The current tension in the writing of histories has been between the defense of "textbook" histories--i.e., the conventional approach which focuses on great events, great individuals, and great collectivities--and progressive--i.e., populist or alternative histories which focus on ordinary people. A new form has been engineered by television, which produces documentary-dramas and drama-documentaries by dramatizing histories and bringing them to life through individual accounts and experiences. These emergent forms have involved a shift in programming rationale to endorse long programs or mini-series; have taken on certain humanist and progressive critiques; and have adopted some dramatic and footage techniques that offer more daring accounts than earlier authoritative documentaries. Three documentaries illustrate different ways of writing about people and place as television: (1) "About Time," which spins a yarn about our notions of time and our relationships with time; (2) "The Country and the City," which presents the relationship between country and city as a central element in the development of capitalism; and (3) "The Dragon Has Two Tongues," which speaks of Welsh histories through two opposed historical viewpoints. These three examples have sought the essence of identity through mechanisms of time, and polarity, respectively, and each can be located within the transforming practice of writing and reading histories. However, constructed within the spectacle, and ordered by the present, they can at best make explicit those connections and acknowledge those restraints. (34 references) (CGD)