I will describe a topologists' perspective on the history of the study of an object that Mumford called "the tautological ring" and its generalizations.

The tautological ring was originally defined as a subring of the cohomology of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces, but can also be studied as a ring of characteristic classes of topological bundles. This point of view led to a proof of Mumford's conjecture, stating that the tautological ring coincides with the entire cohomology of the moduli space in a "stable range", as well as to some generalizations of this result. If time permits, I will explain what we know about the tautological ring outside the stable range.