INTRODUCTION the yucky past HAVE YOU EVER WANTED TO TAKE A TRIP IN A TIME MACHINE You'd set it for say 1770 You'd visit an early American city ride a horse along cobblestone streets go to a fancy ball and grab a bite to eat
THINK AGAIN What was life back then really like Let's take a look at some of the gross things in the past including smells bugs diseases clothing and hair These alone will make you realize you couldn't stand to be there You'll land in the month of June in a city populated mostly by white settlers You'll meet wealthy people and middle class folks You probably won't spot any Native Americans there but you'll see some black slaves who work as house servants and in shops The slaves share many of the same yucky habits as their masters of course You may notice a lot of things are not what you expected Some of them might be upsetting This was a time when black people were enslaved People sometimes suffered greatly from diseases that we can now easily and painlessly cure Other things may not be upsetting but they sure will be gross And that's what this journey is all about As a visitor from the future you'll have the special ability to blend in as needed so that you don't call too much attention to yourself People will be happy to talk with you but they'll have no idea just how different from them you really are So get ready for a whole lot of ick yuck and eew
CHAPTER ONE the awful smells HAVE YOU EVER VISITED A DUMP Or been near the bear enclosure at the zoo on a hot day Then you know icky smells
America stank in the 1600s And the 1700s And the early 1800s SMELLY STREETS Look Lots of horses clomp down the street They toss their heads and look pretty on one end But at the other end they poop Cows roam the streets and poop Huge pigs run wild eating garbage which also stinks The pigs poop In New York City the real streets haven't been seen in years There's too much poop The same is true everywhere in cities towns and farms a Fine Featheret Cleaning Crew In Charleston South Carolina a large marketplace where people bought food often was filed with rotting leftovers But luckily for residents birds were on hand to clean up the mess Buzzards regularly swooped down to grab pieces of meat and other food With their bald heads and sharp beaks buzzards aren't very pretty Even so they provided a valuable service so it was against the law to kill them Unfortunately because they ate rotten meat the birds also stank But at least they didn't fill the streets with a lot of poop
