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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 internationally famous carnival of delights in New York was the birthplace of the hot dog and the roller coaster, and offered everything from the bawdy to the surreal.
The unbounded optimism of the Jazz Age and the shocking consequences when reality finally hit on October 29th, ultimately leading to the Great Depression.
The dramatic story of the construction of New York City's Grand Central Terminal in 1913, lauded as the greatest railroad terminal in the world, with electrified train service under the city streets.
The first around-the-world air race was sponsored to prove that the airplane had a commercial future. Four pilots took off from Seattle and two returned 175 days later.
In 1900 Major Walter Reed proved that mosquitoes spread yellow fever. The discovery halted an outbreak during the construction of the Panama Canal, and led to the disease's eventual eradication.
The laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable - an underwater communications link between North America and Europe - is a remarkable story of mid-19th century ingenuity and perseverance.
The worst epidemic in American history killed over 600,000 Americans during World War I. Nicknamed "Spanish influenza" it died out quickly the following winter.
Begun during the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad employed 20,000 men, mostly immigrants, who built the iron road with their bare hands.
The international race to develop biological weapons during the 20th century, the challenges scientists faced, and the moral dilemmas posed by their eventual success. Watch Bonus Footage at the bottom of the chapter menu.
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.
Equipment failure, human error and bad luck led to the country's worst nuclear accident in 1979. Radioactive gases were released inside the plant, and there was threat of a widespread meltdown.
Richard Sears and Alva Curtis Roebuck brought consumer goods to the hands of every American with their Sears and Roebuck catalogue.
The New York City Subway was the largest public works project in history. Engineered by William Barclay Parsons, the 21-mile four-track route was completed in four years.
Postwar New York City and the global economic order told through the story of the rise of the World Trade Center, it's destruction on September 11th, 2001, and its afterlife.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1957 the Soviet Union beat the United States by launching the first satellite. A uniquely impressionistic history of the early years of the Space Race.
James Eads, one of America's greatest engineers, tamed the mighty Mississippi and deepened the river at its mouth, turning New Orleans into the second largest port in the nation.
In 1960, Francis Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. The plane had provided a high-tech peek behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
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