The film traces American history during the 20th century through a sequence of vignettes of pioneering social scientists who used numerical tools to examine America.
The First Measured Century includes on-camera interviews with forty experts: Howard M. Bahr, Lee D. Baker, Alan Brinkley, Theodore Caplow, William Chafe, John Milton Cooper, William Cronon, Elliot Currie, Christopher DeMuth, Betty Friedan, Milton Friedman, Francis Fukuyama, Alec Gallup, George Gallup, Jr., Paul Gebhard, Bruce Geelhoed, James Gregory, Kenneth T. Jackson, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Christopher Jencks, James H. Jones, Alfred E. Kahn, David M. Kennedy, Alice Kessler-Harris, Nancy Koehn, Alan Kraut, Seymour Martin Lipset, Glenn Loury, Staughton Lynd, David Moore, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Robyn Muncy, William O'Neill, Ken Prewitt, Rita Simon, Daphne Spain, Paul Volcker, James Q. Wilson, William Julius Wilson, Daniel Yankelovich.
[2] The documentary film is accompanied by a reference book of the same title but different subtitle: The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900-2000.
Instead, fifteen chapters provide a dense array of time series data and interpretive essays about American society in the 20th century.
The authors of the companion volume gave a one-hour presentation about the project to an audience at Olsson's Books and Records in Washington, DC, on May 22, 2001.
The replication of surveys in Muncie, Indiana (Middletown studies) over a 75-year period from 1924 to 1999 is an unusually long timeframe for measuring social trends in America.