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Browse the entire American Experience series featuring over 200 films. Watch full films online, download teacher’s guides, go behind the scenes, and learn more about your favorite films.
The story of a frontiersman farmer and a wealthy Confederate slave-owner's daughter. He would become president of the nation during its worst crisis, the Civil War, and free slaves as the Great Emancipator.
A civil rights leader in Harlem before entering politics, Powell was one of the most charismatic black leaders of the 20th century. He served as a New York congressman during the Fifties and Sixties.
After the stock market crashed in 1929, thousands suffered unemployment and poverty in the Great Depression. The most desperate year, 1932, brought World War I veterans' Bonus March, the election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the New Deal.
An 800-mile pipeline transports crude from the largest oil field in North America. Native Alaskans, oil company representatives, environmentalists, geologists, politicians, and others tell the story of its construction.
The story of a founding father who laid the groundwork for the nation's modern economy -- including the banking system and Wall Street. He was also a primary author of the Federalist Papers.
Richard Byrd was hailed as the greatest American polar explorer after claiming to fly an airplane over both the north and south poles. In 1934 he became the first to experience winter in Antarctica's interior.
The first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, Earhart disappeared in 1937 while she was attempting to circumnavigate the world by airplane.
Politics, culture, race relations, and technology in a year of change, from Gibson Girls to immigrants, Booker T. Washington to W.E.B. Du Bois, striking coal miners to the Galveston hurricane, new inventions, and a presidential election.
Following the Great Depression, anti-Semitism was on the rise in America. The US government's response to the Holocaust was slow and fueled by complex social and political factors.
America's first superstar, Oakley was the main attraction of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. She thrilled audiences with her sharpshooting, and fueled nostalgia for the American frontier West.
The life of the legendary photographer, known best for his black and white images of the wilderness of the American West.
After achieving fame for an exposeé on New York City's mental facility on Blackwell's Island, intrepid journalist Nelly Bly went on a journey around the world breaking the record of Julius Verne's fictional character.
Just days after the Civil War ended, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre. As a fractured nation mourned, a manhunt closed in on his assassin, the twenty-six-year-old actor, John Wilkes Booth.
Bascom Lamar Lunsford and his campaign to preserve mountain music and dance.
P.T. Barnum -- huckster, con man, promoter, entertainer and founder of "The Greatest Show on Earth" which would become the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
In the Philippines, the most daring rescue mission of World War II took place when Army Rangers liberated 513 prisoners of war three years after the Bataan Death March.
President Theodore Roosevelt was caught in the middle of the first major battle for wilderness preservation, over the building of Hetch Hetchy Dam in Yosemite National Park.
Towards the end of World War II, Adolf Hitler tried his final gamble, a massive surprise assault across the Allied front in Belgium and Luxembourg, in the single biggest and bloodiest battle American soldiers ever fought.
Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst fought to suppress a film by boy genius director Orson Welles (of War of the Worlds fame). A brutal, fictionalized portrait of Hearst, the movie would eventually be acknowledged as one of cinema's masterpieces.
After the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, British and American pilots delivered tons of food and fuel to the German city by airplane for nearly a year in the first battle of the Cold War.
A Utah farm boy, Philo T. Farnsworth, builds a prototype for a television, but is thwarted by movie studio executives wanting to control the technology.
When David Vetter died at age 12, he was already world famous - played by John Travolta in a TV movie. His unusual life, lived permanently inside a germ-free environment due to severe combined immunodeficiency, fueled medical ethics debates.
Mathematician John Nash's career was cut short by paranoid schizophrenia, but his work became a foundation of modern economic theory. In 1994, as Nash began to show signs of improving, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics.
William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's legendary exploits helped create the myth of the American West that still endures today.
Following the attacks on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II, the US government feared an Alaskan invasion and constructed one of the biggest and most difficult homeland defense projects ever.
The influential musical pioneers from Appalachia whose recordings ("Wildwood Flower", "Keep on the Sunny Side") lifted spirits during the Great Depression. Their songs and style laid the foundations for American folk, country and bluegrass music.
Following the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic National Convention saw a clash of political visions on the convention floor and violence outside between police and protesters on the streets of Chicago.
City of the Century chronicles Chicago's dramatic transformation from a swampy frontier town of fur traders and Native Americans to a massive metropolis that was the quintessential American city of the nineteenth century.
An African American minister whose dream of ending racism galvanized millions of Americans in the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968 but left an enduring legacy.
One of the most popular New Deal programs, the CCC put three million young men to work in camps across America during the height of the Great Depression.
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