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C
So good, so good, so good.
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B
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A
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Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. When you join Sam's Club, you get way more than you'd expect. You don't just get value. You get insider tips from fellow members. You don't just pick up a pizza. You actually vote on its toppings. Mmm, bacon crumbles. You don't just visit the club, because with the Sam's Club app, everywhere can be the club. You don't just shop the latest finds. You find your people. And at the end of the day, isn't that what it's all about? Come join us. Sam's Club. This year, the United states marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, offering a chance for the nation to take stock of its remarkable, complicated past. But what if that story is best told not through presidents, wars, and stirring speeches, but instead through a collection of unexpected, often unsung objects? That's the aim of American radio producer Roman Mars. New series, A History of the United States in a Hundred Objects. And in this episode of the History Extra Podcast, Emily Briffet caught up with Roman. To find out more.
- [03:01]
C
We're here today to talk about the podcast series that you've done. A history of the United States in 100 objects. And in this, you reframe U.S. history through everyday artifacts we've made and often forgotten. Why did you decide to examine US History through objects like this? And not just the famous ones, but the everyday ones, the ones used by the average person?
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B
Yeah, well, this is a sort of spiritual and literal sequel to A History of the world and 100 objects. That was this landmark series that Neil McGregor presented for the BBC, and all those objects that he presented were from the British Museum. And we knew we wanted to do something different. What was really happening was like, the 250th anniversary was coming up. The United States, and there seemed like a cause to do a new show, like a sequel to A history of the world, but make it about the US Also make it about objects, but not tie it to a museum, not tie it to things thought to be saved and put in behind museum glass to really think about, you know, what makes us history, what tells the story of us through the things we throw away and ignore and not pay attention to, through everyday things, not be tied to a museum. And I just think it was the approach that really kind of lit up my interest also, you know, the US Is a place of mass manufacturing and, you know, lots of copies of things, and it just made sense to sort of focus on that in service to the character of the U.S. and as
- [04:27]
C
you say, 2026 is a big anniversary year for the U.S. yeah. Why tell this story now when you
- [04:35]
B
work in radio and TV and stuff? Date pegs are a very compelling reason to do things. You know what I mean? I mean, for me, that's just enough to get enough of, you know, executives interested in a thing. But there's really no wrong time to do this stuff because, you know, when we have these stories presented in front of us, we think about where we are now in a more clear way, and it's recognizing that history is a series of stories, series of choices, and it is just really worth always going back to history. I mean, even though this is a new history show, a history of the US and 100 objects, I've been doing this show 99% invisible for 16 years, which is basically a stealth history show, it really is. And I think it's Always worth examining these things about where we've been and how we got to now as we're
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C
coming up to this anniversary. I suppose it's quite reflective moments.
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B
Yeah.
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C
How interested would you say the US has been in its own history?
- [05:29]
B
Through the centuries, these anniversaries make us reflect a little bit more and think about the future and think about our ideals. It's not uncommon. Like I was a very little kid when the bicentennial happened, but the ripple effects there was like artifacts left over the bicentennial. So it was a really big deal. And we have this story. The first episode of the series is about this thing called the sentry safe, which is this time capsule safe that was built in 1876, designed to be opened in 1976 by the President of the United States. It was like it was written on the safe opened by the President of the United States 100 years later. And there are these moments in which people are really thinking about what is important to now, what is going to be carried forward in the future, and what do these objects say about us. And so I do think that there's that moment. It's not just like anniversaries in terms of when documents were signed, but we had this a lot at Y2K. These moments where people think to reflect and think about the future. And I talked to historian Jill Laporte horror about this for that first episode. It's kind of an interesting thing. Thinking about the future is kind of a modern concept. People were so kind of bogged down with their everyday lives that thinking about the future and the acceleration of the Industrial Revolution and technology rapidly before that. They really didn't think the future was going to be all that different from the present. And all of a sudden they were looking down the barrel in 1876 of like, oh, yeah, it's going to be really different when we get there. And now that's all we do. We think about the future of everything. We think of the. Of AI, the future of work, the future of family. We think about the future all the time. And so it's just like we hit these moments and now, I think that's now become the water we swim in is always thinking about the future and always reflecting on the past. It's fun to jump in there, give some authoritative rigor to examining the past, pick out new lessons that we can pull from it. Because the United States is a really interesting place that in many ways I'm proud of, in many ways I get disappointed in. But one of the things that's amazing about it is that it is built on an idea. It's built on these concepts of liberty and freedom and all these sorts of things, and that anyone who comes in becomes an American. Those are the fundamental tenets of what we do. And we lose sight of them as we become an older and older country. And it's just nice to remind people of those things and recognize if we've moved on from some of these precepts, what we're losing if we do. I'm a progressive. I like progress. And so it's important to move on from ideas, too, to figure out what we hold sacred. And these objects show that, show some of these things. They show the transition of what we care about. And so it's a good way in. Basically, the object is a doorway to tell a story. Like all history, it's basically just stories.
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C
There are so many fascinating threads there that I really would like to pull out as we chat. But I wonder if we could perhaps pause for a moment with the century safe.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Yeah.
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C
So as you say, this is 1876, opened in 1976. At that time, what did Americans trust to tell their story? And dare I ask what the reaction was in 1976?
- [08:39]
B
Yeah. So this kind of promotional scheme by this woman, Anna Deem, who was a magazine publisher, she devised this idea for the World's Fair. And it was a safe that people were going to put stuff into that was important. People could pay a little bit of money and sign their name in a book. They put a lot of photographs in there, a temperance pamphlet, an ink stand from Henry Walter Longfellow. It was very early in time capsule thinking. It got sealed up. It went 100 years in the future, and it was opened up by the President. They managed to make this thing work. President Ford, opened up in 1976, is opening it up, and they're kind of waiting for something really profound, some message from the past. And as he's pulling stuff out, they're realizing that the material inside is not very impressive. He kind of doesn't know what to do with it. There's like this crowd of journalists gathered around, and they're just kind of making jokes and trying to fill space because nothing in it sort of seems to matter. There's these unknown pictures of people. They don't know the list of names. And you know what we were thinking about as we were choosing this as an object, as our first object that we were talking about was just how hard it is to find things that are representative. It's hard to Find things that can sort of travel through time with their meaning intact. But one of the things that happened during that time period between 1876 and 1976 is like 1876 photographs are new. They're amazing. The idea that you could preserve something in time and you could have a picture of a loved one who had passed away was a new concept for most people. And so to have that, that was a precious object. But 100 years later it's trivial. And now it's like I take 500 pictures a day, you know, so it's one of those things that you just learn about our change in values, what's important to us. And I think that the lesson for the century safe is like the objects inside of it didn't have historical value in a sense. Like people didn't learn new one of a kind things that weren't handwritten. It was a lot of mass produced and copyable stuff. But our approach to telling these stories is that you can find America in any American object if you just know what you're looking for, know how to use it as a lens, know how to tell the right story. And that's our approach, is to fix things that maybe it would also, if opened in 100 years, would be a disappointing set of things. But we're going to tell the story for right now so that we can reflect on this moment and maybe convince you that these mundane and everyday things are worth your attention.
- [11:13]
C
It's not opening it to find this landmark document that changes things. No, it's the everyday, perhaps ephemera. I guess I should maybe ask you then, what would you say is perhaps the most overrated object in US History?
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B
Overrated object in US History?
- [11:30]
C
Hmm.
- [11:31]
B
That's an interesting question that stumped you. I mean, I'm trying to think, like I'm kind of in love with all things, so like I can kind of enjoy everything to a certain extent. But I would say, you know, it's like I get tired of great men stories and things that sort of indicate that stuff. I think people are pretty critical. There's this statue of Abraham Lincoln with enslaved people like at his feet. No power, no agency. I hate that statue. I like Abe Lincoln quite a bit. I hate that statue. So things like that, you know, like that, where they tell the wrong story, in my opinion. And so those are the things that I find overrated. Usually it's the great men puffed up stuff.
- [12:08]
C
I think this is part of the joy of the series in a way. It takes a more kaleidoscopic View on the past. Could you perhaps tell us about some objects that maybe opened up the conversation in terms of who was telling it?
- [12:21]
B
Yeah, we have this story coming up about the Webster Blueback Speller, which is a reference book written by Noah Webster in the late 1700s. And it was just his way of standardizing Americanized English. Like he was pretty annoyed by the extra U's and unnecessary spellings in English language. So Plough, you know, went from P, L, O, U, G, H to P, L, O, W, for example, and color. That dropped the U, honor dropped the U. And it was a way of asserting kind of an American identity and start to sort of separate it from the English identity. You know, Noah Webster was an abolitionist, but probably not the most enlightened thinker when it came to race. He definitely was a product of his time. And so it was meant for school kids. It was meant for everyday people to teach themselves to read The Blueback Speller. It's basically a list of words and syllables and then these moral lessons built into it. So a real kind of hop on pop style of learning to read through reading. What he didn't anticipate was that this little blue book was tiny and so that it could be secreted away and put into pockets. And during slavery, it was illegal for slaves to learn how to read. It was illegal for enslaved people to be taught how to read. And this item, not meant for them, became this kind of tool of liberation that they could secretly learn to read on their own. And the story we tell is about that, but it's also about all the people, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, who taught themselves to read on the Blueback speller and how it influenced their approach to education, in particular education of black Americans after emancipation. We use the Blueback speller to tell that story, but also to tell the story of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. du Bois and their opposition of what is the path to liberation? Is it practical education and learning basic economic skills of planting and building and stuff, or is it going to Harvard and being leaders in the field and getting the vote? And there was a real fight over education during that time period. And it all comes back to this one object, the Blueback speller.
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C
It's extraordinary that such a history has come out of such. Perhaps we might consider it mundane. Yeah, but such an everyday object.
- [14:41]
B
Yeah, I mean, the Blueback speller, like it's not known today, but it is the second best selling book in American history. It was so common that it was just basically wallpaper. And that is amazing to me. That it can both be everyday and forgotten and have this profound effect. And if you pick it up, the inside feel of little consequence. It is just lists and lists. It's a very boring book. It is just lists and lists of syllables. You go from one syllable, you build syllables out to five syllables and these really hack moral lessons built inside of it to help people develop their moral understanding of the universe. But it's an amazing object, really amazing.
- [15:19]
C
And I guess this isn't something necessarily that we would see preserved in a museum.
- [15:24]
B
I mean, there probably is original ones preserved somewhere, but you can still buy a hardback copy it copyright. So I have a copy of it. Bought it at a bookstore, you know, so you can find it around. And there's probably some original ones. I'm sure there's some museum that has an original one. But what's amazing to me is there, you know, there's hundreds of thousands of them that existed through history, and all of them are special.
- [15:45]
C
This brings me onto the question. Obviously, we've got documents that we see preserved pine glass or objects that we see preserved pine glass in a museum that we look up to. And we say, wow, that tells the story of us. Who gets to decide what is kept and what becomes representative of that history?
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B
I mean, that's the big problem with history is that the fraction of the population in the past who could write down their stories is very small. The group of people that had the means to preserve things is very small. And then what you have left are hard things which are made by craftspeople, which is very representative of everyday people. And that was a lot of what the first History of the world in 100 objects was about. Were these objects made by everyday people based on become precious objects over time? And there's a real asymmetry to history in that it becomes a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the story that has moved forward in time becomes a more and more elite group. And that changes things. You know, de la Poer says in our first episode, the history of the world is mostly a history of misery. And we have to like to deal with that asymmetry of who's telling the history and how we're receiving it in the future. We just have to be mindful of it. And it doesn't mean that telling history stories is miserable or that the histories have to be miserable at all. And so we'll cover hard subjects. And it's important that history covers hard subjects. It's also incumbent upon us to tell them well so that people have fun with it. And that discovery is good and you can listen to the voices and try to uncover the voices of the voiceless and have that be a joyous experience, that discovery. And so it's worth it to us to like to pick objects that tell like a little bit different history than you're expected. The great moments in history, the signings of documents, the wars and stuff like this, all that stuff will come into play in all that we do, but they're not our pivot points. We pick a thing, we get into a it's a portal into a time period and then we say why is this significant to mostly everyday people?
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A
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A
Perfect. Hang on.
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C
What's this?
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B
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- [20:16]
C
There are certainly some really surprising objects in the series that I wasn't necessarily expecting to be chosen. Are there any objects that when you really dug into the history, they actually surprised you in what story they were telling?
- [20:30]
B
Yeah, I mean, editorially, the team with me, we make sure the object is interest in and of itself. And then does it have enough of a straight up story about it? And then like, what is the theme of it? Like, what are we trying to say about it? And so we look for things that have that sort of fulfill all three of those requirements. And what has been fun? You know, I've been telling stories about design and architecture for a long time. So I've been using this lens of design to tell stories. So it's always about the thoughtfulness, the care that somebody puts into something. And with this new project, I really had this new toolkit to write about. What does it say about America? What is different about it? How is it connected to the world? And it's just been so fun to examine those themes and to take things and yeah, maybe these everyday objects, you wouldn't think them to be necessarily the perfect example of using a foot measuring device called a Brannock device to explain 20th century US business. But like, like I'm going to do it. This is what I'm going to use it as this example. Because it's not the example people pull out. It's probably not one that's taught in economic seminars of schools and stuff. But I think there's something to be said about this everyday object that's very pleasing as a design. And that the fact that there's this one company, the Brannock Company from Syracuse, New York, made one product for 100 years. And that is something that doesn't really exist anymore. And what does it say about what we make now? Now it seems like most companies create financial products, their hedge funds and this and, and this little device represents a different kind of capitalism, different set of ideals. So we'll often take a thing, we'll have an interest in it, and then you explore it, explore, explore it. And then it's like, what is the bigger idea here? And then we've Just sort of given ourselves some room to sort of figure that out and have fun with it.
- [22:18]
C
I'm admittedly very curious at this history behind the Foot measuring device and what this can really reveal.
- [22:25]
B
You just have to tune in to see.
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C
Tune in and find out more. Okay. Obviously, another idea of this is it's shifting the idea of what history were there objects that fundamentally changed your understanding of US History?
- [22:40]
B
It's a funny thing that happens when. And I'm sure you've encountered this, but when you present things and you talk about things, people think you know everything. You know what I mean? People think you're like, oh, you do a podcast about history. Like, tell me about this event. And I was like, well, if you haven't heard an episode on it, I don't actually know it. You know what I mean? There's only so much things, so many things you can read at once. So I was surprised by all kinds of things in this series. I've been reading like crazy. I've been sort of trying to explore different objects that mean something to other people. And like, even one of our early episodes is about hot air ballooning. They were called gas bags back then, not hot air balloons. But what if you're picturing a hot air balloon, you're picturing the right thing. When I say gas bag, the whole push for this. In the sort of around the Civil War era in the United States, you know, there's amazing stories of what people thought we were going to do with hot air balloons and the promise of them and how they never quite panned out, but also how it inspired a kind of sort of this American, like, impulse to always go to the edge of the atmosphere, always go further in. Cincinnati, Ohio was the gas bag capital of the world for some reason. And the newspaper had a journalist, like, a beat. Their beat was hot air balloons was their entire beat. It was like golden age of journalism. And then the hot air balloon was used during warfare in the Civil War. And the first beginning of every type of thing that came later in terms of an air force or whatever they were spy ships that they went up in the air and then came back down. I knew none of that. And then the granddaughter of the person who popularized it in the States was this inspiration to all these astronauts. And so there's this connection between the people that have always sort of gone further than anyone has gone before, and their connection through decades is right there. And so it's just fun to like. So all that stuff. I'm surprised by all of it.
- [24:27]
C
An Object like that tells us a lot about sort of the US's ideals. It can reveal more about what the US hopes to define itself as. Are there any objects or perhaps stories that you found that best capture perhaps the tension between ideals versus realities?
- [24:45]
B
For sure. I mean, one of the episodes that I pitched was it's the only object that isn't actually real so far. So it is a sharpened screwdriver and it is a reported weapon. So there was this case in the 1980s. A man named Bernie Goetz was on the subway and according to him, he felt threatened by four black teens and he shot them. And it was a big deal. When I was a kid, it was the subway vigilante. It was like tied to these. There was all these movies at the time, Death Wish and things like this. And one of the things that was reported was that the teens were carrying sharpened screwdrivers. And this was not true, but it was perpetuated in the US media. And so I wanted to talk about this as an object, an object that doesn't exist as the beginning of a kind of white fear, white rage, and also misinformation that really took over in the right wing press during this time period. So that is an object that is extremely divisive. In the end, you know, it wasn't entered into court records, so it wasn't taken literally. But it is a thing still mentioned to this day that the kids were carrying sharpened screwdrivers. Two of them had screwdrivers in their pockets because they used them to jim open arcade machines to get quarters. But at the time when all this was being investigated, there was no notion that that was brandished as a weapon. Nobody saw it as weapon. Bernie Goetz never said he was threatened in that way, but the media just sort of created this fiction. And so there are plenty of these divisive things in history that really mattered and really set the future in motion. In some ways, it wasn't the sharpened screwdriver that did it, but is emblematic of a type of journalism and thought that, that I still perceive the effects
- [26:33]
C
of today between these ideals and some of the realities. These objects that you're examining, do they highlight a us that is unified in its ideals, more divided, or altogether something more complex?
- [26:48]
B
I would say more complex. I keep telling people that, like, you know, this is a show made by humans who have points of view about things. I mean, in these stories you find kinship with some characters. In the story, you find real differences. In other parts of the story, you think about where you would stand in history if you were part of it. So I think that telling the stories is unifying in and of itself. One of the things a great thing about history is like you can bring lessons forward which feel different to people. They react differently to them. Rather than bringing up the broad subject in the present day, you can carry people forward with it. And so storytelling is always meant to be unifying to some degree. I'm not making the show for one sort of person. I'm making it for everybody. But I think in presenting the history and what we emphasize and stuff, there's definitely going to be sort of disagreements and things like that. And it's going to show a very complicated history that's going to have lots of different facets to it. I think that's always just the way it is. But that's the fun part of it, too. Coming up with the history of the United States, unhunited objects would be impossible. This is definitely a history of the United States in 100 objects. And that's kind of the only responsible way to do it.
- [28:00]
C
Are there any objects that you may have had to leave on the wayside or any that you'd be sad to have left out?
- [28:07]
B
We did a call out for pitches on the show because we wanted people to contribute to our little project. You know, a lot of them are going to work. A lot of them are not going to work for lots of different reasons. There's stuff that we've left behind that have been pitched that felt like good ideas and fun ideas because there just wasn't enough story there to sustain them. But I think that the one thing that we're really careful of is we want to make sure that we have a good spread of geography, a good spread of time. There's one I really want wanted to do about the Rosenwald schools, which are these schools that were paid for by the Sears Roebuck Company money. And then black communities. And they were created, and there was like 5,000 of them around the US but I think that the blue back speller one is going to kind of make that one not necessary anymore. That's one of those things. Like, I would love to tell that story, but we kind of told some of it here. So it's things like that that I get disappointed because it's like, there's things I would love to do and different angles I'd love to cover. 100 might seem like a. So very little in the end. And so we gotta make sure we're doing a good job with that.
- [29:07]
C
I mean, when you've got 100 objects to tell an entire history. It's still quite a slim.
- [29:13]
B
It is picking it is.
- [29:15]
C
One of the other themes I just wanted to ask you about is that in your series you seem to hint that history of the US is not necessarily a sort of self contained story. Judging from these objects, how far do you think America's been shaped by its own myths, its own storytelling, its own ideas and inventions? And how far is it by exchange, conflict, entanglement with the wider world?
- [29:39]
B
I don't think you could overstate how much the wider world matters. So a lot of the ways that we'll examine this identity will be through the wider world. The second episode of the series is about the standardized 60 degree threading on a screw. And this is a story of somebody early on, like in the 20th century deciding that these things had to be standardized because the world was getting complex with industrialization and we needed to make things so that things could work together more efficiently and so therefore the United States could thrive. Not everyone agreed on what the standard screw thread should be. And in fact it ran into conflict with the UK who had a 55 degree thread standard and our parts could not fit together. And that's fine for a while. And then World War II happens and then suddenly it is not for fine because we are sending jeeps and we're sending tanks, and if you can't repair them, no parts work, no parts are interchangeable. And through various negotiations, we imposed our 60 degree thread standard on the UK because needed jeeps, needed tanks, needed help, and then the world. And in a way that little screw who represents a new form of imperialism, the old form, putting governors in places, having armies, calling revolts. And then the 20th century version that the United States pioneered, which is, I mean, still plenty of force, plenty of bad stuff, plenty of bases in other countries, in fact, more bases, hundreds and hundreds of bases in other countries. But this new sort of form of we're going to make everyone dependent on the things we make and have constantly be in conversation with us. And if we decide we're going to change the standard, everyone else has to change the standard. This is a new form of imperialism. That little object defines the United States in a certain way, but it really defines the United States in reference to the rest of the world and what the 20th century meant and why the 20th century was very much the American century. It's because of those types of things. And so that interchange of objects and things is going to be a huge part. Another one, we're doing a piece about Nunchucks, which are not an American invention, they're sort of Okinawan and, like, a little bit Filipino and a little bit Chinese and a little bit, you know, like a little bit of everything. But what they represent in America during the sort of Kung Fu era and the establishment of an Asian American identity is like, that mix of what made up what nunchucks were and the mix of, like, people forming an Asian American identity from all these different countries and all these different histories. But deciding to become, under the name of one thing inside of the United States to show that solidarity is nunchucks in Asian America are talking to each other. So our objects are not just American inventions and things like this. It's really about a conversation with the rest of the world.
- [32:39]
C
It speaks so much for shifting geopolitics and the shifting situation in the world. One of the themes that I wanted to go back to, that you mentioned earlier, was this idea of how, over the course of time, memory and how we think about ourselves in the present and the past, and also how we even think about the future. That kind of shifting idea of time and temporality, how that sort of changed as time's gone on.
- [33:09]
B
I think it has a little bit to do with this question of preservation. Now we have the ability to preserve so much more of our lives on our phones. We sort of generate enough data and artifacts about ourselves in a single day than a person 20 years ago did in a lifetime. So our sense of what is going to be brought forward in time becomes skewed by that. Because I think that in a lot of ways, we think all things will be preserved because we have access to a ton of our lives inside of a phone. I think that that's a mistake. I think in the end, the way that we've seen things happen is the curation of the algorithm is going to select smaller and smaller slices, and it's not going to be as representative as we think it's going to be. And so I think we think that our footprint might last forever because we have all these ways of recording the things we do and perceive all the time. So I listen to a lot of indie and underground and punk bands. You might think that Spotify has everything in the world. It does not. A ton of bands I love are just not there. Their records have not been turned into this. And in a way, they're just kind of gone because of it. And that's okay. Things can be let go. They can move forward. That's okay. But if you think that having this very, very big Repository is going to encompass everything. I think you're wrong. And so I think we have a sense of ourselves that all of it will move forward. And I think that it'll be more like the past than we think more of it will be precious objects that will show up that are one of a kind that'll still to people. As we move forward, I think our sense of what the future holds and speculating about the future becomes broader and broader and broader. I think we really do think about the far future being unlike anything that we're existing in today. That's a pretty new concept that wasn't afforded people when they were farmers in some place. They didn't imagine a future that was different for their kids, that was that different from what they had. And so our imagination is greater. But I think we have to remind ourselves that we're kind of more like the peasants than we think, that a lot of our stuff will be lost and a lot of our speculation about the future is just going to be wrong. And so we have to sort of keep on top of these things. The fact that thought has evolved, we have the same brains for the past 10,000 years, but the fact that everything around us makes us think different thoughts about the future and the past totally changes philosophical concepts. It's a stunning thing. And it's fun to mark that through objects as well and to sort of think about history like it's not a thinking about history and telling stories of history or perspecting about the future that is not a given. Those things were taught to us over time culturally.
- [35:52]
C
With that in mind, do you think America is a country that perhaps remembers too much or forgets too much?
- [36:01]
B
I would lean a little bit more on forgets too much than remembers too much. We remember little selections like slogans and stuff. There's a real sense politically that we're in sort of unprecedented times. In many ways we are. But fights over immigration have been present in the US history forever. Fights over stressing the Constitution and what the Constitution means and what it's all about have been there from the beginning. So there's a continuity there that's worth remembering and it is worth, worth spending a lot of time to remember ideals and what it means to be an American. And I think that's worth spending some time on, but it's also worth moving on. I'm a little bit more of the Jeffersonian camp that believes that there should be easier ways to amend the Constitution. At the time, a written Constitution had never lasted more than 20 years. When the US Constitution was written and now it's almost 250 years old. And so there has to be a balance when we're thinking about this stuff. How much do we rely on the past, how much we keep, how much we hold, and then how much we move on from? These are things that are worth examining all the time. Because any part of that can be used as a weapon to do obnoxious things, you know, like trying to be too reverent towards some ideal of the past or moving so fast that you just leave people behind and you leave some of the ideals behind. And so it's just an interesting conundrum as to what is important. And that's why you just tell the stories the best you can and then hopefully people, like, pull the lessons that they can from it.
- [37:31]
C
As a final question for you now, this might be a challenge given in mind, what you've just said at the start of this episode. The first object that we brought up was the sentry safe. If we were, say, doing a sentry safe now, an equivalent in 2026, what would you choose to put into it to represent us either today or that history?
- [37:54]
B
It would be so hard. I mean, I guess I'm kind of doing it, but I also would find it hard. I think what I've learned is that the important things to carry forward are things that are personal, that they don't necessarily need to speak to something bigger. They just have to be a representative of a person. Specificity is the soul of narrative. And so an individual story does a lot to telling the bigger story of us as humans versus a broad publication like thinking about everybody at once kind of tells nothing about the future. I think I would just put a bunch of diaries inside of it. I would like a random lottery of diaries inside of it because I think that will be the way into understanding the past. I think that's where the meaning would stay intact over time. Handwritten diaries of people of all different ages and all different races, all different backgrounds. I think that would be the thing that would matter the most. That was Roman Mars speaking to Emily Brifford. IT Roman is host of the History of the United States and 100 objects a BBC Studios and 99% Invisible Co production for SiriusXM. This series is available to listen to weekly on BBC Sounds and wherever you get your podcasts.
- [39:22]
A
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