In the 1940s two men in Connecticut were selling what looked like pickles but failed the simplest of tests — drop one from a foot and if it doesn't bounce, it isn't fit for sale. Health inspectors relied on that dramatic bounce test to protect public health, a shorthand rule rooted in real cases even if not written word-for-word into the law.

But the episode isn't just about cucumbers. Hartford once banned collecting rags, metals, and old junk without a license to curb opportunists during wartime resource drives and to protect property rights and public order. These niche rules tell a larger story about who gets to profit from scarcity and how cities police survival tactics.

Connecticut also kept Sundays strictly dull: no card games, no public dances, sometimes not even a soda for sale — laws some towns kept on the books long after the 1970s. By the end, you’ll see a state where your pickle better bounce, your junk better be licensed, and your Sabbath better be boring. Next up: Delaware — keep your pants up and your whispers out of church.

Imagine a navy sailing into a peaceful harbor, Marines ashore and the American flag raised—only to discover a newspaper proving there is no war. In this episode, Time Tellers follows Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones as a string of assumptions, fear of being late, and a system that rewards decisive action nearly turns a mistake into international crisis.

We trace the story from Monterey’s surreal occupation to later near-disasters—Tampico, the USS Vincennes, and the terrifying Able Archer exercise—showing how small misreadings and momentum can scale toward catastrophe.

Through sharp storytelling and tense, human moments, the episode reveals how restraint, a single pause, and a few courageous voices have sometimes been the only things standing between normalcy and war.

In Colorado, weather isn’t just forecast—it’s permitted. Follow the surprising path from ski-resort water worries to cloud-seeding airplanes and the paperwork that makes engineered snow legal, plausible, and surprisingly bureaucratic.

In Boulder, a run of couch fires near student housing turned a strange hazard into law: no indoor furniture on porches. It’s a small regulation with a big human story about safety, parties, and unintended consequences.

And for the rumor hunters: the idea that llamas can’t parade downtown on Sundays is part blue-law, part folklore. We trace how plausible statutes become urban legend and what that reveals about how communities police behavior. Three odd rules, three revealing stories—Colorado never sounded so strange.

When you draw a heart, you think of love — but the Valentine's heart looks nothing like a human heart. In this episode, Renee and Dan follow a surprising trail from ancient medicine and plant seed pods to medieval devotion and the rise of print, asking how a simple, abstract shape became the world's shorthand for affection.

This is a brisk, curious story of symbols and survival: fertility, faith, poetry, and commerce collide as the heart shifts from anatomical organ to sacred sign to mass‑market motif. By the end you’ll see why a shape that never looked like a heart came to mean it — and why that matters.

On a Valentine’s Day special, Time Tellers traces the strange and powerful history of when love wasn’t private but political: a right doled out and denied by statutes, courts, and customs. From colonial Virginia bans on interracial unions to eugenics-era restrictions, criminal sodomy raids, and the heartbreak of lost children, this episode stitches together the laws that decided who could marry, touch, and be recognized as family.

Through courtroom language, secret networks, and quiet acts of resistance, the episode follows the people who loved anyway and the slow, messy legal changes that finally began to unsettle entrenched hierarchies. It’s a narrative about control, courage, and how fragile the freedom to love openly still can be—an invitation to listen to the untold stories that survive where the law tried to silence them.

Step into a tour of the delightful and absurd: Mark Twain’s frog tale meets the real-life rules of small-town America. At the Calaveras County Fair frogs leap for glory, but a blunt public-health line separates sport from supper — if a frog dies mid-jump it cannot be eaten and must be disposed of, a pragmatic and strangely moving rule to prevent disease.

Then we pivot to civic theater: Chico’s symbolic ban on building or storing nuclear weapons—complete with a token fine—reveals how municipalities use laws to assert local values even when federal authority looms larger. Along the way we debunk and decode myths, from the likely-apocryphal ban on women driving in housecoats to modern protections for driving rights and hot-button policies on clotheslines and rooftop solar in HOAs.

We zip across the West — Colorado’s permits to make it snow, rules about couches on porches — and return to a moral throughline: care for wildlife, community identity, and the small, earnest regulations that say what a place values. Protect the frog, save the planet, and please don’t bring your warhead to the farmer’s market.

August 1835. A penny paper prints a breathless scientific report and, overnight, the moon blooms with forests, oceans, and winged humanoids. Listeners gather in public squares to hear the tale read aloud; theologians and citizens debate souls and science while the nation wrestles with a new, electrifying media age.

This episode follows the Green Moon hoax from its breathless headlines to the ashes of trust it left behind, tracing how borrowed authority, vivid detail, and a hunger for sensational news made fiction feel like fact. We meet the real figures tangled in the story, the shaky science that should have warned readers, and the paper that may have been joking — or testing how far confidence could carry a lie.

In short, it’s a story about curiosity, credulity, and the fragile power of authority — and a reminder that scrutiny, not swagger, makes science reliable.

This podcast is a work of historical interpretation. While we strive for accuracy, some aspects of history are open to interpretation and debate. Thank you for listening.

When a passerby insists on pronouncing the state one way, a single resolution from the 1880s stands between history and habit. This episode opens with that small-but-stubborn decision — a deliberate choice to honor French spelling and Quapaw heritage that turned pronunciation into law.

From there we chase the folklore: bans on blue light bulbs and teachers punished for bobbed hair. Those stories smell like the kind of municipal overreach that thrived in the early 20th century — real in places, exaggerated in the telling. The narrative follows the trail from rumor to record, separating theatrical claims from likely local ordinances.

Finally, the story lands at the most prosaic truth: Arkansas does regulate what you sell at the roadside stand. Permits, safe handling and honest labeling make for less glamorous but far more enforceable rules. Arkansas, say it right, read the sign, and wash your melons.