Two days from now, many New Yorkers and perhaps a greater number of tourists will celebrate the 236th anniversary of These United States by watching a group of Americans stuff as many hotdogs down their gullets as they can. I refer, obviously, to the famous hotdog eating contest Nathan’s Famous hosts each year.
The hotdog seems to me 
a most American food. You can eat it with one hand. It’s inexpensive on the Wallet of Now but maybe not so much on the Self of Tomorrow. Its immigrant origins are hotly debated by those jockeying for brand superiority in a never ending race in which only one can be the victor.
So I poked around. Here’s what I found:
Sausages. They’re ground up meat and innards and stuff packed into emptied lengths of intestine or, in our modern era, more likely casings made of plant cellulose or collagen rendered from hides of assorted beasts. Frankfurt made notable pork sausages and served them on buns as early as the 13th century. Two centuries later, with the coronation of Holy Roman (German!) Emperor Maximilian II, they became the must-have food at coronation revelries. So our hotdog’s connection to celebrations of national power and pride run deep.
In the late 18th or early 19th century, a butcher from Germanic Bavaria named Johann Lahner brought the sausage sandwich idea to Vienna (Wien!) and added beef to the pork stuffing. And then, around 1870, a German immigrant named Charles Feltman began selling sausages on rolls at Coney Island.
Forty-six years later, a Polish Jew immigrant employee of Charles named Nathan Handwerker was convinced by celebrity song-&-dance men Eddie Cantor (ne, Edward Israel Iskowitz) and Jimmy Durante to bust out on his own. He sold his dogs for five cents, half the cost of his old boss’ dogs. Now, nobody knows about Charles Feltman and Nathan’s Famous is at every rest stop along the Jersey Turnpike. In between then and now, American innovation in industry and homogeneity created the uniformly pink-gray dog we know today.
Incidentally, though different people claim to have originated the name “hotdog,” most of those claims center around the seller’s frustration that he gave white gloves to customers so that wouldn’t burn their hands, only to have to replace the gloves with a bun when folks wouldn’t stop nicking them. The first in-print use of “hotdog” was in 1892 in the Patterson Daily News out of Jersey and referenced a sausage seller known as Hot Dog Morris but born Thomas Francis Xavier Morris. The writer was reporting on a young laborer—let’s call him a scamp—and began “Somehow or other a frankfurter and a roll seem to go right to the spot where the void is felt the most.”