You Are A Weirdo

Today, bananas are just a delicious, fruity fact of life. But being able to buy these curvy, golden delicacies in places where it’s too cold to grow them is actually a very recent development in the big picture of human history. Understanding the banana's past actually tells us a lot about the modern world—about economics, politics, technology, and even why we keep getting annoying popup ads for magical fruit-based cures.

Join your favorite professional historian on this golden, slightly curved voyage through time, from the ancient Indian Ocean region through the present-day Western world. Discover how the banana has been adored throughout the ages. Explore why this fruit was once feared as a threat to civilization itself. And find out why bananas are as much a part of the Industrial Age as more obvious products like steel or petroleum.

May 2023 dynamic content: Support this show by spreading the word and becoming a Patron of Past Peculiarity! Check out https://findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors/ for details.

Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

Who’s your daddy?

In most societies throughout most of recorded human history, your answer to that question would be the primary determinant of who you were allowed to be. A community in which your prestige and your birth-status determine who you are is what’s called a society of orders.
But as a person of the present, you are disorderly.
This episode begins with an irritating experience in the waiting room at your local DMV. But then we explore the controversy in the early United States around a group called the Society of the Cincinnati. Many political leaders feared it might represent the beginning of a new American aristocracy that would undermine the new republic. To discover why this seemingly innocent club for Revolutionary War veterans and their families concerned so many U.S., we accompany Thomas Jefferson to France and learn why living in an absolutist monarchy changed his mind about the Cincinnati.

May 2023 dynamic content: Support this show by spreading the word and becoming a Patron of Past Peculiarity! Check out https://findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors/ for details.

Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

Studying history can help you become a better, more informed leader. Yet a lot of so-called advice from 'history' out there tends to oversimplify the historical record. History is big and complex; reducing this enormous field to a bunch of digestible soundbites makes it appear small and simple.
So what would happen if we tried to follow historical leadership advice without picking and choosing examples or separating those select tidbits from their original contexts? Would that advice still make sense? In this episode we answer that very question. And we discover that the real lessons of history are deeper, richer, messier and stranger—and far more profound—than some folks would have you believe.

May 2023 dynamic content: Support this show by spreading the word and becoming a Patron of Past Peculiarity! Check out https://findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors/ for details.

Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

We take for granted our present-day ability to make ourselves as obnoxiously loud as we want to be. Yet being able to pump up the volume of an individual voice—to make it so deafening that it can easily reach all 140,000 ears of a stadium full of 70,000 people—is a brand-new development in the big picture of the human past.

Vibe with your favorite professional historian on this sonic journey through thousands of years. This amped-up episode brings you around the world, from the cities of ancient Greece and the Yucatán peninsula, through the expansive countryside of North America. Experience how Europe’s Scientific Revolution ultimately changed humans’ relations with sound itself. And discover some of the different, creative, occasionally bizarre ways through which people tried to raise their voices for the thousands of years prior to electronic amplification.

May 2023 dynamic content: Support this show by spreading the word and becoming a Patron of Past Peculiarity! Check out https://findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors/ for details.

Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.

You’re presumably reading this description because you like to listen to podcasts. And you can listen to podcasts because clever people invented loudspeakers a century-and-change ago. And loudspeakers were not possible without the invention of electronic amplifiers. Which were not possible without vacuum tubes. Which are a lot like light bulbs.

What was it like to experience electronically amplified sound for the first time? Did it set crowds of people into hysterical panic? Why or why not? Why were there so many innovations in audio tech at around the same time between the 1870s and 1930s? What is a magnavox and what does it have to do with Magnavox-with-a-capital 'M'? Why did the Great Grape Juice Waterfall of 1915 never, in fact, actually take place?

These and many other fascinating interrogative sentences appear in this episode! Plug in now to learn more about how electronic amplification transformed the world into the weird place it is today.

May 2023 dynamic content: Support this show by spreading the word and becoming a Patron of Past Peculiarity! Check out https://findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors/ for details.

Thanks for listening! To learn more about this history project, check out findyourselfinhistory.com.