Levi Strauss: The Invention of American Workwear

In the 1850s, San Francisco was a city of mud, ambition, and broken dreams. While hundreds of thousands of men swung pickaxes in search of gold, one immigrant—who never dug a single hole—built a fortune on what those men wore on top of the soil.In this episode of The Threads of History, Theodore Alexander uncovers the gritty, practical origins of the blue jean. We move past the myths of the American West to explore the actual engineering of denim: why indigo fades but doesn't decay, how a tailor’s simple copper rivet changed the world, and why a garment designed for miners became the most democratic article of clothing on Earth.From the "diagonal ribbing" of 19th-century twill to the rebellious silver screens of the 1950s, we pull on the thread of the world’s most resilient fabric to see what it reveals about our history—and ourselves.