For nearly 3,000 years, Homer’s Odyssey has taken readers across a Mediterranean filled with cyclopes, enchantresses, shipwrecks, and mysterious islands. But how much of that extraordinary journey belongs to the real world?

In this episode of Sleeping Through the Pages, we set sail from ancient Troy and attempt to retrace Odysseus’ legendary voyage. Along the way, we explore the landscapes, civilizations, and historical mysteries behind Homer’s epic—from the possible inspiration for the Cyclops to the treacherous waters associated with Scylla and Charybdis, the island linked to Calypso, and the long-awaited shores of Ithaca.

Traveling between mythology, archaeology, and geography, we’ll discover which locations can be identified, which remain disputed, and why people have spent centuries trying to place an imaginary voyage on a real map.

And as we follow Odysseus toward home, we encounter a surprisingly human story about curiosity, temptation, survival, and the peculiar difficulty of returning to the place where we began.

History worth staying awake for, told calmly enough that you don’t have to.

Sleeping Through the Pages explores the history behind familiar stories, books, places, and traditions—with a little curiosity and an occasional detour.

For centuries, Italian kitchens had pasta, cheese, olive oil, and garlic—but no tomatoes.

Our journey begins in the Americas, where Indigenous peoples cultivated tomatoes long before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic. From there, we follow the fruit through the Columbian Exchange to Renaissance Europe and the bustling streets of Naples, where cooks gradually transformed an unfamiliar ingredient into something unmistakably Italian.

Along the way, we discover a 1692 recipe for Spanish-style tomato sauce, meet the street vendors who fed nineteenth-century Naples, and learn why pizza struggled to win over diners in Rome before conquering the world.

We also visit Chinese and North African kitchens, where the tomato developed entirely different culinary identities.

Finally, we cross the Atlantic once more, following Italian immigrants who brought their recipes to America—returning the tomato to its home continent with an Italian accent and a whole new recipe book.

It’s a story of exploration, migration, ordinary meals, and the surprising ways new ideas become treasured traditions.

Because sometimes history begins with someone asking for another helping.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in search of Asia and arrived in a world already inhabited by thriving civilizations. Centuries later, Americans transformed the navigator into a national hero, naming cities, universities, and even their capital after him.

But Columbus Day has a history of its own. From the young republic’s search for national symbols to the struggles of Italian immigrants seeking acceptance, the holiday acquired meanings Columbus himself could never have imagined.

Meanwhile, Indigenous Peoples’ Day emerged to celebrate the civilizations, achievements, and living cultures of the peoples who were here long before his arrival.

Tonight, we’ll travel from the Caribbean in 1492 to the ancient city of Cahokia, from nineteenth-century American celebrations to Berkeley, California, in 1992, where a new holiday took shape.

Along the way, we’ll discover something curious: the events of history may stay the same, but what each generation chooses to remember tells us something about the people doing the remembering.

A thoughtful, occasionally humorous journey through exploration, immigration, Indigenous history, and the stories America chooses to tell.

Follow the yellow brick road from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into one of America’s great arguments about money—and then on to the real history of Fort Knox.

Along the way, we’ll encounter struggling farmers, the Great Depression, a fortune sent through the mail, the Magna Carta, a Hungarian crown, James Bond, and the persistent suspicion that perhaps the world’s most famous vault isn’t quite what we imagine.

It’s a story about gold and the strange things we ask it to represent: security, wealth, trust, and sometimes something closer to myth.

Because the gold at Fort Knox has barely moved for decades.

Its reputation has traveled everywhere.

In this episode of Sleeping Through the Pages, we follow the Mid-Autumn Festival across more than two thousand years—from ancient farmers watching the sky to the legend of Chang’e, the Jade Rabbit, Tang and Song poets, mooncakes, rebellion, migration, video calls, and China’s journey to the Moon itself.

Along the way, Chang’e changes from a mysterious woman who takes the medicine of immortality into a symbol of separation, sacrifice, and reunion. The Jade Rabbit transforms from a maker of immortality medicine into a healer, a festival figure, and eventually a rover leaving tracks across the lunar surface.

It is a story about how traditions change without disappearing—and about what happens when technology finally solves problems that imagination once helped us endure.

So settle in, get comfortable, and follow the moonlight backward through history to discover why, after all these centuries, we still look up.

Then we learned to write.

In this episode of Sleeping Through the Pages, we follow writing from marks pressed into clay more than five thousand years ago to papyrus, alphabets, paper, books, the printing press, and eventually the digital text we carry in our pockets.

Along the way, we meet Gilgamesh, decipher an ancient message carved into a mountainside, visit the Library of Alexandria, and discover how a few simple technologies changed who could preserve an idea—and how far that idea could travel.

Because writing did more than give us books. It gave the past a way to speak to the future.

Sleeping Through the Pages tells carefully researched stories about the people, places, objects, books, myths, and ideas that shaped our world—slowly and calmly.

Listen closely and you may learn something. Let your mind wander and you may fall asleep.

Sleeping Through the Pages follows the people, places, books, myths, objects, and ideas that shaped our world—through carefully researched stories told slowly and calmly.

Listen closely and you may learn something. Let your mind wander and you may fall asleep.

Either way, there will always be another page.