100 Objects #1: The Century Safe

In 1876, on the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, magazine publisher Anna Deem launched a bold stunt: a time capsule safe sealed with a promise to be opened by the U.S. president in 1976. Built at the Centennial Exposition—a dazzling showcase of industrial progress—it was meant to capture the spirit of America’s rise. But when President Gerald Ford finally opened it, the contents were a letdown: photographs, pamphlets, autographs, and a single inkwell once owned by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Nothing revolutionary. Yet historian Jill Lepore argues that the disappointment reveals a deeper truth: history is not preserved by the grand or the famous, but by the fragile, forgotten, and often mundane. The Century Safe wasn’t a time capsule of America’s ideals—it was a monument to the act of preservation itself. From this moment, the podcast 'A History of the United States in 100 Objects' is born, not as a curated archive, but as a radical act of recovery: to find stories in the overlooked, the discarded, and the personal. This series will dig beyond museum glass to uncover America’s true past—one object at a time. The episode challenges the myth that history is a collection of perfect, representative artifacts. Instead, it reveals that the past is shaped by who had the power to preserve it—and who didn’t.