About this season
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.
Episodes (20)
1. Smear, the Game of Dirty Politics
Aired 25 October 1964 • 30 min
2. Who Killed Anne Frank?
Aired 13 December 1964 • 30 min
3. Duke Ellington Swings Through Japan
Aired 20 December 1964 • 30 min
4. Anthony Eden
Aired 27 December 1964 • 30 min
5. TAC: The Lightning Punch
Aired 3 January 1965 • 30 min
6. Target: North Africa
Aired 10 January 1965 • 30 min
7. Korea, the Line
Aired 17 January 1965 • 30 min
8. The Strange Case of Rudolf Hess
Aired 24 January 1965 • 30 min
9. The Nisei: The Pride and the Shame
Aired 31 January 1965 • 30 min
10. The Sailing Oysterman
Aired 7 February 1965 • 30 min
11. Heartbreak Country, Italy's South
Aired 14 February 1965 • 30 min
12. Siege of Leningrad
Aired 21 February 1965 • 30 min
13. Pop Buell, Hoosier at the Front
Aired 28 February 1965 • 30 min
14. The Navajos and Annie Wauneka
Aired 7 March 1965 • 30 min
15. Taming of the Mekong
Aired 14 March 1965 • 30 min
16. The Warsaw Uprising
Aired 21 March 1965 • 30 min
17. Man with a Violin: Isaac Stern
Aired 4 April 1965 • 30 min
18. The Dissenter, Norman Thomas
Aired 11 April 1965 • 30 min
19. The Supersonic Jet Race
Aired 18 April 1965 • 30 min
20. The Farmer, Feast or Famine
Aired 25 April 1965 • 30 min