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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The unbounded optimism of the Jazz Age and the shocking consequences when reality finally hit on October 29th, ultimately leading to the Great Depression.
On June 6, 1944, Operation Overlord went into effect. Allied troops invaded Normandy, fighting to free Europe from Nazi occupation and end World War II.
The African American jazz composer and bandleader performed regularly at Harlem's Cotton Club, and thrived from the Depression through World War II, leaving a legacy in music.
As First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt supported President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies and advocated for civil rights. She became one of the 20th century's most influential women.
The young CBS reporter changed his pacifist ideals after reporting on the rise of fascism in Europe during World War II. Based on Sevareid's 1946 book of the same name.
The personal journey of three generations of a Japanese American family, including their stint in internment camps during World War II.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt restored hope after the Great Depression and led the nation during World War II. Part of the award-winning The Presidents collection.
Joe Louis became a symbol of African American equality and democracy. Max Schmeling represented Hitler's Aryan racial theories and fascism. The two boxers fought in 1938 -- on the eve of World War II.
During World War II more than a thousand women signed up to fly with the U.S. military as WASPS. 38 died in service, though they received no benefits as they had no official military status.
Before World War II, San Francisco's Chinatown was closed to outsiders, but second generation Chinese Americans defied cultural tradition to pursue their passion for American music and dance.
San Francisco built one of the "Seven Wonders of the Modern World" during the Great Depression while battling wind, fog, ocean currents, and earthquake-prone land.
During the Great Depression, Americans built the Hoover Dam, overcoming technical challenges to erect one of the greatest engineering works in history.
Before radar had been invented, the worst hurricane to hit America devastated the East Coast and killed over 600 people in a terrible natural disaster.
In 1936 Angie Debo uncovered a widespread conspiracy and the U.S. government's theft of Native Americans' oil rich lands in Indian Territories of Oklahoma.
An updated look at the Alabama tenant farmer families that Walker Evans and James Agee documented in their 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
A look at five real-life "Rosies," the reality of working in defense plants during World War II and the women's reactions to having to give up those jobs for returning GIs.
General Douglas MacArthur led American troops in World Wars I and II before being fired by President Harry Truman during the Korean War. A portrait of a complex, imposing and fascinating American.
Joseph Goebbels, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, was the mastermind behind Adolf Hitler's success. His diaries reveal his chilling justifications for racism and the Holocaust.
In 1931 Grace Hubbard Fortescue murdered a local Hawaiian accused of raping her daughter, a Navy wife. Island racial tensions flared when Fortescue received a one-hour sentence for her crime.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt constitute the world's largest piece of sculpture on a hillside in South Dakota, completed by temperamental and determined artist Gutzon Borgium.
In the summer of 1940, 10,000 children were sent from wartime Britain to the United States.
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.
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