History For Sleep with the Drowsy Historian

Drowsy Historian

Get early episodes & ad-free audio on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian History For Sleep delivers slow, calm, and slightly unsettling historical storytelling that makes dozing off educationally depressing. Brought to you by the Drowsy Historian, each episode is 1–2 hours of immersive bedtime history with just enough absurd detail to keep you listening — until you aren’t. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

  1. 14H AGO

    What It Was REALLY Like to Be a Factory Worker During the Great Depression

    Get early episodes & ad-free audio on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian Tonight, you spend a full day inside a 1930s American factory — clocking in before dawn, working beside tired men and indifferent machines, filling out endless paperwork, and trading hours of your life for wages that barely hold things together. There are no dramatic moments here. No speeches. No sudden escapes. Just routine. Repetition. And the quiet erosion of the self. This immersive, second-person historical sleep story follows one ordinary worker through a single, unremarkable day during the Great Depression — from the walk to work, to the factory floor, to the slow return home, and finally into an exhausted sleep. The horror doesn’t come from violence or cruelty, but from indifference, bureaucracy, and the steady demand to keep going. Perfect for sleep, relaxation, or quiet background listening. #DrowsyHistorian #GreatDepression #FactoryWork #WorkingClassHistory #ImmersiveHistory #HistoryForSleep #CalmHistory #SleepStory #EverydayHistory #1930sAmerica

    2h 30m

  2. 1D AGO

    What It Was REALLY Like to Be a Gold Prospector in the California Gold Rush

    Get early episodes & ad-free audio on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian What was it really like to chase gold in the California Gold Rush? Tonight, we’re stepping back into 1849 — not into the legends, not into the tall tales, but into the slow, exhausting truth of life as an ordinary gold prospector. No fortune-tellers, no dramatic showdowns… just mud, cold rivers, aching backs, and the quiet erosion of hope as each empty pan weighs a little heavier than the last. You’ll walk west with a dream burning faintly in your chest, settle into a canvas tent that never quite keeps out the weather, and learn the river’s indifferent rhythm. You’ll meet wanderers who pass through like changing weather, trade stories around dying fires, and cling to the smallest glimmers of luck — even if they’re nothing more than mica shining in the wrong light. 🛏️ Drowsy Historian’s Favorite Sleep Tools Looking to upgrade your nighttime routine? These are a few things I personally use or recommend: • Sleep Earbuds for Enhanced Immersion → https://amzn.to/47ccNqV • Blanket Soft Enough to Make the Plague Feel Tolerable → https://amzn.to/3GSOq8f • Weighted Blanket for Pretending You’re a Mummified Pharaoh → https://amzn.to/4kVJCgE • Sleep Mask Headphones For Total Historical Escape → https://amzn.to/4nWsNVn • Book Light for Reading About Plagues at 2AM → https://amzn.to/4eSg0iu • White Noise Machine for Blocking Out the 21st Century → https://amzn.to/3GJ9jTw These are affiliate links. I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them—at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the show while staying cozy. #DrowsyHistorian #GoldRush #CaliforniaHistory #SleepStory #HistoricalStorytelling #GoldProspector #WhatItWasReallyLike

    2h 26m

  3. 2D AGO

    Why You'd Regret Joining a Street Gang in Victorian London

    Get early episodes & ad-free audio on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian Tonight, you’re stepping into the polite, suffocating world of a Victorian London street gang—where danger is wrapped in etiquette, brutality hides behind perfect manners, and every quiet nod or forced smile becomes another thread in a net you never meant to enter. You arrive seeking protection, warmth, and belonging. What you find instead is a labyrinth of rigid rules, whispered expectations, polite threats, and a version of “proper behavior” that tightens around you with every carefully measured gesture. Nothing here is loud. Nothing is obvious. And that’s exactly why it’s terrifying. This is the story of how a gang recruits you not through violence, but through civility… and how the simple desire to fit in becomes a quiet, relentless trap. 🛏️ Drowsy Historian’s Favorite Sleep Tools Looking to upgrade your nighttime routine? These are a few things I personally use or recommend: • Sleep Earbuds for Enhanced Immersion → https://amzn.to/47ccNqV • Blanket Soft Enough to Make the Plague Feel Tolerable → https://amzn.to/3GSOq8f • Weighted Blanket for Pretending You’re a Mummified Pharaoh → https://amzn.to/4kVJCgE • Sleep Mask Headphones For Total Historical Escape → https://amzn.to/4nWsNVn • Book Light for Reading About Plagues at 2AM → https://amzn.to/4eSg0iu • White Noise Machine for Blocking Out the 21st Century → https://amzn.to/3GJ9jTw These are affiliate links. I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them—at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the show while staying cozy. #DrowsyHistorian #VictorianHistory #SleepStory #StreetGangs #DarkHistory #HistoricalFiction #LondonHistory #VictorianEra #SleepAid

    2h 13m

  4. 3D AGO

    How the Roads of Ancient Rome Were Actually Built

    Get early episodes & ad-free audio on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian Tonight, we’re traveling to the edges of the Roman Empire—not to watch generals command armies or senators debate politics, but to follow the forgotten hands that built the roads beneath them. In this quiet descent into daily labor, you wake before dawn in a cold work camp and spend the day hauling stone, carving trenches, diverting streams, tamping foundations, and walking the straight lines Rome demands from the landscape. Progress is mandatory. Pain is routine. And the Empire rarely says thank you. This episode explores what life was really like for the countless laborers—enslaved workers, conscripted locals, and low-status laborers—who shaped the very backbone of Rome’s infrastructure. With a calm, immersive narration, we’ll trace the monotony, exhaustion, and quiet erosion of self that comes from building something meant to last centuries… even if your own name does not. 🛏️ Drowsy Historian’s Favorite Sleep Tools Looking to upgrade your nighttime routine? These are a few things I personally use or recommend: • Sleep Earbuds for Enhanced Immersion → https://amzn.to/47ccNqV • Blanket Soft Enough to Make the Plague Feel Tolerable → https://amzn.to/3GSOq8f • Weighted Blanket for Pretending You’re a Mummified Pharaoh → https://amzn.to/4kVJCgE • Sleep Mask Headphones For Total Historical Escape → https://amzn.to/4nWsNVn • Book Light for Reading About Plagues at 2AM → https://amzn.to/4eSg0iu • White Noise Machine for Blocking Out the 21st Century → https://amzn.to/3GJ9jTw These are affiliate links. I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them—at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the show while staying cozy. #DrowsyHistorian #AncientRome #RomanRoads #HistoryForSleep #CalmHistory #WhatItWasReallyLike #RomanEmpire #ForgottenHistory #SleepStory

    2h 10m

  5. 4D AGO

    How Ships Were Built Entirely by Hand During the Age of Sail

    Get early episodes & ad-free audio on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian Step into the quiet world of an Age of Sail shipyard, where raw timber, iron, canvas, and endless patience are transformed into a vessel capable of crossing oceans. Tonight, you’ll drift through the long, tactile craft of building a wooden ship entirely by hand — from selecting trees in the forest to steaming planks, bending ribs, sealing seams with pitch, forging nails, raising masts, sewing sails, and guiding the finished hull into the sea. No battles. No captains. No storms. Just the warm, steady rhythm of human hands shaping something far larger than themselves. This is the forgotten daily life of shipwrights — the quiet jokes, the shared mistakes, the stubborn planks, the hiss of steam, the scent of tar, and the calm satisfaction of getting it almost right. A world where teamwork speaks louder than orders, wood has opinions, and every plank feels like a small miracle… or a future leak. 🛏️ Drowsy Historian’s Favorite Sleep Tools Looking to upgrade your nighttime routine? These are a few things I personally use or recommend: • Sleep Earbuds for Enhanced Immersion → https://amzn.to/47ccNqV • Blanket Soft Enough to Make the Plague Feel Tolerable → https://amzn.to/3GSOq8f • Weighted Blanket for Pretending You’re a Mummified Pharaoh → https://amzn.to/4kVJCgE • Sleep Mask Headphones For Total Historical Escape → https://amzn.to/4nWsNVn • Book Light for Reading About Plagues at 2AM → https://amzn.to/4eSg0iu • White Noise Machine for Blocking Out the 21st Century → https://amzn.to/3GJ9jTw These are affiliate links. I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them—at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the show while staying cozy. #woodenships #history #ageofsail #shipbuilding #drowsyhistorian #sleepvideo #calmhistoricalstories #asmrhistory #shipwrights #bedtimehistory

    2h 18m

  6. 5D AGO

    The HORRIFYING Life of a Victorian Sewer Worker

    Get early episodes & ad-free audio on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian Tonight, we’re heading beneath Victorian London—into the damp, choking maze where the city’s forgotten workers fought a daily war against darkness, rot, and endless waste.You won’t walk through palaces or glittering drawing rooms in this story. Instead, you’ll descend each morning with a lone lantern, navigating collapsing tunnels, swarms of rats, flickering air, and the quiet indifference of a city that never once thinks about the workers keeping its refuse moving. Down here, filth becomes a profession.Routine becomes survival.And the only companionship you can rely on is the echo of your own footsteps as London breathes above you and never wonders where you’ve gone. 🛏️ Drowsy Historian’s Favorite Sleep Tools Looking to upgrade your nighttime routine? These are a few things I personally use or recommend: • Sleep Earbuds for Enhanced Immersion → https://amzn.to/47ccNqV • Blanket Soft Enough to Make the Plague Feel Tolerable → https://amzn.to/3GSOq8f • Weighted Blanket for Pretending You’re a Mummified Pharaoh → https://amzn.to/4kVJCgE • Sleep Mask Headphones For Total Historical Escape → https://amzn.to/4nWsNVn • Book Light for Reading About Plagues at 2AM → https://amzn.to/4eSg0iu • White Noise Machine for Blocking Out the 21st Century → https://amzn.to/3GJ9jTw These are affiliate links. I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them—at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the show while staying cozy. #VictorianLondon #SewerWorker #DrowsyHistorian #HistoryForSleep #VictorianEra #DarkHistory #ForgottenWorkers #HistoricalStorytelling

    2h 19m

  7. 6D AGO

    Why You Wouldn’t Survive as a Sailor Aboard a 16th-Century Slave Ship

    Get early episodes & ad-free audio on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian Tonight, you’ll step aboard a 16th-century slave ship — not as an officer or a merchant, but as one of the low-ranking sailors caught inside its brutal machinery. The days blur into a numbing cycle of orders followed, rations measured, repairs repeated, and suffering processed into routine. Human lives are reduced to cargo, noted in ledgers and counted in silence, while the ship creaks under a weight the crew has been trained not to acknowledge. In this quietly devastating descent, you’ll move through the dim lower decks, the stagnant heat, the endless watch rotations, and the cold bureaucracy that keeps the vessel functioning. The horror here isn’t loud. It’s procedural — a system that demands numbness, obedience, and the quiet erosion of whatever humanity you carried aboard. 🛏️ Drowsy Historian’s Favorite Sleep Tools Looking to upgrade your nighttime routine? These are a few things I personally use or recommend: • Sleep Earbuds for Enhanced Immersion → https://amzn.to/47ccNqV • Blanket Soft Enough to Make the Plague Feel Tolerable → https://amzn.to/3GSOq8f • Weighted Blanket for Pretending You’re a Mummified Pharaoh → https://amzn.to/4kVJCgE • Sleep Mask Headphones For Total Historical Escape → https://amzn.to/4nWsNVn • Book Light for Reading About Plagues at 2AM → https://amzn.to/4eSg0iu • White Noise Machine for Blocking Out the 21st Century → https://amzn.to/3GJ9jTw These are affiliate links. I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them—at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the show while staying cozy. #HistoryForSleep #SlaveTradeHistory #MaritimeHistory #DrowsyHistorian #ForgottenHistory #CalmHistory #SlaveShip #EarlyModernHistory #16thCentury

    2h 24m

  8. JAN 11

    What It Was REALLY Like to Run a Medieval Inn (Where Stories Never Agree)

    Get early episodes & ad-free audio on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian Step inside a quiet medieval inn where the fire burns low, the floors creak with memory, and every traveler arrives carrying a story that politely contradicts the last. Tonight, you’re the innkeeper — a patient observer of harmless lies, whispered miracles, exaggerated fortunes, confused pilgrims, boastful soldiers, suspicious tax collectors, and a bard who rewrites his life with every sip of wine. This is a calm, immersive journey into the soft absurdity of medieval life: a world held together not by truth, but by the gentle fictions people tell to feel braver, kinder, richer, holier, or simply less alone.Here, you offer warmth, bread, and quiet understanding — and in return, the inn fills with stories that drift like smoke, settle like dust, and weave themselves into the rafters. 🛏️ Drowsy Historian’s Favorite Sleep Tools Looking to upgrade your nighttime routine? These are a few things I personally use or recommend: • Sleep Earbuds for Enhanced Immersion → https://amzn.to/47ccNqV • Blanket Soft Enough to Make the Plague Feel Tolerable → https://amzn.to/3GSOq8f • Weighted Blanket for Pretending You’re a Mummified Pharaoh → https://amzn.to/4kVJCgE • Sleep Mask Headphones For Total Historical Escape → https://amzn.to/4nWsNVn • Book Light for Reading About Plagues at 2AM → https://amzn.to/4eSg0iu • White Noise Machine for Blocking Out the 21st Century → https://amzn.to/3GJ9jTw These are affiliate links. I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them—at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the show while staying cozy. #medievalhistory #sleepstory #drowsyhistorian #medievalinn #calmhistoricalstory #asmrhistory #historypodcast #medievaleurope #bedtimestory #cozyhistory #calmhistories

    2h 19m
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4.2
out of 5
193 Ratings

About

Get early episodes & ad-free audio on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian History For Sleep delivers slow, calm, and slightly unsettling historical storytelling that makes dozing off educationally depressing. Brought to you by the Drowsy Historian, each episode is 1–2 hours of immersive bedtime history with just enough absurd detail to keep you listening — until you aren’t. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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