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The future is open. Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network.

I'm your host, Heather Tusco, and I'm a storyteller who makes history accessible

because I believe it's a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being much more deeply in touch with our own humanity.

This is episode 161, and it's a pop culture episode, because I get a serious tickle when the kids, I say that in quotes, are into something that's

400 years old. If you've been anywhere near TikTok or are close to a teenager, you may have heard

that sea shanties are now a thing. So I thought I'd devote an episode to the history of these songs, and we can throw in

some songs at the same time. I'm not going to get into the sociological analysis of why C shanties

are now becoming a thing, but Mashable had one of the most concise reasons that I can imagine,

and it said, we've spent months

in isolation yearning for the day when this ship of weirdness will reach the port of normalcy.

And I was thinking about it because in a lot of ways, this situation that we're in right now

is similar to being on a long sea voyage, right? We're just kind of floating around.

And yet there's still work to do, a lot of work to do for a lot of us who have kids and

we're trying to homeschool and trying to do all of that.

It's like being on a ship where there's a ton of work and you don't really know how long

it's going to last.

So, yeah, yeah.

...