People's Century I

Video-based course
12 one-hour videos
14 lessons

Produced by WGBH and distributed by Dallas TeleLearning

People’s Century I: 1900-1999 course themes—global interrelatedness, identity and difference, the rise of the mass society, and technology versus nature—serve as a guide to understanding the material in each unit of the telecourse. Unit 1 introduces the format used in the video component of People’s Century, one that includes a variety of visual sources, such as newsreel footage, home movies, and interviews with ordinary people who participated in the events covered in each unit. From these sources, especially the interviews, we learn how individuals, families, and communities affected and were affected by the large-scale political, social, and economic developments of the twentieth century.

Lesson Titles/Descriptions

1900 - Age of Hope – introduces and explains the four themes of the course and surveys the political and social state of the world as the new century begins.
1916 - Killing Fields - deals with the causes of World War I, the nature of the conflict on the battlefields and home fronts, and the war’s impact on soldiers and civilians. We learn of the political, economic, social, and psychological consequences of the conflict, and finally, we consider the implications of the peace settlement.
1917 - Red Flag - looks at the causes, characteristics, achievements, and failures of the Russian Revolution of 1917. We also compare the Bolshevik Revolution with the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Mohandas Gandhi’s independence movement in India, and the Chinese Revolution led by Mao Zedong.
1919 - Lost Peace - having explored the causes and consequences of World War I in Unit 2 and the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution in Unit 3, we now turn to the hopes and desires for peace after 1919, to the efforts to ban war in the twenty-year period between 1919 and 1939, and to the ultimate failure of those efforts.
1926 - On The Line - explains how the moving assembly line and mass production of goods changed both the nature of work and the nature of the workplace. We also learn about the response of workers to these changes.
1927 - Great Escape (Video no longer available for this lesson) – focuses on the international movie industry as a form of popular entertainment and a medium of propaganda.
1929 - Breadline - examines the reasons for the collapse of the U.S. stock market on 1929, the relationship between the crash and the worldwide economic depression that followed, and the response of Great Britain, France, and the United States to this economic crisis. We then turn our attention to an overview of Latin America in the early twentieth century. The impact of the Great Depression on ordinary people throughout the world is also considered.
1930 - Sporting Fever (Video no longer available for this lessons) – explores impact of mass sports in boosting patriotism and nationalism.
1933 - Master Race - deals with the emergence of fascist ideology in Europe between 1919 and 1939, the reasons for the success of the ideology in Italy and Germany, and the events that led to the world’s descent into World War II. It pays particular attention to the Holocaust, Hitler’s attempt to create a European empire under German control, and the unique blend of nationalism, militarism, and racial theory with which Hitler taught Germans to believe they were the master race. It also examines the influence of European fascism on political movements in the rest of the world.
1939 - Total War - traces the course of World War II from its prelude in China in 1931 to its end in 1945. We also look at the war on the home front and at its impact on the civilian population.
1945 - Brave New World - examines the causes and stages of the Cold War, the challenges to the bipolar world of the superpowers, the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Communist governments in Eastern Europe, and at the emerging post-Cold War world system.
1947 - Freedom Now - explores the political, social, and economic characteristics of African and Asian societies and the process of nation building in these regions.
1948 - Boom Time - examines the reasons for the economic boom in the United States and Western Europe during the thirty years from 1945 to the mid-1970s and the impact of this economic boom on Western society.
1945 - Fall Out - looks at the impact of population growth over the past fifty years on such matters as the earth’s carrying capacity, food security, energy sources, and the greenhouse effect. We also look at the problem of nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction in the late twentieth-century world.