Time machines? We already have them. And, no, I’m not talking about the sort depicted in the 2010 classic “Hot Tub Time Machine.” I mean our television sets, which allow us to lose ourselves in the past.

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       That’s what District sisters Michon and Taquiena Boston enjoy doing. Last fall, the historical-drama devotees turned their love of escapist TV into a podcast, “Historical Drama With the Boston Sisters.”

       The sisters say if they could visit any time, it would be the 1920s. Michon would want to hang around the Washington house of a relative who was friends with a young Edward “Duke” Ellington. Taquiena would like to be a fly on the wall at the literary salon that poet Georgia Douglas Johnson hosted at her home off 14th Street NW.

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       The Boston sisters always ask their guests the same question I’ve been asking readers: What era would you like to visit? Susanne Simpson, executive producer of “Masterpiece” on PBS, told them: “I have dress envy for the Regency period. So I would say probably the Regency period, which is 1820.”

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       When reader Lisa Schnebly Heidinger of Phoenix was growing up, she longed to experience the pioneer period, not least because of the clothing.

       “Long skirts, plucky women, high stakes every day and a chance to find out if you’re tough enough,” Lisa wrote. “I cursed our complacent tract-house summer-vacation life.”

       Kevin Pagliuca of Duluth, Minn., often thinks he should have been born in the 19th century, “a time when craftsmanship was truly an art which was honored and appreciated,” he wrote. “My passion is woodworking, and I have worked as both a cabinet maker and a wooden-boat builder over my lifetime. Today these are dying trades. As CNC machines and 3D printers evolve, these trades will all but be extinct, leaving a man with the soul of a craftsman out in the cold.”

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       Diana Read of Ashburn, Va., would go back to Minoan Crete, “say the year 1850 BCE to be on the safe side — and I’d very likely stay there.”

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       That ancient place, she wrote, is the “only known civilization not founded on warfare.” The men of Crete sailed the Aegean, trading the olive oil produced on the island.

       “With the men away, it was women who ran things,” Diana wrote. “The great temple complex at Knossos was where the grain, wine, olive oil and other comestibles were stored. In hard times, the priestesses dispensed enough food that no one had to go hungry.

       “In those pre-patriarchal times, women were valued as the givers and nurturers of life.”

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       The hot climate meant children went clothing-free until adolescence. Men wore a garment that resembled a kilt. Women wore long, tight skirts and bodices that left their breasts exposed.

       Wrote Diana: “Imagine never having to wear a brassiere, a garment designed to confine, control and hide the human breast! To live in a society in which the Great Mother Goddess Rhea was worshiped, in which women were revered rather than subjugated, abused and despised would be paradise.”

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       Lucy Johnson of LaGrangeville, N.Y., said she’d like to live during the Upper Paleolithic, which lasted from 40,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago.

       “I would live in a small community, but we would get together once or twice a year with other communities and exchange news and goods and spouses,” Lucy wrote. “That is to say that these get-togethers were times when the young folks could get to know one another and pair up — and if it didn’t work out, they could try again at the next fair.

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       “Back at home we each had our roles, but each role was recognized as essential to the survival of the group and no role was held above another.”

       One man might be skilled at hunting, another at chipping spear points. Women who knew the medicinal qualities of plants were as valued as ones who could sew.

       Wrote Lucy: “Life was hard, but equal. Each person was respected for what they could do.”

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       None of you reading this column can remember the Paleolithic. That’s not the case with the era Conor Devlin, a 26-year-old New Yorker, longs to visit.

       “For the past four years or so, I've been yearning to experience life in the 1960s and the 1970s,” he wrote.

       Conor thinks he would have liked the music of the 1960s and ’70s, the relatively low-tech way of life, the lack of social media.

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       “There was a lot more room for people to relate to each other on a human level,” he wrote.

       That period, Conor wrote, made up “the biggest watershed moment in our country’s modern history. It was a time when everyone began thinking for themselves and asking difficult questions. What does it mean to be an American? What justifies an armed intervention? How do we serve our country while staying true to our morals? Are our elected officials worthy of our trust?

       “I would have loved to have been a part of that national conversation.”

       Of course, that conversation continues today. Everything old is new again. Time to bring back the Great Mother Goddess Rhea?

       See you soon

       I’m taking some, um, time off. I should be back in this space on Feb. 28.