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.
Episodes
9 episodes
Nobody Cooked At Home In Rome
Most Romans never cooked a meal in their lives. Not once. The city had a million people and almost none of them had a kitchen. Most Romans lived in cramped, wooden-framed apartment buildings where open flame meant the whole block burns down — s...
Mississippi Riverboat Captains
In the 1850s, a Mississippi riverboat pilot was the highest-paid and most socially prestigious professional in America. He earned ten times a carpenter's wage, answered to no one while at the wheel, and carried the entire length of the Mississi...
Amazonian Rubber: The Spectacular Rise and Even Faster Fall
For thousands of years, the Amazon basin was full of trees that bled a strange white sap. It was a curiosity — it bounced, it stretched, it was waterproof — but it melted in summer heat and cracked in winter cold, which made it essentially usel...
Why Put Pine Tar Boots on 300 Geese?
If you came across a man walking down the road with 300 geese, all of whomever wearing boots made of tar, would you find it strange? You wouldn't if you lived in the 1700's. At that time, how else could you get a few hundred animals to market? ...
Who Owned Your Poop In Edo Era Japan?
In most places, for most of history, few people would eagerly assert their ownership over a bucket of excrement (or poop or doo-doo or whatever your preferred terminology is). Not so in Edo era Japan.
Frankpledge: The System Where You Pay For Others' Crimes
In medieval England, your neighbors' crimes were your problem. Literally. Twice a year, every man in the village gathered in the manor yard, and if anyone in your group had broken the law or left the village without permission, or done anything...
What Did People Do Before Raincoats?
Getting soaked wasn't just unpleasant. Wet clothing in cold air pulls heat from the body continuously — over days and weeks of incomplete drying, it suppresses the immune system, worsens infections, and kills. Soldiers, sailors, agricultural wo...
The US Life Saving Service: 186,000 Lives Saved Before The Coast Guard Was Invented
In 1887, the ocean was America's highway. There were no trucks, no national road network that could move heavy cargo cheaply — shipping a ton of goods thirty miles inland cost as much as shipping it across the Atlantic. So everything moved by w...
Turnspit Dogs: The Now Extinct Breed That Worked England's Kitchens
English manor houses were capable of putting on fabulous dinners of delicious food without modern conveniences — the modern equivalent of producing a fine dining meal in the middle of the woods completely from scratch. No electric appliances. N...