New podcast explores US history through 100 everyday objects

**A New Podcast Series Reimagines American History Through Everyday Objects**

A new weekly podcast series — *A History of the United States in 100 Objects* — launched today, promising to reframe the American story not through monuments or museum-quality treasures but through overlooked, mundane, and sometimes bizarre artifacts. The project is a collaboration between BBC Studios and *99% Invisible*, the long-running podcast hosted by Roman Mars that has built a devoted following by excavating the hidden design and cultural logic embedded in ordinary things. The timing is deliberate: the series arrives as the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a milestone that lends the project a particular commemorative weight.

The series draws direct lineage from *A History of the World in 100 Objects*, the acclaimed BBC Radio 4 production that premiered in 2010 and was hosted by Neil MacGregor, then curator of the British Museum. That original series became a landmark in audio storytelling, tracing the sweep of human civilization through a hundred physical artifacts — each one handled, described, and narrated by MacGregor with a tactile intimacy that gave listeners the sensation of holding ancient history in their own hands. It remains widely discussed and influential more than fifteen years later. The new American edition is explicitly conceived as both an update and a reinvention of that format.

**Roman Mars and the 99% Invisible Connection**

The collaboration came together in an unusually organic way. As BBC Studios producers began developing potential episode ideas for the American version, they repeatedly found that *99% Invisible* had already produced an episode on the same object or story. That coincidence occurred often enough that a formal partnership became the obvious path forward. Mars, who describes himself as a devoted fan of both the BBC and the original MacGregor series, accepted quickly.

The creative mandate for the new series departs sharply from its predecessor. Where MacGregor's original episodes leaned heavily on museum collections and objects of acknowledged historical significance — things already consecrated by institutional display — the American version is deliberately steering toward artifacts that exist outside museum cases. The team wants objects that are discarded, misunderstood, overlooked, or sitting in someone's attic. In keeping with that spirit, listeners are being invited to propose their own objects and personal stories, with the production team offering to help shape the best submissions into broadcast-quality episodes.

Mars is hosting and serving as curator, roles that mirror MacGregor's dual function in the original. He has assembled what he describes as a wide roster of contributors — audio storytellers, historians, and journalists — who will each bring their own interpretive sensibility to the objects they cover. The format lends itself to a kind of intellectual personality showcase, with contributors narrating not just the history of an object but their own relationship to it.

**The Objects Themselves: Gold Coins, Screws, and a Ceramic Dalmatian**

The specific examples Mars previews give a strong sense of the series' tonal range and ambitions. One episode traces the journey of a single gold coin from the California Gold Rush to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, using that trajectory to examine how the coin's fate intersected with a near-catastrophic crisis for the American economy. The story encapsulates themes of western expansion, speculative fever, maritime disaster, and financial fragility — all compressed into a single piece of metal.

Another episode focuses on what Mars describes simply as an American screw — a specific fastener design whose engineering innovation quietly restructured manufacturing and mechanical practice not just in the United States but globally. The choice of a screw is almost a manifesto for the series' philosophy: nothing could be more mundane or less likely to appear in a conventional history, yet its consequences were world-altering.

Perhaps the most provocative preview is the episode devoted to a ceramic dalmatian figurine from the set of *Wheel of Fortune*. Mars is aware the choice sounds absurd — he acknowledges it directly and promises that the episode justifies the selection. The dalmatian almost certainly opens a door into questions about television's role in shaping consumer culture, American kitsch, the aesthetics of mass entertainment, or the strange afterlives of prop objects. That willingness to defend the seemingly indefensible artifact is central to what makes the format work.

**Why the Format Resonates — and What the Series Is Attempting**

The hundred-objects structure has proven durable because it solves a genuine problem in popular history: how to make the past feel concrete and personal rather than abstract and distant. A single object anchors a story in physical reality, giving listeners something to visualize and locate in space and time. The best episodes in the MacGregor original could make a listener feel the weight of a helmet or the texture of a coin while absorbing centuries of political and cultural change.

The American version adds a democratic dimension that fits the subject matter. By soliciting listener contributions and focusing on non-institutional objects, the series implicitly argues that American history is not primarily housed in the Smithsonian or the Metropolitan Museum of Art — it is scattered across attics, thrift stores, basements, and garage sales. That framing carries a political charge in 2025, a moment when debates about whose history gets told, and through whose objects, remain intensely contested.

Mars signals that the series will not avoid difficult material, but the overarching tone is meant to be one of engaged curiosity and even fun. He frames even sober historical episodes as having room for irreverence — what he calls a little drunk history alongside every careful account. New episodes will release weekly for the next 100 weeks, making the full arc of the series a roughly two-year commitment that will run well past the 2026 anniversary milestone it was designed to mark.