Curated playlist
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 eventually sell 460 million copies worldwide. He was a ruthless vigilante who…
- 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 hamburger stand run by two brothers who simply wanted to make $1 million before they…
- 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 American prime-time and stayed there. Time magazine would eventually name it the greatest…
- 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 since. The character who stepped off those pages wore a brightly colored costume,…
- 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 Family Circle magazine, the psychologist William Moulton Marston argued the comic book…
- 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 named John Stith Pemberton, a wounded Civil War veteran addicted to morphine, who set…
- 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 day. That number speaks to something more than popularity. It points to a question…
- 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. The doll had launched on the 9th of March 1959 at the American International Toy…
- 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 using the phrase "rock and roll" to describe the music. The genre he named would…
- 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. That debut was unlike nearly everything else on the newsstands: instead of reprinting…
- 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. The first issue he put out, Marvel Comics #1, sold a combined nearly 900,000 copies…
- 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 before European ships arrived. Their story begins with migrations across…
- 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. Each side fielded 25 players. The ball was round, and no one was allowed to pick it up or carry…
- 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 a football game. Seven of the most-watched broadcasts in American television…
- 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. By the time the second season aired, eight of the ten highest-rated programs on all of basic cable…
- JuneteenthJuneteenth takes its name from a portmanteau of June and nineteenth, first coined in the 1890s. The day it commemorates is the 19th of June 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger arrived on the island of Galveston, Texas. The Emancipation…
- American nationalismAmerican nationalism begins with a single document and a single sentence. In 1776, the Continental Congress issued a Declaration of Independence announcing that a new nation had formed, the United States of America. That act set in motion…
- 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 short films through a viewfinder, one person at a time. Nobody watching those…
- 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. By 2023-45 percent of Americans reported listening to it, a share that had…
- Empire of LibertyThe Empire of Liberty is a phrase Thomas Jefferson first wrote down in 1780, while the American Revolution was still being fought. At that moment, the United States did not yet exist as a finished nation, yet Jefferson was already looking…
- AmericanizationAmericanization names something vast and contested: the reach of United States culture, economy, and technology into the daily lives of people who have never set foot on American soil. On the 31st of January 1990, approximately 38,000…
- American comic bookAmerican comic books are thin, stapled periodicals that launched one of the most influential popular art forms of the twentieth century. In June 1938, a character named Superman appeared on the cover of Action Comics #1, and within a few…
- Uncle SamUncle Sam is one of the most recognizable faces in American political life, and yet almost nobody knows where he actually came from. His white top hat, blue tailcoat, and red-and-white-striped trousers are fixtures of recruiting posters,…