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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.
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.
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.
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.
From a small-town Texas murder emerged a landmark civil rights case. The little-known story of the Mexican American lawyers who took Hernandez v. Texas to the Supreme Court, challenging Jim Crow-style discrimination.
The unbounded optimism of the Jazz Age and the shocking consequences when reality finally hit on October 29th, ultimately leading to the Great Depression.
Three years before the Gold Rush, 87 pioneers took a shortcut westward to California, only to get caught in the snows of the Sierra Nevada. The emigrants' fateful journey culminated in death and cannibalism.
In 1927, the Mississippi River flooded from New Orleans up to Illinois, leaving a million people homeless and leading to a major black migration to the North. A dramatic natural disaster story.
The Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon Territory, the largest American gold rush, inspired a Charlie Chaplin film when 100,000 people made the treacherous journey in search of riches.
Discovery of a precious metal inspired worldwide migration by Forty-Niners, the eager gold-seekers who settled the westernmost state and turned California into a land of opportunity and fierce competition.
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.
Vivid memories of those trapped in the terrifying temblor of 1906 that killed thousands of Californians.
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.
When an earthen dam broke without warning, a small city in Pennsylvania was swept away in a wall of water over 30 feet high.
A saga of ambition, wealth, family loyalty and personal tragedy. From Joseph Kennedy's rise on Wall Street, through John, Robert and Edward's successes and scandals, the family has left a storied political legacy.
The legendary trapper, scout and soldier helped map the Oregon Trail. The ultimate frontiersman, Carson inspired popular novels before being associated with the "Long Walk" of the Navajo people.
Originally settled as a mail stop, Las Vegas has undergone several makeovers, from an Old West vacation town, to a mafia haven, to the "Atomic City" and "Sin City."
In the 1940s Dr. Walter Freeman gained fame for perfecting the lobotomy, then hailed as a miracle cure for the severely mentally ill. But within a few years, lobotomy was labeled one of the most barbaric mistakes of modern medicine.
John Wesley Powell's epic journey into the unknown Grand Canyon was filled with adventure as his team mapped the Colorado River for the first time.
A complex portrait of Mormonism. From Joseph Smith's discovery of gold tablets to persecution, migration, and settlement in Utah, the film explores the history of the most American of religions.
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.
Carl Fisher created Miami Beach from a narrow spit of Florida swampland. Brilliant marketing made him a fortune until a devastating hurricane and the stock market crash of 1929 wiped him out.
From Reconstruction to the 1960s, this film offers a portrait of New Orleans that reflects the best and the worst in America: Mardi Gras, jazz music, and struggles with segregation.
The history of New York City and the people and forces that have shaped it over the past 400 years is told in a seven-part 14.5-hour series.
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.
Her 1963 warnings about the effects of pesticides and herbicides - especially DDT - sparked a revolution in environmental policy and created a new ecological consciousness.
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.
One of the most remarkable thoroughbred racehorses in history, Seabiscuit was the long shot that captured America's heart during the Depression.
In 1967 thousands of hippies flocked to San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district only to discover that the counterculture celebration had descended into drug abuse and occasional violence.
The story of the farmers who came to the Southern Plains of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas dreaming of prosperity, and lived through ten years of drought, dust, disease and death.
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