Uncle Sam was not designed by a committee in Washington. This episode pieces together the strange, organic history of America’s best-known symbol, from earlier personifications like Columbia and Brother Jonathan to an 1810 diary entry by a seasick Navy midshipman named Isaac Mayo.

We examine the popular story of Samuel Wilson, the Troy, New York meatpacker whose beef barrels stamped US supposedly inspired the name, and why the timeline does not quite fit. Then we follow Uncle Sam’s rivalry with Brother Jonathan, how the Civil War made the federal government central to American life, and how illustrator James Montgomery Flagg used his own aged-up reflection and a pose borrowed from Britain’s Lord Kitchener poster to create the iconic image.

• Columbia, Brother Jonathan, and the search for an American national persona
• The 1810 evidence of Uncle Sam as military slang before the War of 1812
• The Samuel Wilson meatpacker legend and its first appearance in print in 1842
• How Uncle Sam took Brother Jonathan’s star-spangled wardrobe and outlasted him after the Civil War
• James Montgomery Flagg’s 1916 illustration, four million recruitment posters, and Uncle Sam Day