The Great War and The Shaping of the 20th Century (BBC Series)

TV : Documentary : DVD quality : English





The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century BBC / PBS series


The seven-part PBS series, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, a co-production of KCET/Los Angeles and the BBC, in association with England's London-based Imperial War Museum, premiered on PBS November 10, 1996 to great critical acclaim. The series won two Emmy awards, the Alfred du Pont Journalism Award, the George Foster Peabody Award, the Producers Guild of American Vision Award, the International Documentary Association: Best Limited Series Award, and a Director's Guild Nomination. It was the first TV production ever to go beyond the military and political history of World War I to reveal its ongoing, social, cultural and personal impact.

The series featured a large cast of noted actors, including Leslie Caron, Ralph Fiennes, Louis Gossett Jr., Jeremy Irons, Yaphet Kotto, Martin Landau, Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Natasha Richardson, Martin Sheen, Jean Stapleton, Michael York, with Salome Jens as narrator. A companion book, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, was written by Blaine Baggett and Jay Winter, published by Penguin Studio Books.

The World War of 1914-18 - The Great War, as contemporaries called it -- was the first man-made catastrophe of the 20th century. Historians can easily identify the literal "smoking gun" that set the War in motion: a revolver used by a Serbian nationalist to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand (heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne) in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.

But scholars are still debating the underlying causes. Was it the desire for greater empire, wealth and territory? A massive arms race? The series of treaties which ensured that once one power went to war, all of Europe would quickly follow? Was it social turmoil and changing artistic sensibilities brought about by the Industrial Revolution? Or was it simply a miscalculation by rulers and generals in power? The answer provided in "The Great War and The Shaping of the 20th Century" is that all of these volatile elements combined to set off a gigantic explosion we now know as World War


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