Perhaps the single most important performer of the 20th century, Elvis Presley popularized rock & roll music on an international level and in the process became known simply as "The King."

This program is different from those preceding it in one major respect — this is history that your grandparents, your parents, and you have lived through. Whether it was the breadlines and Great Depression of the 1930s, FDR and WWII in the 1940s or the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton in the 1990s someone you know has lived through it.

Bill Clinton's popularity among younger voters propelled him to the Presidency in 1992. He went on to join Andrew Johnson as only the second president in U.S. history to be impeached by the House of Representatives.

What does it mean to live through history? To be part of history? To be part of American history? Tough questions all. While pondering those, remember too, that history is not just great events or dates. It's the invention of TV and its impact; it's the birth of rock-'n'-roll; it's hippies and Flower Power in the 1960s.

As always, history is about wars (WWII, Korea, Indochina, and Cold) about Power (nuclear, black, and flower) about Rights (civil, women's, gay, and reproductive).

Switched on in 1946 and occupying a 1500 square foot room at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC -- or the "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer" -- laid the foundations for the much more compact machine that you are currently using.

The history of our time is that of the A-bomb and Malcolm X; it's Vietnam and safe-sex; it's the red scare and the Soviet bear; it's women's rights and computer bytes; its JFK, MLK, and LBJ; it's the Holocaust and unthinkable loss; it's the family Bush and the Nike swoosh; it's Desert Storming and global warming.

Soon, readers of history, it will be up to you to be makers of history, and in the words of Robert Penn Warren, "go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time."

1. The Great Depression
   1. The Market Crashes
   2. Sinking Deeper and Deeper: 1929-33
   3. The Bonus March
   4. Hoover's Last Stand
   5. Social and Cultural Effects of the Depression
2. The New Deal
   1. A Bank Holiday
   2. Putting People Back to Work
   3. The Farming Problem
   4. Social Security
   5. FDR's Alphabet Soup
   6. Roosevelt's Critics
   7. An Evaluation of the New Deal
3. The Road to Pearl Harbor
   1. 1930s Isolationism
   2. Reactions to a Troubled World
   3. War Breaks Out
   4. The Arsenal of Democracy
   5. Pearl Harbor
4. America in the Second World War
   1. Wartime Strategy
   2. The American Homefront
   3. D-Day and the German Surrender
   4. War in the Pacific
   5. Japanese-American Internment
   6. The Manhattan Project
   7. The Decision to Drop the Bomb
5. Postwar Challenges
   1. The Cold War Erupts
   2. The United Nations
   3. Containment and the Marshall Plan
   4. The Berlin Airlift and NATO
   5. The Korean War
   6. Domestic Challenges
6. The 1950s: Happy Days
   1. McCarthyism
   2. Suburban Growth
   3. Land of Television
   4. America Rocks and Rolls
   5. The Cold War Continues
   6. Voices against Conformity
7. A New Civil Rights Movement
   1. Separate No Longer?
   2. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
   3. Showdown in Little Rock
   4. The Sit-In Movement
   5. Gains and Pains
   6. Martin Luther King Jr.
   7. The Long, Hot Summers
   8. Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam
   9. Black Power
8. The Vietnam War
   1. Early Involvement
   2. Years of Escalation: 1965-68
   3. The Tet Offensive
   4. The Antiwar Movement
   5. Years of Withdrawal
9. Politics from Camelot to Watergate
   1. The Election of 1960
   2. Kennedy's New Frontier
   3. Kennedy's Global Challenges
   4. Kennedy Assassination
   5. Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society"
   6. 1968: Year of Unraveling
   7. Triangular Diplomacy: U.S., USSR, and China
10. Shaping a New America
    1. Modern Feminism
    2. The Fight for Reproductive Rights
    3. The Equal Rights Amendment
    4. Roe v. Wade and Its Impact
    5. Environmental Reform
    6. Others Demand Equality
    7. Student Activism
    8. Flower Power
11. A Time of Malaise
    1. Undoing a President
    2. The Sickened Economy
    3. Foreign Woes
    4. Finding Oneself
    5. The New Right
12. The Reagan Years
    1. "Morning in America"
    2. Reaganomics
    3. Foreign and Domestic Entanglements
    4. Life in the 1980s
    5. The End of the Cold War
13. Toward a New Millennium
    1. Operation Desert Storm
    2. A Baby Boomer in the White House
    3. Republicans vs. Democrats
    4. Living in the Information Age
    5. The End of the American Century