The United States has created many cultural institutions which have spread around the world.

People all over the earth have enjoyed and benefited from rock and roll, Hollywood films, and the internet.

However, we've also created some things that have spread to other countries, which, to be totally honest, are probably not our best look.

Learn more about Black Friday, the surprising history of the term, and how it manifests itself around the world today, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. The term Black Friday as it's used today refers to the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States.

It's given special attention because it's considered to be the beginning of the Christmas

shopping season. American Thanksgiving falls approximately one month before Christmas

and because it always falls on a Thursday

many people have the following Friday off from work. That means that there are lots of

people who are able to go shopping. The Christmas shopping season has traditionally

been the biggest sales period of the year and the term

black comes from the accounting tradition of using black ink to represent positive values and

red ink to represent negative values. So Black Friday is the day or or at least begins the season, where retail stores become profitable or go into the black.

Or at least that's the modern use of the word.

The phrase Black Friday, however however goes back much earlier.

While it didn't initially refer to retail shopping, it did have an economic association.

The word Black in a business sense has always had a mixed meaning.

In an accounting sense, being in the

black was good. However, market crashes were often also referred to as Black, such as Black Tuesday

when the stock market crashed in 1929. The first Black Friday occurred in 1869.

During the Ulysses S Grant Administration, the government began selling its gold reserves to pay off the debt from the Civil War.

Three financiers, J. Gould, James Fisk, and Abel Corbin tried to corner the market in gold.

They formed a group called the gold ring to try and buy up as much gold as possible.

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