Bygone Worlds: The Fascinating History of How We Used to Live
Bygone Worlds is history that pulls you completely out of your modern life and immerses you in another time and place. Through rich and meditative storytelling that vividly appeals to all your senses, you’ll travel from the kitchens of Elizabethan England where Turnspit Dogs helped cook meals to the Silk Road where two monks broke China’s centuries long monopoly on silk to the shores of America where the US Life Saving Service rescued over 170,000 people before the Coast Guard was even invented. While other history podcasts focus on wars and famous figures, we illuminate the captivating corners of daily life you've probably never heard about. Whether you listen at bedtime or during your day, kids and adults can step back in time to learn about lives you never knew existed and feel like you lived them.
Bygone Worlds: The Fascinating History of How We Used to Live
Latest Episodes
What Did People Do Before Alarm Clocks?
Before the alarm clock, someone had to wake up the city. In Victorian England that job had a name: the knocker-upper. Armed with a long bamboo pole and a wire tip, she walked her route in the dark before dawn, tapping on bedroom windows until s...
The Georgian Pineapple: The Rich Rented It. The Super-Rich Ate It.
In 18th-century England, a single pineapple cost what a craftsman earned in six years. Growing one required a purpose-built heated greenhouse — thousands of pounds of construction, a dedicated gardener, eighteen months of careful cultivation — ...
The Aztec Floating Gardens That Fed a City Larger Than London
In 1519, a Spanish soldier named Bernal Díaz del Castillo walked into Tenochtitlan and found himself unable to describe what he was seeing. He tried anyway: the city rising from the water seemed like an enchanted vision. He wrote that his soldi...
Syllabub: When Showing Off Meant Bringing a Cow to Dinner
Wealthy people have always found ways to make sure you know it. In 17th century England, one popular method was inviting your dinner guests outside to watch as a cow — walked up from your farm specifically for the occasion — was milked directly...
How Beaver Drove Men Mad As Hatters
In 17th-century New France, the most valuable thing in the wilderness was a beaver. Not for its meat. Not for its lodge-building engineering. For its underfur — microscopic barbed fibers that, when compressed with heat and moisture, interlock p...