“America: Alternative Futures,” a two-hour documentary

Especially important here are long-term shifts in societies – what Fernand Braudel described as the ‘longue durée’ – counterposing these to a short-term focus upon events. Braudel talks of ‘history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man [sic] in relationship to his environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constan