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
17 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...
Nantucket: While the Men Were Gone, the Women Ran Everything
In the 1840s, a third of all adult men on the island of Nantucket were at sea at any given moment — gone for three years, sometimes four, hunting sperm whales in the Pacific Ocean. Eight decades before American women got the right to vote, the ...
Traveling The Silk Road: Bandits, Buried Caravans, and Financial Innovation
Four thousand miles of mountain passes, shifting desert dunes, and territory where the difference between a legitimate toll and an armed robbery depended entirely on who was holding the pass that season. Caravans were raided. Caravans were swal...
The Monks Who Broke China's Silk Monopoly
For nearly three thousand years, China held the world's most valuable trade secret. The penalty for revealing it, for smuggling out a single silkworm egg or mulberry seed, was death. The entire Byzantine Empire, the most powerful state in the w...
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...