The Twentieth Century

A stately, newsreel-driven history lesson that feels like a mid-century classroom film: informative, earnest, and occasionally stirring.

Genres

News, Documentary

Starring

Walter Cronkite, Judy Garland, Lena Horne

Overview

The Twentieth Century is a long-running CBS documentary television series that aired from 1957 to 1966, sponsored throughout its run by the Prudential Insurance Company and narrated by Walter Cronkite. Drawing on the resources of CBS News, the series produced both historical compilation documentaries and originally photographed contemporary reports, presenting major political, cultural, scientific, and social developments that shaped the modern world. Episodes combined newsreel footage, eyewitness testimony, and on-location reporting, covering subjects ranging from global conflicts and political change to arts, science, and international social transformation. Popular with audiences and critically respected, the series functioned as a formative model for later American television documentary programming and helped establish the compilation-documentary format as a central mode of broadcast nonfiction.

How it feels

Earnest, warm and tense. Measured and needs your attention.

About

Politics, war, power, identity

Content

Mild violence. No gore, sexual content or swearing.

Note

Written by AI, so it can be wrong. Full breakdown

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