The First Measured Century

The First Measured Century: The Other Way of Looking at American History is a three-hour PBS documentary film hosted by Ben J. Wattenberg. The film was produced for PBS by BJW, Inc. and New River Media, Inc. and was first broadcast in December 2000. The film traces American history during the 20th century through a sequence of vignettes of pioneering social scientists who used numerical tools to examine America. The film mixes archival footage, archival still photography and artwork, interviews with contemporary experts, graphical animations of statistical trends, and on-camera narrative appearances by the host. Information from Middletown IV, a 1999 replication of Middletown studies of Muncie, Indiana first begun by Robert and Helen Lynd in 1924, is included in the film and companion volume.

The First Measured Century includes on-camera interviews with forty experts: Howard M. Bahr, Lee D. Baker, Alan Brinkley, Theodore Caplow, William Chafe, John Milton Cooper, William Cronon, Elliot Currie, Christopher DeMuth, Betty Friedan, Milton Friedman, Francis Fukuyama, Alec Gallup, George Gallup, Jr., Paul Gebhard, Bruce Geelhoed, James Gregory, Kenneth T. Jackson, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Christopher Jencks, James H. Jones, Alfred E. Kahn, David M. Kennedy, Alice Kessler-Harris, Nancy Koehn, Alan Kraut, Seymour Martin Lipset, Glenn Loury, Staughton Lynd, David Moore, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Robyn Muncy, William O'Neill, Ken Prewitt, Rita Simon, Daphne Spain, Paul Volcker, James Q. Wilson, William Julius Wilson, Daniel Yankelovich.

The documentary film is accompanied by a reference book of the same title but different subtitle: The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900-2000. Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks, and Ben J. Wattenberg are the authors. The AEI Press (in-house publisher for the American Enterprise Institute) published the book. Unusually for a companion book to a documentary film, the book does not follow the synopsis of the film and does not include much of the narrative material. Instead, fifteen chapters provide a dense array of time series data and interpretive essays about American society in the 20th century.

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