Video Details

American Experience

Grade Levels:	6 - 13+
Core Subject(s):	Fine Arts - Visual Arts
Website:	http://www.uen.org/dms/
Usage rights:	Download and retain personal copies in perpetuity.

Availability information for this program

Episodes:

• A Brilliant Madness: The Story of John Nash

  A Brilliant Madness chronicles the life of mathematician and Nobel Prize winner John Nash. At the age of 21, he developed the Nash Equilibrium, a challenge to traditional game theory that would prove revolutionary to economics. After receiving his doctorate, Nash began teaching at M.I.T. where he began to exhibit signs of mental imbalance. He claimed that aliens were sending him coded messages. For the next 20 years, Nash suffered from the disease until he slowly began to recover in the 1980s. In 1994, he received the Nobel Prize.

  Length:	00:56:38

• A Midwife's Tale

  Based on her personal diary, this program presents a dramatic exploration of the life of Martha Ballard, a woman who lived through the economic boom and bust and the political and social turmoil of the decades following the American Revolution.

  Length:	01:28:40

• Amelia Earhart

  Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, and the first to cross the North American continent alone. Her exploits as an aviator, along with her beauty, intelligence, and independence, made her a national heroine. Seemingly invincible, Earhart traveled and lectured, a champion of aviation and equal opportunity for women. But the public didn't know the cost of her courage. The record-breaking flights, aerial exhibitions, and endless promotional commitments, together with health problems and financial worries, combined to push Earhart to the point of exhaustion. In 1937, while attempting to circle the earth along the equator, her plane disappeared without a trace, transforming the "First Lady of the Air" into an American legend.

  Length:	00:56:32

• Annie Oakley

  Annie Oakley provides insights into American history topics including the legends and realities of the American West, westward expansion and the closing of the American frontier, representations of Native Americans, the changing roles of women on the frontier and during the late nineteenth century, women's suffrage in the West and in the Constitution, the history of popular entertainment, and more.

  Length:	00:56:42

• Ansel Adams

  Few American artists have reached a wider audience, or enjoyed more widespread popularity in their own lifetime, than Ansel Adams. A visionary photographer, a pioneer in photographic technique and a crusader for the environment.

  Length:	01:41:06

• Bataan: Death March and Rescue

  Contrast the rules of war--and the treatment of American POWs--between World War II and today. With chilling testimony from both captive and liberator, Bataan: Death March and Rescue depicts the saga of thousands of Allied soldiers who faced death capture on the Bataan peninsula in 1941. Only 500 prisoners in the Cabanatuan camp lived to be rescued. Their valiant struggle to survive the tortures of a sweltering jungle march, disease, deprivation, and brutality is remembered in this stirring documentary.

  Length:	00:56:41

• Building the Alaska Highway

  In May of 1942, across the rugged sub-Arctic wilderness of Alaska and Canada, thousands of American soldiers began one of the biggest and most difficult construction projects ever undertaken-building the Alaska Highway. This program tells how young soldiers battled mud, muskeg, and mosquitoes; endured ice, snow, and bitter cold; and cut pathways through primeval forests to push a 1,520-mile road across one of the world's harshest landscapes.

  Length:	00:55:30

• Citizen King

  Citizen King explores the last five years in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life by drawing on the personal recollections and eyewitness accounts of friends, movement associates, journalists, law enforcement officers, and historians, to illuminate this little-known chapter in the story of America's most important and influential moral leader.

  Length:	01:54:43

• Daughter From Danang

  In 1975, with the end of the war in Vietnam imminent, Mai Thi Kim, a poor, young Vietnamese woman, sent her seven-year-old daughter to America as part of a controversial evacuation program known as "Operation Babylift." The little girl was adopted by a single woman, renamed Heidi and brought up in Tennessee. Twenty-two years later, Heidi tracked down her birth mother and visited Danang.

  Length:	01:23:46

• Eleanor Roosevelt

  She was the nation's conscience, a tireless advocate for the disadvantaged, a woman who influenced American social policies for decades and pushed through the first international charter on human rights. Eleanor Roosevelt survived a painful childhood and a difficult marriage to become one of the most admired women in America. Going beyond her public achievements, this intimate biography explores the secretive and surprising private life of a controversial American figure.

  Length:	02:24:56

• Eugene O'Neill

  Eugene O'Neill provides insights into topics including changes in American culture and society during the first half of the twentieth century, the history of the American theater, Greek tragedy, controversies surrounding artistic expression, alcoholism, and more.

  Length:	01:59:22

• Fatal Flood

  In the spring of 1927, after weeks of incessant rains, the Mississippi River went on a rampage from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, inundating hundreds of towns, killing as many as a thousand people and leaving a million homeless. In Greenville, Mississippi, efforts to contain the river pitted the majority black population against an aristocratic plantation family, the Percys -- and the Percys against themselves. Liev Schreiber narrates this dramatic story of greed, power and race during one of America's worst natural disasters.

  Length:	00:55:28

• Fidel Castro

  Fidel Castro has survived U.S. hostility, an invasion, several CIA assassination attempts and an economic embargo. His face has become an iconic image worldwide, yet the man himself remains an enigma to all but a few. Through interviews with relatives, childhood friends, fellow rebel leaders, Bay of Pigs veterans, human rights activists and journalists, this program constructs an intimate and revealing portrait of the most resilient of leaders.

  Length:	01:56:21

• Fly Girls

  During World War II, more than a thousand women signed up to fly with the U.S. military. Wives, mothers, actresses and debutantes who joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS) test-piloted aircraft, ferried planes and logged 60 million miles in the air. Thirty-eight women died in service. But the opportunity to play a critical role in the war effort was abruptly canceled by politics and resentment, and it would be thirty years before women would again break the sex barrier in the skies.

  Length:	00:56:07

• Golden Gate Bridge

  This program tells the story of Golden Gate bridge builder, Joseph Strauss, who spent thirteen years wrangling with politicians, arguing over designs and fighting lawsuits from opponents before he was able to break ground. By completion, Strauss, his designers and his construction crews had built what has since been called one of the "Seven Wonders of the Modern World."

  Length:	00:55:29

• Influenza 1918

  As the nation mobilized for war in the spring of 1918, ailing Private Albert Gitchell reported to an army hospital in Kansas. He was diagnosed with the flu, a disease about which doctors knew little. Before the year was out, America would be ravaged by a flu epidemic that killed 675,000 people--more than died in all the wars of this century combined--before disappearing as mysteriously as it began.

  Length:	00:55:04

• Jesse James

  Jesse James provides insights into American history topics including the Missouri Compromise and pro-slavery factions in the West, the end of the Civil War, Reconstruction-era politics, guerrilla warfare, criminal activities and Westward expansion, the Pinkerton Detective Agency and private policing, American outlaws and the legend of Jesse James vs. the reality of his life, and more.

  Length:	00:55:56

• John Brown's Holy War

  He led a righteous crusade against the evils of slavery yet used horrifying violence to carry out his mission. Martyr, madman, and murderer, John Brown was an extremist who was as controversial and misunderstood in the mid-1800s as he is today. His execution at Harper's Ferry sparked a chain of events leading to the Civil War.

  Length:	00:01:00

• Journey to America

  At the beginning of this century, 18 million immigrants left their homelands spurred by the hope of a new and better life free of persecution and poverty. JOURNEY TO AMERICA presents the personal story of the men, women, and children who came to America between 1890 and 1920. Remarkable footage of families making long treks through Europe and scenes of immigrants on crowded transport ships are interlaced with oral interviews .

  Length:	00:57:53

• Kinsey

  Alfred Kinsey was a little-known biologist when, in the 1940s, he began compiling data from thousands of interviews about the sexual practices of men and women. The results of that research were the explosive "Kinsey Reports." Through interviews with his research assistants, his children, his biographers, and historians, this documentary assesses Kinsey's achievements, while examining how his personal life shaped his career.

  Length:	01:27:19

• Marcus Garvey: Look For Me in the Whirlwind

  Marcus Garvey is one of the most controversial figures in American history. Both a powerful orator and a pompous autocrat, Garvey inspired the loyalty of millions of African Americans while infuriating many black leaders. This is the story of a Jamaican immigrant who between 1916 and 1921 built the largest black mass movement in world history. It explores Garvey's dramatic successes and failures before his fall into obscurity.

  Length:	01:26:46

• Mary Pickford

  Mary Pickford created a totally new way of acting that entranced audiences and left them spell-bound. She was also a creative producer and shrewd businessperson who played a pivotal role in shaping the first new media of the twentieth century. This powerful and moving production uses footage, stills, original audio interviews with Pickford and clips from her movies to tell a story that is full of joy and power, of loneliness and despair.

  Length:	01:25:54

• Meltdown at Three Mile Island

  Witness how human error and bad luck converge in our nation's worst nuclear accident. On March 28, 1979, a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania suddenly overheated. As scientists and officials scrambled to prevent a nuclear catastrophe, thousands of nearby residents fled the area. Learn more about the event that shocked a nation and cast a pall over America's nuclear energy program.

  Length:	00:56:27

• Mount Rushmore

  High on a granite cliff in South Dakota's Black Hills tower the huge carved faces of four American presidents. Together they constitute the world's largest sculpture. The story of Mount Rushmore's creation is as bizarre and wonderful as the monument itself. It is the tale of a hyperactive, temperamental artist whose talent and determination propelled the project. And it is the story of dozens of ordinary Americans who suddenly found themselves suspended high on a cliff face with drills and hammers creating what some would call a monstrosity and others a masterpiece.

  Length:	00:56:09

• Mr. Sears' Catalog

  They started selling watches. Then Richard Sears and Alva Curtis Roebuck started a revolution -- a "wish book" that made life on the farm a little easier and put consumer goods within reach of every American. Issued in the late 1800s and weighing nearly four pounds, the early Sears Roebuck catalogue was the link to civilization and the good life for generations of rural Americans. This remarkable marketing tool changed the Sears company from a tiny concern into the world's largest merchandising corporation. A story of entrepreneurial triumph as well as an affectionate portrait of America from the 1890s through the 1920s, this program explores how the Sears catalogue became a symbol for the natural ambitions and dreams of a sprawling country.

  Length:	00:57:42

• Murder of Emmett Till

  The shameful, sadistic murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a black boy who whistled at a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store in 1955, was a powerful catalyst for the civil rights movement. Although Till's killers were apprehended, they were quickly acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury and proceeded to sell their story to a journalist, providing grisly details of the murder. Three months after Till's body was recovered, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.

  Length:	00:56:13

• One Woman, One Vote

  How could America call itself the world's greatest democracy, but continue to deny the right to vote to more than half of its citizens? ONE WOMAN, ONE VOTE documents the struggle for fair representation for all Americans, which culminated in the passing of the 19th Amendment in the U.S. Senate by one vote. Witness the 70-year struggle for women's suffrage. Discover why the crusaders faced entrenched opposition from men and women who feared the women's vote would ignite a social revolution.

  Length:	01:49:46

• Orphan Trains

  Few Americans are aware that modern foster care had its roots in a little-known 19th-century rescue program. In 1853, 10,000 homeless children prowled the streets of New York City. Shocked by their plight, a young minister, Charles Loring Brace, founded the Children's Aid Society and sent many of these desperate children west to begin new lives with farm families. Over the next 75 years, until 1929, Brace's Society and other East Coast charities sent more than 150,000 orphaned and neglected children by train to 47 states.

  Length:	00:56:01

• Partners of the Heart

  Witness the achievements of two men who came together in an unlikely time and place to leave the world a life-saving legacy. In 1930s Nashville, white surgeon Dr. Alfred Blalock and black carpenter's apprentice Vivien Thomas forged a partnership that changed the course of medical history. Discover how their pioneering shock research saved thousands of children's lives and crafted the beginnings of modern heart surgery.

  Length:	00:58:26

• Public Enemy #1

  For about a year from 1933 to 1934, America was thrilled and terrorized by a man called John Dillinger. A desperado, a bank robber, a bad man no jail could hold, his reputation grew until he was named the country's first Public Enemy #1 and hunted by virtually every cop in America. Dillinger finally met his match in J. Edgar Hoover, who used the outlaw's celebrity to burnish his own reputation and that of his national law enforcement agency, the FBI.

  Length:	00:57:01

• Remember the Alamo

  In the early 1830s Texas was about to explode. Although under Mexican rule, the region was home to more than 20,000 U.S. settlers agitated by what they saw as restrictive Mexican policies. Mexican officials, concerned with illegal trading and immigration, were prepared to fight hard to keep the province under their control. With war on the horizon, the Tejanos had to pick a side.

  Length:	00:54:32

• Return with Honor

  This documentary by Academy award-winning filmmakers Freida Lee Mock (Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision) and Terry Sanders (A Time Out of War) explores the 462 American prisoners of war who were held in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" during the Vietnam War. Told entirely through interviews with survivors and previously unseen Vietnamese footage that documents their lives during the imprisonment, the filmmakers focus on the strength of overcoming adversity rather than the horrors of the war and the prisons. The film also concerns itself with the return of the 462 pilots held for over eight-and-one-half years, and how Americans celebrated their homecoming.

  Length:	01:53:13

• Roots of Resistance: The Story of the Underground Railroad

  In the mid-1800s, black men and women traveled a network of escape routes known as the Underground Railroad. Their flight from the shackles of slavery in the South was organized by other escaped slaves and their allies, including famous ex-slaves Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. This program recounts the little-known story of black America's secret railroad to freedom through narratives of escaped slaves.

  Length:	00:57:46

• Scottsboro, An American Tragedy

  In March 1931, two white women stepped from a box car in Paint Rock, Alabama, to make a shocking accusation: they had been raped by nine black teenagers on the train. So began one of the most significant legal fights of the 20th century. The trial of the nine falsely accused teens would draw North and South into their sharpest conflict since the Civil War, yield two momentous Supreme Court decisions and give birth to the civil rights movement.

  Length:	01:27:10

• Seabiscuit

  Despite his boxy build, stumpy legs, scraggly tail and ungainly gait, Seabiscuit was one of the most remarkable thoroughbred racehorses in history. His fabulously wealthy owner Charles Howard, his famously silent and stubborn trainer Tom Smith, and the two hard-bitten, gifted jockeys who rode him to glory turned Seabiscuit into a national hero.

  Length:	00:55:54

• Spy in the Sky

  In the spring of 1960, a CIA spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. Overnight, the U-2 plane became the most famous aircraft in the world. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, miraculously survived the crash. From the beginning, the U-2 project was controversial, but even after the political fallout of the failed Powers mission, the U-2 spy plane continued to play a key role in the perilous years of the Cold War.

  Length:	00:55:47

• Stephen Foster

  Stephen Foster was the first great American songwriter. His melodies are so much a part of American history and culture that most people think they're folk tunes. All in all, he composed some 200 songs, including "Oh! Susanna," "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair" and "Camptown Races." Though he virtually invented popular music as it is recognized today, Foster's personal life was tragic and riddled with contradiction. His marriage was largely unhappy, he never made much money from his work and he died at age 37 a nearly penniless alcoholic on the Bowery in New York. Joe Morton narrates.

  Length:	00:56:39

• The Alaska Pipeline

  The Alaska Pipeline offers insights into topics in American history including large-scale engineering projects, natural resource management, the American wilderness, life in Alaska, Native American land claims, energy sources and policy, infrastructure planning and development, and more.

  Length:	00:55:21

• The Donner Party

  In the winter of 1846, the pioneer Donner Party travelers made the fateful decision to take an untried shortcut through the high Sierra Nevadas to beat the coming winter, only half of them would come out alive. Through family journals, newspaper accounts, and interviews with historians and descendants of the party, the program re-creates the Donner Party's now legendary journey.

  Length:	01:27:19

• The Duel

  Alexander Hamilton was an impoverished immigrant from the West Indies. Aaron Burr was born into wealth and privilege in New England. Both rose to fame: one became a framer of the U.S. Constitution, the other a Revolutionary War veteran and financier who nearly came to be the nation's third president. In 1804 they faced each other in a duel that changed the course of history.

  Length:	00:56:30

• The Fight

  June 22, 1938 saw the rematch between the African American heavyweight Joe Louis and his German opponent Max Schmeling. It was an historic event freighted with symbolic significance, both a harbinger of the civil rights movement and a prelude to World War II. This program captures the swirl of events leading up to it, the impact Louis's victory had on black America and its significance for Jews on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Length:	01:32:21

• The Great Transatlantic Cable

  This program tells the story behind the laying of the transatlantic cable. The physical challenges to laying the cable were enormous. The project would require the production of a 2,000 mile long cable that would have to be laid three miles beneath the Atlantic. Cyrus Field, an energetic young New Yorker wasn't deterred, and since its completion in 1866, nothing has broken his communications link with Europe-not storms, earthquakes or war.

  Length:	00:55:57

• The Iron Road

  The Iron Road tells the dramatic history of the first transcontinental railroad -- a feat of engineering and backbreaking labor that opened up the riches of the West and turned America's dream of manifest destiny into a reality. This hour-long treatment focuses on the politics, the personalities, and the money that drove this project to completion, along with the brutal working conditions for the 20,000 (mostly immigrant) laborers.

  Length:	00:57:15

• The Kennedys Part 01-The Father

  The legendary Kennedys seemed to have it all-money, power, charm, ambition. From Joe Kennedy's rise on Wall Street to the collapse of his last son's presidential hopes in 1980, the compelling tale of the Kennedy dynasty still fascinates Americans. American Experience presents the first comprehensive look at one man's elusive dream for his family and his nation, beginning in triumph and ending in tragedy. The first part of The Kennedys tells the remarkable story of patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy and his creation of a dynasty that would enable him to realize, through his sons, his own failed ambitions to become America's first Roman Catholic President.

  Length:	01:52:12

• The Kennedys Part 02-The Sons

  The legendary Kennedys seemed to have it all-money, power, charm, ambition. From Joe Kennedy's rise on Wall Street to the collapse of his last son's presidential hopes in 1980, the compelling tale of the Kennedy dynasty still fascinates Americans. American Experience presents the first comprehensive look at one man's elusive dream for his family and his nation, beginning in triumph and ending in tragedy. The conclusion of The Kennedys follows the Kennedy story from the glamorous imagery of Jack and Jackie Kennedy's White House, to the dark days of Edward Kennedy's accident at Chappaquiddick.

  Length:	01:52:25

• The Man Behind Hitler

  Excerpts from the diaries of Joseph Goebbels provide insights into the Nazi Third Reich, World War II in Europe, the Holocaust, fascism, U.S. involvement in foreign wars, political propaganda, censorship, and more.

  Length:	01:23:12

• The Massie Affair

  In the early years of the 20th century, at a time when the U.S. Navy dominated Hawaii, Americans thought of the islands as a Pacific Paradise. But in 1931, an explosive incident shook the semblance of tranquility and exposed growing racial tensions. The alleged rape of a white woman by a group of Hawaiians led to violence and murder. The Massie Affair inflicted a wound on the psyche of the Hawaiian people that has yet to heal.

  Length:	00:56:24

• The Monkey Trial

  In 1925, a Tennessee biology teacher named John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution in defiance of state law. His trial became an epic event of the 20th century, a debate over free speech that spiraled into an all-out duel between science and religion. "Monkey Trial" explores the dramatic moment when a new fault line opened in society as scientific discoveries began to challenge the literal truth of the Bible. Often humorous and at times frightening, the story of two value systems colliding resonates today.

  Length:	01:21:15

• The Pill

  In May 1960, the FDA approved the sale of a pill that arguably would have a greater impact on American culture than any other drug in the nation's history. For women across the country, the contraceptive pill was liberating: it allowed them to pursue careers, fueled the feminist and pro-choice movements and encouraged more open attitudes towards sex. The Pill presents a compelling account of a society in transition.

  Length:	00:56:12

• The Richest Man in the World, Andrew Carnegie

  The Richest Man In the World is a thoughtful portrait of one of history's most complicated men. Andrew Carnegie was a study in contrasts, a walking contradiction. He was a great philanthropist who endowed nearly 3,000 libraries, but he was also a ruthless businessman who dealt savagely with employee and competitor alike. The major events of Carnegie's life are given close attention, from the Homestead Strike to his eventual sell-out to J.P. Morgan. A man such as Carnegie is inseparable from his age, and this volume of the American Experience puts the events of Carnegie's life in proper context.

  Length:	01:56:06

• The Wright Stuff

  In 1903, the Orville and Wilbur Wright solved one of the most baffling mysteries of science, manned flight. This is a quintessential American story about two ordinary men who, working alone, reshaped the 20th century.

  Length:	00:56:06

• Transcontinental Railroad

  Go behind-the-scenes of one of the greatest engineering feats of the 19th century: the building of a transcontinental railroad across the United States. Completed in only six years by unscrupulous entrepreneurs, brilliant engineers, and legions of dedicated workers, the Transcontinental Railroad left in its wake a horde of displaced, broken Native Americans.

  Length:	01:47:38

• War Letters

  Based on newly discovered personal correspondence from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War II to the Gulf War, "War Letters" brings to life vivid eyewitness accounts of famous battles, intimate declarations of love and longing, poignant letters penned just before the sender was killed and heartbreaking "Dear John" letters from home.

  Length:	00:56:36

• Zoot Suit Riots

  Named for the clothes they wore, 17 young Mexicans were tried for murder in Los Angeles in 1942. Their convictions on scanty evidence made them Latino martyrs, provoking riots between servicemen and local residents. Did official prejudice and spectacular media coverage inflame a bad situation and thwart justice, as a citizen's committee later claimed? You be the judge.

  Length:	00:55:11

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