The Tiffany blue box

MY, NY

It has been the item which excites every recipient.

Bill

Ford Mustang

Detroit MI

Cars have always had a powerful place in American culture. The Ford Mustang and Cadillac are two of the iconic car makes. Mustang made Ford's fortune and even inspired a pop song,"Mustang Sally."

Algis

@algisk

An original Teddy Roosevelt bear, circa 1903

Dublin, California

He is hand made by Morris and Rose Michtom of Brooklyn, N.Y. The Michtom's made so few of these first style Teddy's. That they were lost in time. Please google up Google + by Robert Csech to read more. Also Google up, Icon, Submit your photo, Smithsonian Photo contest. For several years now the Smithsonian has honored my old bear on this web site. It took me thirteen years of intense research to discover who created my old bear. The same maker as the famous Smithsonian bear. but my bear is older.

Robert

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Book

A perfect example of isolation, fantasy and delusion in 20th century America

Kevin

@1foolish

The View from Mrs Thompson's

Bloomington, IL

There is no other work I have read in recent times that captures what it is to be American and specifically, Mid Western than this...it is to me simple and simply heartbreaking.

Louise

Dances with Wolves, the movie

The American west

The disturbing fictional account of the powerlessness of personal relationships when pitted against the steamroller of human desire to conquer all and dominate the universe beginning with the backyard.

Steve

Public education (okay, it's not a book, movie, song, play or building, but it fosters such)

Here, there, everywhere?

Public education, the great equalizer, contains the ecosystem to grow American Dreams and keep them thriving.

Emily

song "Playin' in the Band"

on tour, America

Grateful Dead is so very uniquely American and a cultural icon. No other band has ever done what the Dead did, and never will again. The Dead developed a cult-like following that lasted decades and spanned generations. The title of the song can be used as an introduction to the band and their significance in American cultural history.

Ryan

Albert Pinkham Ryder

Nat'l Museum of Am. Art

I love his paintings. A great many American painters have been influenced by him. I don't know if a program on him would be appropriate for the radio, but if so, I'd love to hear it.

Robert

Patty griffin's "Mary"

my ipod

"Mary" is the most haunting song I've ever heard. Patty Griffin was blessed not only with transcendent song writing abilities but a voice to match. "Mary"'s images of the virgin juxtaposed with the story of Patty's own grandmother "who loses another son" is as sad as it is timeless. There are multiple versions on You Tube but the classic version is from the live album "A Kiss in Time" with Emmylou Harris' always perfect backing vocals and Buddy Miller's mournful guitar. It's as moving and magical as music can get.

Daren

(The Magazine of) Fantasy & Science Fiction

publisher located in Hoboken, NJ

F&SF, published continuously since 1949, has always reflected and often heralded developments in the changing character of science fiction and fantasy, which I'd argue is America's great 20th – and so far 21st century – popular literature. Many of its eleven successive editors and many more of its contributing writers are themselves true American icons.

Mary

@MaryPThornburg

Slacker (Richard Linklater)

Austin, TX

Slacker captures a slice America's barely adult youth of the late 80's - early 90's - in all it's fringe outlined details. Later, this generation could launch rockets and silicon startups - but first they would have to crawl low to the earth. This is the story of that low slinking formative 'slack'.

(your form does not work correctly. The youtube URL prompt does not handle perfectly acceptable address ie) https://youtu.be/iDIM0sRh5R4 rejected more than once )

Josh

All the Kings Men

Baton Rouge, LA

If Robert Penn Warren's "All The King's Men" is not the Great American Novel, it is certainly the Great American Political Novel. It delves into the good and bad of American politics and the secrets of the powerful. The characters are rich and real and Warren paints them with warts and all, showing the sympathetic side of even vile characters.

George

St. Elmos Fire

Washington D.C.

I think this depicts the struggles and inner turmoil that so many of us faced in our middle 20a. I can identify with each character.

Helen

Dick Dale, "King of the Surf Guitar"

Twentynine Palms, CA

He created the surf music, a way of life and revolutionized the electric guitar. He was and is quite a character. At nearly 80 he still tours and absolutely shreds the guitar.

Wendell

Technicolor

world wide in the 30's - 60's

My first images of America were as a child in WW2 England, they were all in Technicolor. When I came to live in LA in the 50's it was real technicolor compared to post war England.

anthony

The Gilded Age, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, 1873

Washington, DC

I'm re-reading Mark Twain's 1873 "The Gilded Age: a Tale of Today" for a lecture I'm giving. What strikes me--again--is that this book not only coined a name for one of the most important socio-economic moments in America's history (1865-1915), but it is a bitingly accurate portrait of what America was as it became a great nation in the 19th century. This was the country where you could re-invent yourself, by any means necessary. The second thing that strikes me is how like this old vision of the United States we are today. We are still a nation of self-re-inventors, of dreamers. We are easily corrupted by our dreams and led astray by those who feed our fantasies of success.

Ulysses

Harry Partch

Los Angeles, California

Partch was born in 1901. He grew up in a town in Arizona still untouched by electricity. He educated himself at public libraries and came to reject western music and invented a 43-tone unequal, un-tempered scale (in contrast to the familiar 12-tone equal tempered one) and a slew of instruments utilizing it. During the Depression, he lived as a hobo for 9 years, transforming his experiences to music. He developed a uniquely American musical art for the stage with roots that stretched to Ancient Greece and the Far East.

Dylan

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

Sauk Centre MN (Sinclair's birthplace)

It is the quintessential 20th century American novel about man's relationship to money, status, and coming to grips with life meaning in middle age. Lewis is an unappreciated genius at capturing the zeitgeist of his time, the period before the economic collapse of the 1930's. I saw "The Big Short" last night, and was reminded that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The quest for striving, success, and fear of failure are the same nearly 100 years later.

Marjorie

The Pufferbelly

kent ohio

Once a bustling railway station, now a restaurant, located beside the two levels of tracks used today only by freight trains that never stop at THIS EXQUISITE ICONIC BUILDING of America's GILDED ERA. My mother, age four in 1918, told me about her excitement at taking the train to visit her paternal Grandmother, who had requested to see 'baby Edna' be for she died.

louanne lasdon