250 American Firsts

In December 1870, Joseph Rainey of South Carolina took his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, the first Black man to serve there. Seven more Black South Carolinians followed him through 1897, and then the state didn't send another for nearly a century. The ninth was Jim Clyburn, elected in 1992. His book ⁠ The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shap...

In 1925 Edward Bernays sold America bacon by asking 5,000 doctors about breakfast. Gina Luttrell of Syracuse's Newhouse School joins Margaret Talev and Ghael Fobes on the campaigns that invented modern PR — bacon and eggs, Torches of Freedom, and the HR pamphlet that normalized Casual Friday. Luttrell's book, Public Relations Campaigns that Changed America: How Strategic Messaging Shaped C...

The first time the Olympics came to the United States, in 1904, they were supposed to go to Chicago. St. Louis, busy staging a World's Fair that same year, wanted them too — and pressured the IOC into moving the Games west, where they ended up folded into the fair as an afterthought. Bob Costas is the right person to explain how that improbable start grew into something the country now can&#39...

Before it became the template more than a hundred countries would copy, Yellowstone was two million acres almost no one in Washington had ever seen. When Congress voted to protect it in 1872, most lawmakers were deciding the fate of a place they knew only through paintings and photographs an expedition had hauled back the summer before. It was, as Collin O'Mara puts it, Instagram before Instag...

Before it was a stop on every politician's D.C. itinerary, Ben's Chili Bowl was a family restaurant on U Street with a half-smoke, a chili dog, and a jukebox. Nizam Ali — son of founders Ben and Virginia Ali — grew up snapping frozen sausage links for $2 a day, years before he understood what his parents' restaurant meant to Washington. Opened in 1958 in the heart of "Black Broadw...