Source Abbreviations

Read and Learn!
Select the Chapters at Left for 
Fascinating Trends of the Twentieth Century

"THE FIRST MEASURED CENTURY: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900–2000" by Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks and Ben J. Wattenberg is a book about social change in the United States during the twentieth century. It relies on statistical trends to tell that awesome story. 

During the twentieth century, Americans became the most energetic measurers of social life that ever lived. They measured everything that had been counted before, such as population and the size of the government’s territory and army. And they pioneered the measurement of facets of American life that had never been systematically counted before, such as crime, love, food, fun, religion, and work.

The panorama of the American twentieth century presented in this volume unfolds as a series of key trends, each explained in a one-page essay illustrated by one or more colored charts on the facing page. 

The First Measured Century was designed as a tool for teachers and students, journalists and bureaucrats, managers and consultants, social scientists and housewives, and everyone else who wants a better understanding of American society.

A special feature of this book is the inclusion of the first published results from “Middletown IV.” In 1929, Robert and Helen Lynd published the groundbreaking Middletown: A Study in Cultural Change based on their research during the 1920s in Muncie, Indiana. 

In 1978, Theodore Caplow led a team of social scientists that replicated and extended the Lynds’ original work. 

In 1999, The First Measured Century Project commissioned partial replications of the Middletown study to provide long-term data on certain topics not covered by official statistics. The research team, directed again by Theodore Caplow, used the same survey instruments in the same place with the same wording as the Lynds used seventy-five years earlier. For many of the topics in these surveys, these data are the longest time series existing in the world. More extensive findings from Middletown IV will be published in journal articles.

PBS Program | Trends of the Century | Viewer's Voices | Interactivity | Teacher's Guide