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- A look at the life of legendary American pilot Amelia Earhart, who disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 in an attempt to make a flight around the world.
- An in-depth look at the Vietnam War.
- Chronicles the way the West was lost and won between 1845 and 1893. It looks at the final decades of the American frontier from the time of the Gold Rush until after the last gasp of the Indian wars at Wounded Knee.
- The story of our growing awareness and understanding of the environmental crisis and emergence, during the 1960's and '70's, of popular movement to confront it.
- Chronicles the rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator whose anti-communist crusade against alleged infiltration of state institutions and film industry would test the limits of American decency and democracy in the 1950s.
- Born in 1859, William Henry McCarty never knew his father. As a teenager, he followed his mother in a convoy of pioneers on their way west. Once in New Mexico, his mother died and the young man was left to fend for himself at the age of 15. He became a cowboy in Arizona and killed a man in self-defense. Convicted of murder, he escapes. From homicides to stories of cattle rustlers and bounty hunters, the whole mythology of the Wild West is embodied in Billy the Kid. Since King Vidor's "Billy the Kid" in 1930, the outlaw has fueled the imagination of some fifteen directors, the most memorable film being Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" in 1973.
- Riding the Rails offers a visionary perspective on the presumed romanticism of the road and cautionary legacy of the Great Depression. From 'middle class gentility to scrabble-ass poor,' the undiscriminating Great Depression forced 4,000,000 Americans away from their homes and onto the tracks in search of food and lodging. Of this number, a disturbing 250,000 of the transients were children. The filmmakers relay the experiences and painful recollections of these now-elderly survivors of the rails. Forced to travel more by economic necessity than the spirit of adventure, the film's subjects dispel romantic myths of a hobo existence and its corresponding veneer of freedom. Riding the Rails recounts the hoboes' trade secrets for survival and accounts of dank miseries, loneliness, imprisonment, death, and dispossession. Sixty years later, the filmmakers transport their subjects back to the tracks, where the surging impact of sound and movement resuscitates memories of a shattered adolescence and devastating rite of passage.
- The NAACP and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall build a Supreme Court case against the policy of segregation.
- A docudrama adaptation of Ulrich's Pulitzer-winning book, which was based on thousands of entries in the journal of Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife, in the late 1700's and early 1800's. The movie intercuts between reenactments of Ballard doing her Maine midwifery and related tasks, and Ulrich in her eight years of research on her book; in the end, clear comparisons are made between the work of the two women.
- When he left the White House in 1989, Ronald Reagan was one of the most popular presidents of the century. A former Hollywood star and seemingly simple man, Reagan was consistently underestimated by his opponents. One by one, he overcame them all. Incorporating interviews with key political insiders, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and members of the Reagan family, "Reagan" explores the man who saw America as a "shining city on a hill" and himself as its heroic defender. The program follows Reagan's life from his itinerant boyhood in Illinois to his battle with "communist agitators" in the Screen Actors Guild and his dramatic 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter. Only 70 days into his presidency, a would-be assassin's bullet left him more debilitated than anyone knew. Reagan's massive military buildup and bold challenges to the Soviet Union caused his critics to portray him as a trigger-happy cowboy. But he negotiated deep cuts in nuclear weapons and resolved to end the Cold War. Five years after leaving office, Reagan announced he had Alzheimer's disease and dropped from public view. [info from DVD container]
- 1987– 1h 50m8.5 (117)TV EpisodeAn assassin's bullet ended the life of William McKinley in 1901, making his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, an "accidental" president at the age of 42.
- A documentary about the history of African American race films during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
- The film explores the beginnings of America's first amusement park and takes us through its good times all the way up to its end. The show was originally produced for PBS's American Experience.
- Polio at age 39, president at age 50. Explore the public and private life of a determined man who steered this country through two monumental crises: the Depression and World War II. FDR served as president longer than any other, and his legacy still shapes our understanding of the role of government and the presidency. A film by award winning filmmaker David Grubin. This is the first of two parts.
- The great influenza pandemic of 1918 - the worst epidemic ever seen in the United States.
- The story of Carl Graham Fisher, an Indiana entrepreneur who created Miami Beach out of the Florida swamps.
- Biography of U.S. President Harry S Truman.
- In 1875, Captain Richard Pratt ordered 72 Indian warriors suspected who had fought white colonists to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. Once there, Pratt began an experiment which involved teaching Indians to read and write, making them learn English and forcing them to be Christians, barring Native languages and religions, and putting even children as young as five in uniforms and drilling them like soldiers. "Kill the Indian and the save the man," was Pratt's brutal motto. A film about cultural genocide that Richard Pratt began to forcibly assimilate Native Americans into white culture with the creation of the Carlilse School for Indians in 1879. Pratt's school, and others like it, claimed noble intentions. The death toll was high from physical abuse and disease. Similar efforts in Australis and Canada are considered genocide, leading to investigations and official government apologies. These forced assimilation efforts lasted well into the 1930s, when they were abandoned as destructive and worsening poverty, unemployment, and suicide rates.
- He was boxy, with stumpy legs that wouldn't completely straighten a short straggly tail and an ungainly gait; though he didn't look the part, Seabiscuit was one of the most remarkable thoroughbred racehorses in history. In the 1930s, when Americans longed to escape the grim realities of Depression-era life, four men turned Seabiscuit into a national hero. They were 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. By following the paths that brought these four together and in telling the story of Seabiscuit's unlikely career, this film illuminates the precarious economic conditions that defined America in the 1930s and explores the fascinating behind-the-scenes world of thoroughbred racing. Scott Glenn narrates.
- The true story of the legendary outlaw Jesse James.
- America's love affair with the quiz show is dealt a blow when it's revealed that the games are fixed.
- The story of the Nuremberg Trials and Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor.
- 1987– 1h 26mTV-PG7.9 (152)TV EpisodeEach of the episodes focuses on important historical events and concludes with a short contemporary story that links the past to the present.
- 1987– 1h 30mTV-PG8.0 (163)TV EpisodeIn March of 1621, in what is now southeastern Massachusetts, Massasoit (actor Marcos Akiaten, Chiricauha Apache), the leading sachem of the Wampanoag, sat down to negotiate with a ragged group of English colonists. Hungry, dirty, and sick, the pale-skinned foreigners were struggling to stay alive; they were in desperate need of native help. Massasoit faced problems of his own. His people had lately been decimated by unexplained sickness, leaving them vulnerable to the rival Narragansett to the west. The Wampanoag sachem calculated that a tactical alliance with the foreigners would provide a way to protect his people and hold his native enemies at bay. He agreed to give the English the help they needed. A half-century later, as a brutal war flared between the English colonists and a confederation of New England Indians, the wisdom of Massasoit's diplomatic gamble seemed less clear. Five decades of English immigration, mistreatment, lethal epidemics, and widespread environmental degradation had brought the Indians and their way of life to the brink of disaster. Led by Metacom, Massasoit's son (actor Annowon Weeden, Mashpee Wampanoag), the Wampanoag and their native allies fought back against the English, nearly pushing them into the sea.
- On September 1, 1939 the first day of World War II in Europe President Franklin D. Roosevelt appealed to the warring nations to under no circumstances undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations. Just six years later, British and American Allied forces had carried out a bombing campaign of unprecedented might over Germany s cities, claiming the lives of nearly half a million civilians. The Bombing of Germany examines the defining moments of the offensive that led the U.S. across a moral divide. Weaving together interviews with WWII pilots and historians, and stunning archival footage of the bombing and its aftermath, this AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film is a haunting reminder of the dilemma imposed by war's civilian casualties.