The Twentieth CenturyS4 · E1

Season 3S4 · E1

Seasons

S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S8 S9

The Twentieth Century

8.0 3

News Documentary

Seasons

Episodes

221

Status

Ended

Network: CBS

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.