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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 women's suffrage movement endured infighting, alliances, and betrayals, and won the right to vote when the 19th Amendment passed in 1920.
Between 1854 and 1929 more than 100,000 abused or orphaned children were sent by train to the Midwest to begin new lives in foster families.
In the summer of 1940, 10,000 children were sent from wartime Britain to the United States.
A fresh look at President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, the public's reaction, and the government investigations that lead to a widespread loss of trust in government institutions.
At the height of segregation in the United States, an unlikely alliance between a black medical genius and a white surgeon led to a pioneering medical breakthrough.
In 1775, local American militias routed the British at the Battle of Lexington and Concord. This film follows the 65 "British soldiers" and 67 "American rebels" who reenact the battle today.
A minute-by-minute account, on both sides of the Pacific, leading up to the surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which brought America into World War II.
The story behind the development of the oral contraceptive that put women in control of birth control.
The story of the polio crusade pays tribute to a time when Americans banded together to conquer a terrible disease. The medical breakthrough saved countless lives and had a pervasive impact on American philanthropy that continues to be felt today.
Legendary bank robber John Dillinger garnered the admiration of many Americans hurt by the Great Depression. But J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI took him down with a message: crime doesn't pay.
Television game shows became an instant national phenomenon in 1955, but four years later contestant Charles van Doren admitted they were a scam.
The U.S. and the Soviet Union race to build the hydrogen bomb during the Cold War, thus beginning the nuclear arms race.
The historic journey of Apollo 8 captivated the world in 1968 -- a bright spot in a year marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, race riots, and the Vietnam War.
Her 1963 warnings about the effects of pesticides and herbicides - especially DDT - sparked a revolution in environmental policy and created a new ecological consciousness.
While the U.N. debated strategies for control of atomic energy, the U.S. Navy was preparing for nuclear tests on Bikini Island, forcing residents to move away for more than 40 years.
Roman Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin used the power of radio to become one of the first media stars as he railed against the nation's economic system in the midst of the Depression.
The life of the president who saw America as a "shining city on a hill" and himself as its heroic defender. Favoring deregulation and lower taxes, Reagan experienced wide popularity and controversy as well. Part of the award-winning The Presidents collection.
The stories of ordinary people in the tumultuous years after the Civil War, when America struggled to rebuild the Union and integrate former slaves into the life of the nation.
In the early 1830s Texas was home to more than 20,000 U.S. settlers, and 4,000 Mexican Tejanos. Still ruled by Mexico, the land was about to be mired in war. The Tejanos had to pick a side.
When two passenger ships collide off Nantucket in 1909, 1,500 people rely on 26-year-old Jack Binns to operate a new technology - wireless telegraphy - to save them all.
American prisoners of war in North Vietnam tell of their experiences at the Hanoi Hilton and other notorious prisons. More than 20 veterans share their accounts, including Senator John McCain.
The remarkable and tragic life of the third Kennedy son, Robert F. Kennedy, who was the probable Democratic presidential candidate of 1968 when he was assassinated.
A look at the poor Scottish emigrant boy who built a fortune in telegraphy, railroads and steel, and then began systematically to give it all away.
The evocative stories of teenage hoboes crisscrossing America on trains during the Great Depression.
Born in Puerto Rico, Clemente was an exceptional baseball player and humanitarian whose career sheds light on larger issues of immigration, civil rights and cultural change. He would die in a tragic plane crash.
Head of the most powerful family in America, billionaire John D. Rockefeller ran Standard Oil, a despised monopoly. It was up to John Jr. and his vast philanthropy to change the family's reputation.
Men and women, black and white, risked their lives to carve an elaborate network of escape routes out of slavery using trails, back roads, safe houses, river crossings and night trains.
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