The program looks at the Gilded Age with an exploration of the works of Henry Adams, including his Pulitzer Prize winning "The Education of Henry Adams". Adams was the great-grandson of John Adams and the grandson of John Quincy Adams. He graduated from Harvard in 1858 and embarked on a grand tour of Europe. From 1861 to 1868 he acted as his father's private secretary in London, where his father was serving as a diplomat. On several trips to France, Adams examined medieval Christendom, and in the much-admired Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1913) he described the medieval worldview as reflected in its cathedrals. The Education Of Henry Adams (1918) remains Adams's best-known work and one of the most distinguished of all autobiographies; it was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1919, and in 2000 a distinguished panel named it the greatest American work of nonfiction of the 20th century.