Curated category
Culture of the United States
- BatmanBatman took his first step into the world on the 30th of March, 1939, inside the pages of Detective Comics #27. He was not yet the brooding icon that would…
- McDonald'sMcDonald's opened its first location at 1398 North E Street in San Bernardino, California, on the 15th of May 1940 - not as a global empire, but as a…
- The SimpsonsThe Simpsons premiered on the 17th of December 1989, and within months it had done something no animated show had managed since the 1970s: it cracked…
- SupermanSuperman first appeared on the 18th of April 1938, inside issue number one of Action Comics, and nothing in American popular culture has been quite the same…
- Wonder WomanWonder Woman fights not with fists or firepower, but with love. That was the strange premise her creator insisted on. In an October 1940 interview with…
- Coca-ColaCoca-Cola first sold for five cents a glass at Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia, on the 8th of May 1886. The man behind it was a Confederate colonel…
- Sesame StreetSesame Street premiered on the 10th of November 1969, and within a decade, nine million American children under the age of six were watching it every single…
- BarbieBarbie sold about 350,000 units in her first year, beating every market expectation and outrunning Mattel's own ability to make her for three straight years.
- Rock musicIn 1951, a Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey named Alan Freed began spinning rhythm and blues records for a multi-racial audience, and he is credited with first…
- DC ComicsDC Comics traces its origins to a tabloid-sized publication called New Fun: The Big Comic Magazine, which first appeared with a February 1935 cover date.
- Marvel ComicsMarvel Comics was founded in 1939 by a pulp-magazine publisher named Martin Goodman, operating out of an office at 330 West 42nd Street in New York City.
- Native Americans in the United StatesNative Americans are the Indigenous peoples of the United States, the descendants of the first human beings to settle these lands, tens of thousands of years…
- American footballOn the 6th of November 1869, two college teams from Rutgers and Princeton met to play what is now considered the first American football game.
- Super BowlThe Super Bowl is the annual championship game of the National Football League, and it has spent more than half a century becoming something far larger than…
- South ParkSouth Park debuted on Comedy Central on the 13th of August 1997, and within three months, the ratings for a single cable show had tripled.
- JuneteenthOn the 19th of June 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived on the island of Galveston to take command of more than 2,000 federal troops.
- American nationalismAmerican nationalism begins with a single document and a single sentence. In 1776, the Continental Congress issued a Declaration of Independence announcing…
- Cinema of the United StatesCinema of the United States began with a coin-operated peephole machine in New York City in 1894. Thomas Edison's kinetoscope drew paying customers to watch…
- Country musicCountry music got its name in an unlikely way. For decades, the genre was called hillbilly music, and only in the 1940s did the term "country music" catch on.
- Empire of LibertyThe Empire of Liberty is a phrase Thomas Jefferson first wrote down in 1780, while the American Revolution was still being fought.
- AmericanizationAmericanization names something vast and contested: the reach of United States culture, economy, and technology into the daily lives of people who have never…
- American comic bookAmerican comic books are thin, stapled periodicals that launched one of the most influential popular art forms of the twentieth century.
- Uncle SamUncle Sam is one of the most recognizable faces in American political life, and yet almost nobody knows where he actually came from.