From the country’s first lunch counter to the first Olympic games on U.S. soil, hosts Margaret Talev and Ghael Fobes explore America’s 250th anniversary through a series of unexpected firsts that shaped the country in ways nobody saw coming. Some are famous. Some should be. All of them tell us something about who we were — and who we’re becoming.
This podcast — 250 American Firsts, or as we call it: 250AF — was produced by Syracuse University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism, and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. with the generous support of the Hearst Foundations.
Ep. 2 – The World's First National Park
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 Instagram.
O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, joins hosts Margaret Talev and Ghael Fobes to explain how the world’s first national park nearly became another Niagara Falls, roadside tollbooths and all, and how a handful of landscape images convinced a skeptical government to keep it public. He talks about why conservation was for so long one of the few things both parties agreed on, from the Great American Outdoors Act to the fights moving through Congress right now, and he makes the case for his own favorite spot on the map: Delaware Bay, where a shorebird the size of a fist flies from the bottom of South America to the Arctic and stops to gorge on horseshoe crab eggs on the way.
Special thanks to the National Wildlife Federation; to the National Park Service for the footage; and to the Smithsonian for the early photographs and paintings of the parks by William Henry Jackson and Thomas Moran.
Show Notes and Links
- National Wildlife Federation
- Thomas Moran collection (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
- “The Painting That Inspired a National Park,” Smithsonian lesson plan (The American Experience in the Classroom)
- William Henry Jackson and his Yellowstone photographs (https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/yellowstone-national-park-33076)
Ep. 1 – The Lunch Counter That Welcomes Everyone: Inside Ben's Chili Bowl
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 Broadway,” Ben’s was integrated from day one, at a time when most lunch counters in America were battlegrounds over who got to sit down and eat. Nizam talks with hosts Margaret Talev and Ghael Fobes about serving Dr. King and Barack Obama alongside neighborhood regulars, staying open during the 1968 riots and the pandemic, and what a 65-year-old lunch counter needs to survive a 2025 renovation.
Show Notes and Links
- History of sit-ins (Stanford/King Institute)
- The last operating Woolworth’s lunch counter (Smithsonian Magazine)