The Century

"Lindbergh's Journey": Charles Lindbergh flies solo across the Atlantic / "First Step": Neil Armstrong steps on the moon; space exploration.

"Evil Rising": Hitler rises to power / "The Race": the race to build the atomic bomb.

"The Great War": World War I / "The Fall": the Vietnam War.

"Innocence in Rebellion": Elvis Presley helps change American culture / "Searching for the Promised Land": Martin Luther King Jr. marches for civil rights.

"Nothing to Fear": Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1933 inauguration; banks fail; internment camps; farm foreclosures / "Picture This": the birth of Hollywood; film industry and the Cold War.

"Live from Tehran": Iran hostage crisis / "Facing the New Millennium": 20th-century thinkers discuss the new millennium.

“Before Elvis there was nothing,” or so said John Lennon. When a 19-year-old truck driver walked into Sun Studios on Union Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee, on July 5, 1954, no one knew how quickly everything would change. Elvis Presley harnessed the forces of sex, money, youth, music, technology and race, transforming our culture, the country and much of the world.

Martin Luther King did not want to go to Memphis when first asked in 1968 — the strike by the sanitation workers seemed like a distraction. But old friends insisted and so he went, discovering the cause of the garbage men was as basic as civil rights itself. This is the dramatic and emotional but little-known story of the final days of one of the greatest Americans of the century, and the struggle that led to his death.

On Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration day in March of 1933, federal troops were on alert to prevent the violence many anticipated. FDR’s calm reassurances saved that day, but most of his efforts over the following four years failed miserably. The real story of those desperate years paints a picture of America rarely seen or told — America on the edge of chaos.

The movies reached the height of their propaganda power just as a new epic struggle began between the East and West. The resulting battle to control the content of the century’s most influential art form is a high-pitched drama which puts both the anxieties of the Cold War and the extraordinary influence of Hollywood into fresh perspective

The story of the Iran hostage crisis is a dramatic saga about a far-away revolution that quickly became as close as the television set when the American Embassy in Tehran was attacked and Americans were taken hostage. For the first time, Americans would see, live in their living rooms, the effects their actions and policies had on the global village.

The great thinkers of our day put the 20th century into perspective and offer their wisdom, philosophy and vision for the future.