The Century That Wrote Itself - Season 1
Season 1
Episodes
The Written Self
Adam Nicolson traces our modern sense of self back to the time when ordinary people first took up the quill. At a time of great upheaval, writing was both a means of escape and of fighting for what youbelieved. Account books became confessionals, and letters weapons against the authorities. From an ambitious shepherd to a Quaker woman imprisoned for her conscience, rising literacy allowed people to re-write both the country's future and their own.
The Rewritten Universe
Adam Nicolson explores the 17th century's contradictory attitudes towards the nature of reality. While a puritan struggled to accept God's will, an early naturalist accepted nothing without testing it first.How did God work? How did the world work? What was our place within it? These questions overflow from the era's diaries and notebooks, famous and unknown alike. Curiouser and curiouser, spreading literacy allowed explosive ideas not just to be recorded but shared, as Adam reveals the texts that rewrote our world.
A World Re-Shaped by Writing
Author Adam Nicolson traces the roots of today's globalised Britain to a 17th-century golden age of writing and communication. He reveals a century on the move, a time when London tripled in size and more than200,000 people emigrated in search of work or God. And it was writing that made this new mobility possible.
Through the very words that kept them afloat in this mobile world, we meet a puritan family split asunder across an ocean, a lowly sailor able to document strange new worlds for those at home and a slave-trader laying the foundations for a new world economy. All these characters remoulded the medieval world into the one we recognise today. Their writings both reveal this turbulent world to us and helped write the change itself.
Recently Updated Shows
Days of Our Lives
Days of our Lives is set in the fictitious Midwestern town of Salem. The core families are the Bradys, the Hortons and the DiMeras, and the multi-layered storylines involve elements of romance, adventure, mystery, comedy and drama.
Beginning on September 12, 2022, DAYS became exclusive to streaming on Peacock.
The Bold and the Beautiful
They created a dynasty where passion rules, they are the Forresters, the first name in Fashion. The Bold and the Beautiful, a world of fashion, glamor and romance. A place where power, money and success are there for the taking in a city where dreams really do come true. Follow the lives and loves of the Forresters on The Bold and the Beautiful...
The Young and the Restless
The Young and the Restless revolves around the rivalries, romances, hopes and fears of the residents of the fictional Midwestern metropolis, Genoa City. The lives and loves of a wide variety of characters mingle through the generations, dominated by the Newman, Abbott, Chancellor, Baldwin and Winters families. When The Young and the Restless premiered in 1973, it revolutionized the daytime drama. It continues to set the standard with strong characters, socially conscious storylines, romance and sensuality.
The Curse of Oak Island
The Curse of Oak Island documents brothers Rick and Marty Lagina as they pursue their lifelong dream of solving more than a 220-year old Oak Island mystery. For over two centuries, teams of searchers, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, have attempted to crack the code that will unearth the treasure believed to be buried on the small island off the coast of Nova Scotia. Armed with the knowledge of those that came before them, the muscle of heavy machinery and decades of engineering know-how, the Lagina's and their partners may be closer than anyone in history to finding the treasure that has so far claimed the lives of six men.