Alistair Cooke narrates this thirteen-episode account of American history, walking the actual ground where it happened: Jamestown's swampy first settlement, the Cumberland Gap wagon trails, Civil War battlefields, and the tenements of turn-of-the-century immigrant New York. Cooke had already spent decades as a British transplant covering the United States for the BBC, and the series lets him argue his own thesis, that America's character comes from the collision of European ambition with a continent that refused to cooperate. Episodes move chronologically from the earliest colonies through westward expansion, slavery and the Civil War, industrialization, and into the twentieth century, mixing on-location narration with period photographs, paintings, and reenacted detail. Cooke's delivery is unhurried and personal rather than encyclopedic, closer to a long essay than a textbook, and the production treats the country's contradictions, its idealism and its violence, as part of the same story rather than separate chapters. It remains one of the defining television histories of the United States made for a general audience.