Slow History for Sleep: Calm True Stories to Fall Asleep To
Settle in and close your eyes. Slow History for Sleep tells true stories from the past in a calm, steady voice, slowly enough to follow and gently enough to drift off to. A ship's gears found at the bottom of the sea. A windy beach where two brothers first flew. A painting that vanished from the Louvre. A long walk through the Niagara woods.Each episode is a single story of around half an hour, told in the third person with soft rain in the background and nothing sudden to wake you. Real history, without the drama.This podcast is...
A Winter at the Bay Post
A calm, slow telling of a true story to help you drift off. A winter at a Hudson’s Bay Company post on the shore of Hudson Bay: the palisaded buildings, the Cree traders and the Orkney servants, the post journals and the northern lights, and the geese returning in spring. Part two of three stories about the fur trade.
Soft rain plays throughout. No sudden sounds.
This episode was created with the assistance of AI, using an AI model of the host’s voice.
The Long River Road to the Great Carrying Place
A calm, slow telling of a true story to help you drift off. The voyageurs’ yearly paddle from Montréal to Grand Portage on Lake Superior: the birchbark canoes, the Ottawa River and the French River, the songs and the camps along the shore, and the meeting place at the end of the road. Part one of three stories about the fur trade.
Soft rain plays throughout. No sudden sounds.
This episode was created with the assistance of AI, using an AI model of the host’s voice.
The Great Molasses Flood: A Winter Afternoon in the North End
A calm, slow telling of a true story to help you drift off. On a mild winter afternoon in 1919, a great tank of molasses gives way in Boston’s North End. The neighbourhood comes together for the long work of putting things right, and the story ends in a quiet park on the waterfront.
Soft rain plays throughout. No sudden sounds.
This episode was created with the assistance of AI, using an AI model of the host’s voice.
Insulin: The Quiet Laboratory in Toronto
A calm, slow telling of a true story to help you drift off. A young doctor from the Ontario farm country spends a long summer and a snowy winter in a small laboratory in Toronto. Early in 1922, a boy in a hospital bed is given a new medicine called insulin, and he begins to get better.
Soft rain plays throughout. No sudden sounds.
This episode was created with the assistance of AI, using an AI model of the host’s voice.
The Dancing Plague: The Summer of Dancing in Strasbourg
A calm, slow telling of a true story to help you drift off. In the summer of 1518, a woman in Strasbourg begins to dance in the street, and soon others join her. The city looks after them as best it can, until a quiet shrine in the hills and the end of summer bring the dancing to a close.
Soft rain plays throughout. No sudden sounds.
This episode was created with the assistance of AI, using an AI model of the host’s voice.
The Great Stink: The River and the Tunnels
A calm, slow telling of a true story to help you drift off. In the hot summer of 1858 the River Thames runs low and foul through London. An engineer named Joseph Bazalgette sets out to build a great network of brick tunnels beneath the city, and a wide stone embankment with gardens beside the river.
Soft rain plays throughout. No sudden sounds.
This episode was created with the assistance of AI, using an AI model of the host’s voice.
Endurance: The Ship in the Ice
A calm, slow telling of a true story to help you drift off. In 1915 the ship Endurance is held fast in the Antarctic ice, and her crew wait out a long, dark winter on the frozen sea. Then a small boat sets out across the ocean for help, and in the end every one of the twenty-eight men comes home.
Soft rain plays throughout. No sudden sounds.
This episode was created with the assistance of AI, using an AI model of the host’s voice.
Laura Secord: The Long Walk through the Niagara Woods
A calm, slow telling of a true story to help you drift off. In the early summer of 1813, a woman named Laura Secord sets out on foot through the Niagara country of Upper Canada, on a long walk through the woods to carry a warning.
Soft rain plays throughout. No sudden sounds.
This episode was created with the assistance of AI, using an AI model of the host’s voice.
The Mona Lisa Theft: The Empty Wall in the Louvre
A calm, slow telling of a true story to help you drift off. In the late summer of 1911, the most famous painting in Paris disappears from its wall in the Louvre, and a long, quiet search begins.
Soft rain plays throughout. No sudden sounds.
This episode was created with the assistance of AI, using an AI model of the host’s voice
Wind over the Dunes: The Wright Brothers
A calm, slow telling of a true story to help you drift off. Two brothers from a bicycle shop in Ohio travel to a long, windy stretch of sand dunes on the North Carolina coast, and spend season after season learning how to fly.
Soft rain plays throughout. No sudden sounds.
This episode was created with the assistance of AI, using an AI model of the host’s voice.
The Gears Beneath the Sea: The Antikythera Mechanism
A calm, slow telling of a true story to help you drift off. In 1900, a crew of sponge divers sheltered from a storm beside a small Greek island and found an ancient shipwreck below them. Among the finds taken to a museum in Athens was a small bronze gear, and the long, patient work to understand the machine it came from.
Soft rain plays throughout. No sudden sounds.
This episode was created with the assistance of AI, using an AI model of the host’s voice.
The Halifax Explosion: A Winter Harbour, 1917
Settle in and close your eyes. Tonight we drift back to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the winter of 1917: a busy wartime harbour, ships coming and going through the Narrows, and a city going about an ordinary December morning.
We follow the story of that morning gently and calmly, through to the help that came from far away and the Christmas tree Nova Scotia still sends to Boston each year to say thank you. Then we linger a while in the quiet harbour, the falling snow and the long trains heading north.
Told slowly, with soft...
