From The World to America: Neil MacGregor meets Roman Mars

Roman Mars (0:00)

In 2010, A History of the World in 100 Objects, hosted by Neil MacGregor, premiered on BBC Radio 4 to great acclaim. It was a groundbreaking series that told a complex and interconnected history of the world through 100 objects housed in the British Museum collection. For 2026, BBC Studios decided they wanted 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 the great credit of the BBC, they thought that maybe British broadcasters weren't the best equipped to take on the curation of 100 Objects that told the history of the United States. So that's when they reached out to me, lifelong American, Roman Mars. I'm the host of a podcast called 99% Invisible, and I love to tell stories about seemingly mundane things and profound things they have to say about us as humans. With our 100 Objects series, we knew we wanted to get out of the museum and focus on objects that were overlooked, thrown away, mass produced and misunderstood. Not priceless museum pieces, but the everyday things that provide a portal into stories about what America means to itself and to the world at large.

If you listened to and enjoyed the original A History of the World in 100 Objects, I hope you'll give A History of the United States in 100 Objects a spin. I'm so proud of what we've made so far and all that is to come. But from the beginning, I knew I needed sage advice to do the job right. And so I sought the counsel of the original 100 Objects host, Neil MacGregor.

Here's our conversation.

What I was hoping you could do to begin with is take me back to January 2010 A History of the World in 100 Objects is launching. It starts with a mummy that you saw as a boy. Were you aware of the phenomenon that this was going to be when you started?

Neil MacGregor (2:02)

No, absolutely not, absolutely not.

I was intimidated, we were all intimidated by the fact that the BBC had committed to a series of 100 programs. We had no idea how it was going to be received at all. In a strange way, the project began really almost as an internal project in the British Museum. What's interested me having come from the National Gallery, to a paintings collection, to a museum, the ambition of which was to show really the history of humanity through things and not an art museum. But to try to explore what it meant to put objects from all over the world into one building. So it really began as a way of exploring what happens when you think of a museum as a place where different objects are exploring the same kind of human experience.

Roman Mars (3:00)

Of all the things in the building, how did you choose the 100?

Neil MacGregor (3:05)

Well, this was the greatest fun.

The British Museum is created in the middle of the 18th century. Really at that moment of the Enlightenment, when people begin to have a totally different notion of what humanity means, it's the physical expression of that Enlightenment notion that there is one humanity.

So what we decided to do was to try to organize the 100 Objects. Well, the BBC decided that there would be five programs a week, and there needed to be a theme for each week. And we wanted to go effectively from the beginning, the earliest hand tools made by anything that can roughly be called human, right up to today. So that gave us the format. And that in each week, we would go around the world. So you would take, let's say, 1,000 BCE and look at a theme, let's say, power.

I mean, how do different societies represent power at 1,000 BCE? Yeah. But what it meant internally was that for every week, I would sit down with a curator from the Chinese collection, the Indian collection, the Egyptian collection, the American's collection. And we would have to think of what objects might speak to each other. Of course, for academics in a particular discipline, this is a totally new way of thinking. There was no connection between ancient Egypt and ancient China. So, no Egyptologist was likely to have asked what in my collection might relate to something that's happening at the same time in China.

Roman Mars (4:41)

Yeah.

Neil MacGregor (4:42)

Because there's no connection. It's an anthropological question asked to people who are historical scholars and they found that completely thrilling because it's allowed them all really to look at familiar objects and ask a totally new kind of question and suggest the commonalities of human behavior. Wherever we are, we all behave roughly, equally badly, equally well, and surprisingly more or less in the same way.