The Friday Digest 13/02/15

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This week's update features fear and vaccination, maps that shaped the world and iconic love letters.

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* How did a lowly Welshman bed a queen and sire a dynasty? 

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* What clothes did people wear in the Tudor period? 

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* Lucy Worsley: why I love the Tudors (with a guest appearance by Jean Plaidy). 

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* Five things you (probably) never knew about Mary Queen of Scots. 

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* Bantams: the army units for those under 5ft 3in.

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* The British First World War officer who married a nurse who branded him a German spy and wanted him dead.

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* Empowerment and the women workers of the First World War.

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* How close did the First World War bring Glasgow to revolution? 

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* The Victoria Cross restoration project at Brookwood Cemetery. 

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* The Italian connection to Waterloo.

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* An international team of archaeologists specialised in battlefield excavations is headed for Waterloo in Belgium on the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s famous defeat at the hands of British and Prussian forces.

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* Magna Carta, Waterloo, Agincourt, Gallipoli and more: 2015 is a year of significant anniversaries which can be a crutch for lazy journalists, but which also allows us to reassess our understanding of the past. 

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* Forty-five people from history who look exactly like modern celebrities.

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* Fear of vaccination is as old as vaccination itself. The particular spectre of fear changes from time to time, but we are the inheritors of a discursive and emotional habit: of casting doubt on the motives and methods of immunology.

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* The maps that shaped the world. 

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* Cardiff remembered: Lawrence of Arabia, gambling and grief.

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* How did the beard become an essential feature of philosophers?

* The effects of infant mortality in the nineteenth century as seen in the non-gendering of babies in literature.

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* The secret stash of Apollo equipment found in Neil Armstrong's wardrobe.

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* The Textus Roffensis – the medieval charter that could be more significant than Magna Carta. 

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* The top secret D-Day plans found hidden under the floorboards in a Hampshire hotel. 

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* Sunken vessels unearthed in Yenikapı have been moved from the excavation area, in a process which took eight years to complete.

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* Welcome to New York: the city of dreams in the 1970s and 1980s ... 

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* Dr Jonathan Castleman: the Leicester man chosen to seal Richard III's coffin. 

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* Top ten sex and love stories to celebrate Valentine’s Day. 

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* A selection of Victorian Valentine's Day cards. 

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* Is this the mathematical formula for love? 

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* ‘She drew me for her Valentine': what was the meaning of love in eighteenth century England? 

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* Johnny Cash's letter to his wife June Carter has been voted the greatest love letter of all time. 

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* Still crazy in love: the happy couples that have been together for over fifty years. 

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* Three heart-warming and powerful essays by Harper Lee to read right now.  

* Go Set a Watchman: is the prospect of another book from Harper Lee a potshot at the Mockingbird, or a literary coup? 

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* The fifty best first sentences in fiction.

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* Happier ever after? J.K. Rowling’s Casual Vacancy joins league of rewritten stories.  

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* Fantastic books and where to find them ... 

  Which history and publishing stories have you enjoyed reading this week?