History For Sleep with the Drowsy Historian

History For Sleep with the Drowsy Historian

History For Sleep delivers slow, calm, and slightly unsettling historical storytelling that makes dozing off educationally depressing. Whether you're hearing about plagues, peasant life, or papal trials, it's all narrated at a soothing pace with a dry wit designed to lull you into unconsciousness. 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.

Episodes

June 17, 2025 101 mins

Get early episodes & bonus perks on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian


In 1700s Paris, fire wasn’t just a danger — it was a sentence. In this immersive historical journey, we follow the grim, slow unraveling of a survivor who endures not only the flames, but the brutal medicine, social rejection, and haunting aftermath that follows. Told from the second-person perspective, this story plunges you into the agony, isolati...

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Get early episodes & bonus perks on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian


Welcome to the Great Wall of China — not the one in the travel brochures, but the real one. The one built with blood, bone, and bureaucratic indifference. In this slow, grim, and darkly educational bedtime video, you’ll live the life of a forgotten laborer conscripted to the Empire’s most ambitious mass grave. You’re not a hero. You’re not a builder...

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Step inside one of the darkest and least-discussed corners of World War II history. In this immersive, slow-paced sleep video, we walk through the harrowing experience of a prisoner in Unit 731 — Japan’s covert biological warfare and human experimentation program. Told in a calm, second-person narrative with dry, unsettling detail, this is not just ...

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Get early episodes & bonus perks on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian


The Glorious Lie: Why You Wouldn’t Survive Leaving England for Jamestown

They told you Virginia was a land of promise. Of gold. Of glory. But what they didn’t mention was the hunger, the desperation, and the slow unraveling of your mind and body before you even saw land. This episode peels back the propaganda and takes you on a grim, immersive journe...

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Tonight we’re not just coughing politely into a handkerchief — we’re diving headfirst into the gasping, sweating, slowly suffocating nightmare of a Victorian tuberculosis victim. You’ll live every fevered breath, every useless remedy, every wheezing moment of decline as society quietly blames you for dying the wrong way, in the wrong clothes, at the...

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Welcome to the Silk Road — not the romanticized highway of cultural exchange you learned about in school, but the gritty, exhausting, lice-ridden reality of life as a 13th-century merchant. In this darkly immersive bedtime story, you’ll navigate deserts that want to kill you, camels that hate you, cities that rob you politely, and trade deals negoti...

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Get early episodes & bonus perks on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian


Welcome to Drowsy Historian, where history is slow, grim, and weirdly relaxing. In this episode, we take you inside a medieval siege — not the heroic, armor-clashing nonsense you see in movies, but the slow-motion disaster of real life behind crumbling walls. You’ll live it: the rumors, the lockdown, the rot, the rats, and the final, brutal breach.

I...

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Being born a bastard in medieval Europe wasn’t just a social inconvenience — it was a lifelong sentence of exclusion, humiliation, and legal invisibility. In this quietly brutal bedtime tale, we walk the mud-caked path of someone born into the wrong family, at the wrong time, under the wrong circumstances. From cradle to grave, discover how illegiti...

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Get early episodes & bonus perks on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian


Step into the shadows of medieval Europe and experience one of history’s most dangerous and overlooked realities: childbirth. In this immersive, second-person narrative, you’ll live through the fear, superstition, agony, and silence that surrounded pregnancy and labor in the Middle Ages. There are no doctors. No pain relief. Just old cloth, whispere...

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Step inside the forbidden walls of the Mughal harem — where beauty was currency, silence was survival, and freedom was an illusion.
In this immersive, darkly poetic journey, you are not a princess or a courtesan. You are property. Trained, adorned, observed, and forgotten — all within the velvet-draped cage of one of history’s most secretive and oppr...

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Step inside the chilling world of the Spanish Inquisition, where silence is never empty—and fear begins before the first scream. This image captures the quiet dread before the interrogation begins: a nervous figure, shackled in the corner, lit only by flickering torchlight, while two shadowed officials quietly prepare parchment and instruments of “s...

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Step inside the Forbidden City — not as an emperor, but as the most overlooked figure in imperial history.
This immersive sleep video guides you through the brutal, quietly haunting life of a eunuch in Imperial China. From the moment of castration to the politics of silence, from whispered conspiracies to a forgotten burial, you’ll experience the pal...

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Get early episodes & bonus perks on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian


Tonight, you’re not just hearing history — you’re living it.
Step into the cracked boots of a woman accused of witchcraft in 1600s Europe — a time when paranoia burned hotter than reason and justice was mostly performance with a body count. From whispered rumors to show trials, sleep deprivation to the executioner’s blade, this is what it actually me...

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Get early episodes & bonus perks on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian


In the trenches of World War I, death wasn’t a dramatic event. It was routine. Tonight’s story walks you through the grim reality of losing friends daily — until you stop feeling anything at all. There are no grand speeches, no heroics. Just mud, silence, and the quiet horror of learning to function while surrounded by ghosts. If you've ever wondere...

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Get early episodes & bonus perks on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian


Ever wondered what it was really like to be a gladiator in Ancient Rome?
Forget the Hollywood heroics. This is the real story — the brutal, blood-soaked, bone-cracking reality of life (and death) in the arena. In this immersive sleep video, you’ll step into the sandals of a doomed fighter: sold into slavery, broken by training, dressed up like a masc...

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Syphilis wasn’t just a disease — it was a slow, humiliating unraveling of the body, mind, and social standing. In this immersive historical bedtime story, we follow the terrifying journey of a Renaissance syphilis victim from the first subtle sore to the final stages of madness, decay, and isolation.

Told in a calm, sleep-friendly voice with dark hum...

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Get early episodes & bonus perks on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian


What really happened during the Crusades? Not the sanitized version — the real story. In this deep-dive documentary, we unravel the chaotic, violent, and often absurd history of the Crusades: from the First Crusade’s apocalyptic bloodbath in Jerusalem, to the Children’s Crusade (yes, that happened), to the unbelievable sack of Constantinople — by Ch...

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Get early episodes & bonus perks on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian


Ever wondered what it was really like to be a concubine in Imperial China? Spoiler: it wasn’t all silk robes and poetic moonlit evenings. In this sleep-friendly deep dive, you’ll step into the embroidered slippers of a palace concubine — chosen, trained, ranked, and slowly erased.

From the ruthless selection process to the weaponized womb politics, f...

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Get early episodes & bonus perks on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian


Ever wondered what the Aztecs actually ate? Spoiler: it wasn’t just corn and chocolate.

In this deep dive into the bizarre, brilliant, and occasionally unsettling world of Aztec food, we explore everything from floating gardens and ritual stews to ant eggs, salamanders, and chili smoke punishments. Discover how the Aztecs used food not just for survi...

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Get early episodes & bonus perks on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DrowsyHistorian


Welcome to the Feast (You’ll Regret It): A Medieval Sleep Story

Tonight, you’ve been summoned to the grandest event in the kingdom: a medieval feast. Unfortunately, you’re not a knight or a noble. You’re somewhere in the middle — tolerated, unprepared, and already sweating through your borrowed tunic.

In this immersive sleep story, you’ll experience t...

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