1

Long Island iced tea

Image: yeoul Shin

There are two theories about the origin of this cocktail, both rooted in Long Island , though not the sameLong Island!

One story claims it was born during the Prohibition era in a community named Long Island in Kingsport, Tennessee . Another, more recent, credits Robert "Rosebud" Butt with inventing the recipe in a 1972 contest held on Long Island, New York .

A daring choice for some, the iconic Long Island Iced Tea has a recipe with a long list of ingredients . To prepare it, you'll need tequila, light rum, vodka, triple sec, gin, and a splash of cola. Only the bravest dare to try it!

2

Martini

Image: Daniel Lloyd Blunk-Fernández

If you are one of those who loves a drink that's both strong and stylish , then the classic Martini is probably among your favorites. It is the choice of the sophisticated James Bond, who famously prefers his Martini "shaken, not stirred."

Traditionally made with gin and vermouth , and garnished with an olive or a lemon twist, the Martini has several variants, including the vodka Martini, which -as its name suggests- swaps gin for vodka.

While the origin of this classic is not entirely clear, most sources argue it comes from a drink called the Martinez , which had the same basic ingredients and was already being served in the mid-19th century at the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco, California.

3

Old Fashioned

Image: Nuff

Let's step back in time with the classic Old Fashioned ! This drink traces its roots back to the early 19th century right here in the United States.

Initially called "the whiskey cocktail," it was prepared much like it is today: mixing sugar with bitters and water, then adding whiskey or brandy. However, as the 19th century progressed, new ingredients like fruit juices, soda, or other liquors became part of many drinks. To stick to the original recipe and avoid these modern twists, people began ordering it as an "Old Fashioned."

The invention of this liquid delicacy is sometimes linked to The Pendennis, a gentlemen's club that opened in 1881 in Louisville, Kentucky . However, mentions of this delicious drink across the country long predate the club.

4

Mint julep

Image: Abby Boggier

Originally from the south of the United States and very popular, especially in Kentucky , there are mentions of this fresh cocktail as early as the 1770s!

It truly stood the test of time, and we understand why. With a base of bourbon , a hint of sugar, water, the classic crushed ice, and the essential fresh mint , it is a mix that's hard to resist.

Served traditionally in silver or pewter cups , this classic American drink is perfect for summer. However, the touch of bourbon can also be good for a cool winter day.

5

Manhattan

Image: OurWhisky Foundation

Remember the original Old Fashioned recipe? Well, let's spice it up. Take the whiskey cocktail and add a splash of sweet vermouth . That's it! Now you have a chic drink: the popular Manhattan .

The Manhattan cocktail has a fascinating origin myth , situated -of course- in NYC . Legend has it that this recipe was created in the 1870s , at the Manhattan Club for a banquet hosted by Winston Churchill's mother! However, historical records show that Lady Randolph Churchill was actually in Paris and pregnant with Winston at the time.

According to more reliable sources, the Manhattan cocktail was actually invented in the 1860s by a bartender named Black , who ran a bar near Houston Street in Manhattan.

6

Sazerac

Image: Bon Vivant

The classic Sazerac cocktail embodies the spirit of The Big Easy , where it was born in the mid-19th century.

The Sazerac we savor today is named after the Sazerac de Forge et Fils brand of Cognac brandy, from which this cocktail was first created. To make a Sazerac, absinthe, bitters, and sugar were combined with the brandy. Over time, rye whiskey replaced brandy in the modern recipe.

What sets the Sazerac apart, besides its Frenchy name, is its distinctive serving style . The ritual begins by rimming an old-fashioned glass with absinthe. Next, the drink is mixed with ice and strained into the prepared glass. Finally, a classic touch: a twist of lemon.

7

Mai Tai

Image: wu yi

While it might sound like the name of an ancient martial art, the Mai Tai is actually a delightful cocktail born in the United States of America.

More modern and with a tropical touch, the Mai Tai is a vibrant blend of rum , Curaçao liqueur, orgeat syrup, and lime juice. The year was 1944 when this balanced recipe was created by Victor J. Bergeron at his Trader Vic's restaurant in Oakland, California .

Apparently, the Mai Tai's name comes from the Thai expression "maitaʻi," which translates as "good," "excellent," or even "the best." So, if you haven't tried it yet, consider this your signal!

8

Tequila Sunrise

Image: Jamin Eyes

Named for its unmixed colors that mirror the beautiful moment when the sun rises, the Tequila Sunrise carries an intense blend: tequila, orange juice, and grenadine syrup .

The original recipe was a bit different. Between the 1930s and '40s , bartender Gene Sulit stirred up tequila with crème de cassis, lime juice, and soda water at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix. Some three decades later in Sausalito, California , Bobby Lozoff and Billy Rice made a change to the original recipe. They traded out the original last three ingredients for orange juice and grenadine, creating the present version.

In case you're wondering, yes, The Eagles' song was inspired by this drink!

9

The Ramos Gin Fizz

Image: The Humble Co.

And New Orleans is here again! With its festive spirit, this city also gave birth to another American cocktail: The Ramos Gin Fizz . This delightful recipe was born in 1888 , courtesy of Henry Charles "Carl" Ramos, owner of the Imperial Cabinet Saloon .

Originally called the " New Orleans Fizz ," it was an instant hit. But if you want to try making it at home, be prepared for a trip to the grocery store, as the recipe is a bit long . The mix for a perfect Ramos Gin Fizz includes gin, lemon juice, lime juice, egg whites, sugar, heavy cream, orange flower water, and soda water.

10

Cosmopolitan

Image: Laure Noverraz

Who hasn't heard of the iconic " Cosmo "? This delightful, sweet drink is a blend of vodka , Cointreau (a type of triple sec), cranberry juice, and a splash of sweetened lime juice. It is served in a chic martini glass and often garnished with a lemon twist.

The origin of this drink is a subject of debate, with various reports suggesting its creation in different places across the country . Some stories trace it back to the 1970s in Provincetown, Massachusetts ; San Francisco, California ; or Minneapolis, Minnesota . Others claim it was born a bit later, in the mid-1980s , in the sunny state of Florida . The current recipe, however, has traces in the bustling city of New York.

Regardless of its birth city, this drink originated in our country and is part of American culture. Let's enjoy it!

1

Compression packing cubes

These zippered fabric cubes let you sort your clothes by category—shirts in one, pants in another, underwear in a third—and then compress them down by squeezing out excess air. They keep everything tidy and surprisingly compact . Most come in sets of different sizes, so you can mix and match depending on what you're packing.

Imagine you're flying to visit family for a long weekend but want to avoid checking a bag. Without packing cubes, that's a puzzle. With them, you'd be amazed what fits into a carry-on.

2

Portable luggage scale

This little handheld device hooks onto your bag's handle and gives you an instant weight reading. It costs about $10and weighs almost nothing itself. Use it the night before your flight, and you'll never get blindsided by an excess baggage fee of $50 (or more) again.

Picture this: you've spent a week in Florida and picked up a few things for the house. You think your bag is fine. The airline disagrees—to the tune of $75. A luggage scale would have caught that before you ever left the hotel room, giving you time to rearrange or ship something home instead.

3

Doorstop alarm

This wedge-shaped gadget slides under your hotel room door and sounds a piercing alarm if someone tries to push it open. It's a simple, inexpensive way to add a layer of security that the hotel deadbolt alone doesn't always provide. It fits in the palm of your hand and weighs almost nothing.

If you're traveling solo or in an unfamiliar area, peace of mind matters . Prop one of these under your door at night, and you'll sleep a lot better, knowing that if anyone tries to come in uninvited, the whole hallway is going to know about it.

4

Foldable tote bag

A lightweight tote bag that folds into a tiny pouch is one of those things you'll reach for constantly once you have it . Use it as an overflow bag on the way home when your suitcase is full of souvenirs, or as a beach bag, a grocery bag, or a day-trip bag when you don't want to lug your whole luggage around.

Say you're on a cruise with a port stop in a charming little town. You want to browse the market and pick up some local olive oil and pottery. You didn't plan for that. But if you've got a foldable tote tucked in your bag, you won’t have to scramble for a bag at the gift shop.

5

Travel clothesline

This is a simple elastic or bungee-style cord that stretches between two points—a towel bar, a bedpost, a shower curtain rod—so you can hang hand-washed clothes to dry overnight. No suction cups, no hardware, nothing complicated.

If you're on a two-week trip and trying to pack light, being able to wash a few things in the sink and hang them up makes a real difference . Woke up in Rome and realized you need your shirt for the following day? Wash it, and it will be dry by morning.

6

Universal travel adapter

Different countries use different outlet shapes and voltages. A universal adapter handles all of it— Europe, Asia, South America, the UK—in one compact device . Most modern ones also have built-in USB ports, so you can charge your phone directly without needing a separate plug.

You've landed in London, and your phone is at 8%. Your American charger is useless in a British outlet. One universal adapter, and that problem will never exist again. It's a one-time, ten-dollar fix for something that can otherwise ruin a morning.

7

RFID-blocking pouch

Modern credit cards and passports have chips in them that can, in theory, be scanned wirelessly by someone nearby. An RFID-blocking pouch or wallet liner prevents that from happening by creating a simple signal-blocking barrier around your cards .

Crowded airports, busy subway stations, tourist hotspots; these are exactly the environments where electronic pickpocketing is a concern. Slipping your passport and cards into an RFID pouch takes two seconds and gives you one less thing to worry about in a busy place.

8

Portable hard drive

A compact external hard drive is no bigger than a deck of cards and lets you back up your photos and documents while you're still on the road. You don't need Wi-Fi, you don't need cloud storage, and you don't need to worry about your phone running out of space at the worst possible moment.

Imagine you've spent eight days photographing the national parks out West. You have thousands of pictures and irreplaceable memories, but your phone gets lost or stolen on day nine. Without a backup, those photos are simply gone. With a portable hard drive, you plug in each night, transfer the day's shots, and travel with the peace of mind that your memories exist in more than one place .

9

Compact extension cord with USB ports

Hotel rooms have a frustrating habit of putting their one or two outlets in the least convenient spots: behind the bed, across the room from the desk, nowhere near where you actually sit. A compact extension cord with built-in USB ports solves this instantly. You plug it into whatever outlet exists, and suddenly you've got four or five charging options right where you need them .

Picture arriving at your room after a long travel day with a dead phone, a tablet that needs charging, and a CPAP machine to plug in before bed. One outlet, three needs. A compact extension cord turns that into a non-issue in about ten seconds, and it takes up barely any space in your bag.

10

Collapsible water bottle

When it's empty, a collapsible silicone water bottle folds flat, thin enough to slip into a jacket pocket . When you need it, it expands and holds a full 20 ounces or more. It's TSA-friendly when empty, and you can fill it right after security.

Staying hydrated on a long travel day matters more than most people realize, especially if you're dealing with heat, walking a lot, or spending hours in dry airplane air.

1

Abraham Lincoln

Political life usually comes with a few disappointing election nights. Long before he was memorialized on Mount Rushmore, Abraham Lincoln spent decades collecting setbacks.

He went into business with a partner in Illinois in 1833 by purchasing a general store. Known as the Berry and Lincoln store, the enterprise failed due to poor sales, leaving him in debt for years. He ran for the state legislature and lost. He served in the Illinois militia during the Black Hawk War in 1832 and was demoted from captain to private. Over the following years, he ran for office again and again, including two unsuccessful bids for the U.S. Senate, and lost most of them. Regardless of that, he kept showing up, and in 1860, he won the presidency and went on to guide the country through the Civil War and end slavery. Friends who knew him in his Illinois years later said what stood out most wasn’t his brilliance, but how he never let defeat be the last word.

2

Elvis Presley

Picture a then-unknown Elvis Presley in 1954, long before the jumpsuits, sold-out arenas, and screaming fans. He was only 19 and still trying to figure out where his unusual blend of country, blues, and rhythm and blues belonged.

Elvis had just released his first single and was invited to perform at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, a stage that represented the pinnacle of country music. He sang a rockabilly-tinged version of "Blue Moon of Kentucky," and the traditional Opry crowd, expecting straight bluegrass, gave him little more than polite applause. According to Opry lore, talent director Jim Denny told him afterward that he wasn’t going to make it as a singer and should go back to driving a truck. Elvis was so shaken that he reportedly cried the whole drive home to Memphis. He never performed at the Opry again. But two years later, "Heartbreak Hotel" hit number one, and Elvis Presley became one of the best-selling solo music artists in history, forever known as the King of Rock and Roll.

3

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison struggled in the classroom. By the age of 12, he was partially deaf and easily distracted , and after only three months, in 1854, Nancy Edison, his mother, took charge of his education at home after a teacher sent him home with a note calling him "too difficult to teach." Much of his learning came at home through reading, experimenting, and satisfying his endless curiosity. As a young man, he also had trouble finding the right fit in the working world. Popular accounts say he was fired from two jobs because employers considered him unproductive. None of that matched what came next: Edison became an extraordinarily prolific inventor and eventually held 1,093 U.S. patents. His work included the phonograph, improvements to electric lighting, and motion-picture technology.

4

Lucille Ball

If you watched I Love Lucy , you know Lucille Ball was capable of turning a simple household mishap into complete comic chaos. But as a teenager, Ball was not yet the performer who commanded a room.

As a young woman, Lucille Ball enrolled at the Johnny Murray Anderson School for the Dramatic Arts in New York in 1926, at the age of 15, hoping to become an actress. Her instructors weren’t exactly encouraging. She was reportedly considered too shy and too timid for the stage and was advised to consider a different line of work entirely. She spent years afterward modeling and taking small, unremarkable film roles, far from stardom. Ball eventually found her footing not in dramatic film but in comedy and television, where her fearless physical humor became her signature. In 1951, she co-created and starred in I Love Lucy with then-husband Desi Arnaz, and it became one of the most successful sitcoms in television history.

5

Henry Ford

Buying a new car today can make it easy to forget how experimental the automobile business once was. Around the turn of the 20th century, companies started and collapsed, and Henry Ford was one of those business owners who had to reinvent himself more than once.

Ford’s first venture, the Detroit Automobile Company, launched in 1899 and folded within two years , undone by vehicles that were too expensive and too slow to build. His backers pushed him out. He tried again with the Henry Ford Company, but it ended the same way, with investors losing patience and Ford losing control of the business bearing his own name. By 1902, he had two failed automakers behind him and no company at all. For the third time, in 1903, Ford started again. This time, he focused on building one dependable, affordable car and figuring out how to produce it faster than anyone thought possible. That car was the Model T, and the assembly line method he built around it didn’t just save Ford Motor Company; it changed how the entire world manufactures goods.

6

Martin Luther King Jr.

It’s weird to think that one of history’s greatest orators struggled in a classroom. But that’s exactly where Martin Luther King Jr.’s path began.

As a first-year student at Crozer Theological Seminary in the late 1940s, King took a course in public speaking and received a grade of C , a modest mark for a young man who hadn’t yet found his voice. He kept working at it throughout seminary, refining the cadence and clarity that would later define his preaching. Within a decade, that same voice was leading the Montgomery bus boycott and delivering the "I Have a Dream" speech to hundreds of thousands of people at the March on Washington in 1963, becoming one of the most recognized voices of the 20th century.

7

Oprah Winfrey

Considering how controlled news anchors’ expressions used to be, Oprah Winfrey’s early career sounds almost like a casting mistake.

In 1976, a 22-year-old Winfrey moved to Baltimore to co-anchor the evening news at WJZ-TV. The fit was rocky from the start. Her delivery was warmer and more emotional than the traditional hard-news style the format called for, and station management eventually pulled her off the anchor desk, with one producer reportedly calling her unfit for television news. It could’ve ended her career in broadcasting entirely. Instead, WJZ moved her to a struggling daytime talk show called People Are Talking . There, freed from reading headlines in a flat, detached tone, Oprah’s natural warmth turned into her greatest asset. The local talk show became the blueprint for The Oprah Winfrey Show , which ran for 25 years and made her one of the most influential media figures in American history.

8

Colonel Harland Sanders

Imagine reaching 65 and deciding that instead of settling into retirement, it’s time to travel around the country trying to convince restaurant owners to serve a recipe. Harland Sanders made exactly that decision.

By his mid-sixties, Sanders had lived through a string of failed jobs and businesses , and the small Kentucky restaurant where he’d perfected his fried chicken recipe closed after a new highway diverted its traffic away. Broke and living on a modest Social Security check, he decided to take his recipe on the road, driving from restaurant to restaurant and offering to share it in exchange for a small cut of sales. As the legend goes, he heard "no" more than a thousand times before a restaurant in Utah finally said yes in 1952. That handshake deal became the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Within a decade, hundreds of KFC restaurants dotted the country, and the white-suited Colonel Sanders (who died in 1980 at age 90) became one of the most recognizable faces in American food.

9

Stephen King

You’ve probably read Carrie , or watched It , but before he became a household name in modern terror, Stephen King was a young writer trying to get his work published.

In the early 1970s, King was teaching high school in his home state of Maine and writing in his spare time, often in a trailer with his wife and young kids nearby. He wrote a novel about a bullied teenage girl with telekinetic powers, but after around 30 rejection letters from publishers, he gave up on it and threw the manuscript in the trash . His wife, Tabitha, fished the pages back out and encouraged him to finish it, believing in the book even when he didn’t. That story became Carrie , published in 1974. It launched King’s career and eventually sold millions of copies, kicking off a body of work that would make him one of the most successful and prolific authors in American history.

10

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel)

You may think publishing more than 50 books was easy for Dr. Seuss. But back when he was known as Theodor Geisel, his work got rejected dozens of times.

In the 1930s, Geisel wrote and illustrated a whimsical children’s book called And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Publisher after publisher turned it down, reportedly around 27 of them, saying it was too different from anything else on the market. As the story goes, Geisel was walking down a New York street, manuscript in hand and ready to give up, when he ran into an old college acquaintance who happened to work at a publishing house and offered to take a look. That chance meeting led to the book’s publication in 1937. It launched Dr. Seuss’s career, which would go on to include classics like The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham , beloved by generations of kids and their grandparents alike.

11

Frederick Smith (FedEx)

Today, overnight shipping is so ordinary that a package arriving the next morning (if not on the same day) barely raises an eyebrow. In the 1960s, reliably moving urgent packages overnight across the country was a very different proposition.

In 1965, as an undergraduate at Yale, Smith wrote an economics term paper describing a delivery service that would route urgent packages through one central hub by plane rather than relying on passenger airlines. His professor wasn’t convinced the idea was practical and marked the paper with a C. Smith went on to serve in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, but the idea from that paper never left him. In 1971, he founded Federal Express, built exactly around the hub-and-spoke concept he’d once sketched out for a grade. FedEx now moves millions of packages a day across the globe, and Smith spent the rest of his life running the company he first imagined as a 21-year-old college student.