In 2010, A History of the World in 100 Objects premiered on BBC Radio 4 to great acclaim: a complex and interconnected history of the world told through 100 objects in the British Museum collection, presented by the museum’s then-director, Neil MacGregor. For 2026, BBC Studios decided to revamp and reimagine that ambitious series, this time focusing on the history of the United States, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. To their credit, they figured that British broadcasters might not be the best equipped to curate 100 objects telling American history. So they reached out to Roman Mars.

The new series, A History of the United States in 100 Objects, gets out of the museum. Its objects are overlooked, thrown away, mass-produced, and misunderstood—not priceless museum pieces, but everyday things that provide a portal into stories about what America means to itself and to the world at large. Before getting too far into the project, Roman went looking for sage advice from the one person who had done this before. This episode is that conversation.

The original series began almost as an internal British Museum project. Neil MacGregor had arrived at the museum from a paintings collection, and what interested him was what it meant to put objects from all over the world into one building. The format the BBC settled on, five themed programs a week moving chronologically from the earliest hand tools to the present, meant that every week MacGregor sat down with curators from the Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, and Americas collections to work out which objects might speak to each other. For scholars trained in a single discipline, the question of what in their collection related to something happening in China at the same moment was one nobody had ever asked them, and they found it thrilling. Choosing the one hundred objects involved no table pounding, just a certain amount of shrill advocacy and some sulking when a favorite piece didn’t make it.

The deeper purpose of doing history through things, MacGregor explains, is that written history limits you to the small bit of humanity that wrote, and mostly to the people in control, who wrote the history and made sure it survived. Objects let the people who never got to tell their story be heard through what they made. Telling it on the radio, where you can’t see any of it, turned out to help rather than hurt: if you can only hear about a thing, you have to imagine it, and you take possession of something you imagine more fully than something reproduced in front of you. It’s a perversity Roman knows something about, having launched a radio show about architecture and design that same year.

Objects also have many more lives than people do. Nobody carving the Rosetta Stone’s tax decree, which is boring beyond boring, had any idea what it would one day come to mean. That dreary bit of broken granite went on to play a starring role in three different stories, the last of them the most famous decipherment in history: the cracking of hieroglyphics.

MacGregor’s description of the whole venture is Gulliver’s Travels. You go off around the world and find astonishing things, but the point of Gulliver’s Travels is that when you come back to England, you realize you’re the peculiar ones. To remove yourself as the norm, he argues, is the precondition of tolerance, and that is what the series was meant to be about. It’s also why the title matters: this was a history of the world, not the history—one particular route through the subject told entirely through objects that now resided in one building in London. How that happened was one of the stories the series told almost without saying so. Some foreign publishers still flattened the article in translation, to his lasting annoyance.

For most of the run, the maker of the object was long dead. The very first program, on a stone chopping tool made one and a half million years ago, had David Attenborough on hand to explain how the thing fit into the animal-human differentiation. Not until a set of David Hockney prints about gay life, chosen to mark the new freedoms of the 20th century, did the series reach an object whose maker could speak for himself. The hundredth object was nearly a counterfeit Chelsea football shirt, made illegally in China and bought in Latin America. What won out was slightly more serious: a solar-powered mobile phone, the modern descendant of the hand ax.

For the American edition, MacGregor suggests looking for the things America gave the world that changed it, like tobacco and blue jeans. He had also heard an early episode of the new series, on the 60-degree screw thread, and endorsed the approach: an object with almost no outward significance, where any screw would do, used to plot how the US dislodged the UK as the industrial determinant of the world. His other piece of advice concerned object number 68, the one where Roman will wonder whether he can bear to go on and whether anyone is still listening. The answer is yes.

This episode ends with MacGregor’s Rosetta Stone installment in full.

New episodes of A History of the United States in 100 Objects air on Fridays, right here in the 99% Invisible feed. A History of the World in 100 Objects was a landmark collaboration between BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum. Listeners in the UK can hear more of it on BBC Sounds. Everyone else can find it wherever they get their podcasts.

A History of the United States in 100 Objects