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

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 permanently into a felt so waterproof and shape-retaining that no other material on earth could match it. Europe's aristocracy wanted hats made of nothi...

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 women of Nantucket ran the island: The dry goods stores, the real estate, the family finances, the children. Nantucket women had property rights, business d...

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 swallowed by dunes that moved overnight and are still being excavated today. Men died of altitude in the Pamirs, of thirst in the Taklamakan, of bad luck at the...

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 western world, was hemorrhaging its treasury paying Persian middlemen just to keep its court and army in silk, a fabric so prized that a single bolt cou...

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 thermop...

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 ch...

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, automobi...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...