Washington Post: “A decade-by-decade look at the books, music, art and ideas that shaped society. Critics, reporters and editors who cover arts and culture spent months creating, revising and arguing over this list, as well as consulting historians, curators and other experts. Are we a young country or an old one? By the standards of ancient Egypt, or China, we have been on the map for the smallest blip of time. But what an astonishing interval that has been. Since the founders put their names to the Declaration of Independence, there have been revolutions in science, technology, medicine, art and literature. We have seen the camera transform memory and politics, we have doubled our average lifespan, and we have been to the moon. There’s no summing up the United States, perhaps because we still don’t know who we are and what we want to be when we grow up. In the early decades of the American experiment, we turned to Europe for a sense of identity, striving to compete with the countries and cultures from which we had decisively separated ourselves. We borrowed the tune of our national anthem from a ditty popular in English clubs and pubs, and it would take us almost a century before we had painters and sculptors on par with those in Europe. It would take even longer before we discovered our own musical voice, in ragtime, jazz and the blues. In hindsight, we didn’t will ourselves into a coherent nation but kept uncovering new things, discovering new voices, always expanding, unearthing, unbinding. No decade can be summed up any more than a country can be summed up, but if we wrote an autobiography not of words but of works — books, music and art, ideas, dress and culture — these 25 would be among the most momentous. These are not necessarily our proudest moments, but they are defining acts of culture. It is an imperfect list, and incomplete, but then that is America, imperfect and unfinished. So we hope. — Philip Kennicott