Bygone Worlds: The Fascinating History of How We Used to Live

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 — so cooking was effectively banned. If you wanted a hot meal, you went outside.

And outside, the city had an answer for that. On nearly every block: a thermopolium, a masonry counter with ceramic jars of hot food sunk into it, menus painted on the walls, customers eating standing up in the street. Rome invented fa...

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 Mississippi River — twelve hundred miles of shifting channel, hidden snags, and treacherous crossings — in his head. There were no buoys, no lighthouses, no charts worth trusting. The river changed after every flood. The pilot read the water's surface the way a doctor reads a face: the color, the texture, the specific pattern of ripples that told him what lay beneath. Trai...

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 useless. Then, in 1844, Charles Goodyear figured out how to make it stable, and suddenly the world had a material it desperately needed: bicycle tires, automobile tires, telegraph wire insulation, industrial gaskets. Modern life, as it turned out, ran on rubber.

Within decades, the only place on earth with enough rubber trees to meet...

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? Without refrigeration, they had to be alive at the market or they'd be more than rotten by the time the buyer wanted to cook them. That meant walking them about 100 miles over ten days. This is that story....

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.

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 else that displeased the crown - everyone paid. The whole group. Split evenly. Whether you knew anything about it or not.

This was frankpledge. It was ruthless and it was ingenious and it lasted three hundred years.

What killed it was an event so catastrophic that it emptied entire villages and accidentally gave...

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 workers and anyone else who spent long hours outdoors in wet weather knew this. Most of them had very little they could do about it. This is the story of what they tried: waxed linen in ancient Egypt, oiled silk in Han Dynasty China, unwashed wool reeking of lanolin in the Scottish Highlands, and eventually a Glasgow chemist who sandwiched dissolved rubber between two pi...

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. No gas range. No grocery stores. The only tool at their disposal was a huge fireplace. One member of the team had to roast whatever giant piece of meat would be served, rotating it continuously as it cooked for hours. In some kitchens, this job fell to a child. Eventually, it became common practice to employ a Turnspit Dog.

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 water, constantly, in all weather. Lumber. Coal. Cotton. Finished goods. And when those ships went aground — which they did, regularly — someone had to go get the sailors off. That someone was the United States Life-Saving Service: a little-known government agency with hundreds of stations on America's beaches, thousands of men on its payroll, and an estimated 186,000 people pulled from t...