View by:
Episodes:
All (266)
|
With full-length videos ()
|
With videos ()
| See all videos (2) »
Season:
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
6
|
7
|
8
|
9
|
10
|
11
|
12
|
13
|
14
|
15
|
16
|
17
|
18
|
19
|
20
|
21
|
22
|
unknown
Year:
1988
|
1989
|
1990
|
1991
|
1992
|
1993
|
1994
|
1995
|
1996
|
1997
|
1998
|
1999
|
2000
|
2001
|
2002
|
2003
|
2004
|
2005
|
2006
|
2007
|
2008
|
2009
|
2010
| Original Air Date—4 October 1988 An account of the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the subsequent effort to rebuild. |
| Original Air Date—11 October 1988 It starts with a live radio broadcast from the Bikini Atoll a few days before it is annihilated by a nuclear test. Shows great footage from these times and tells the story of the US Navy Sailors who were exposed to radioactive fallout. One interviewed sailor suffered grotesquely swollen limbs and he is shown being interviewed with enormous left arm and hand. |
| Original Air Date—18 October 1988 A profile of historian Angie Debo and her exposure of the governmental conspiracy to steal mineral-rich lands from their tribal owners. |
| Original Air Date—25 October 1988 Journalist Eric Sevareid recounts his experiences growing up during the Great Depression and World War II. |
| Original Air Date—1 November 1988 |
| Original Air Date—8 November 1988 A look at modern-day cowboys in the Wyoming Rockies. |
| Original Air Date—15 November 1988 Filmmaker Robert Drew updates his 1963 documentary Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963) which followed the confrontation between President Kennedy and Alabama governor George Wallace. |
| Original Air Date—22 November 1988 The life of Geronimo, as told by the Chiricahua Apaches. |
| Original Air Date—29 November 1988 Writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans revisit the Alabama tenant system depicted in their 1936 book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men". |
| Original Air Date—6 December 1988 |
| Original Air Date—13 December 1988 The story of Father Charles Coughlin who, during the Depression, used the radio to protest against what he saw as society's ills. |
| Original Air Date—20 December 1988 The historical events of nineteenth-century America as depicted in the quilts of the country's women. |
| Original Air Date—27 December 1988 An exploration of the Native Americans of 1830s western America, as seen through the eyes of European travelers Prince Maximilian of Bavaria and Swiss artist Karl Bodmer. |
| Original Air Date—3 January 1989 A profile on American writer Eudora Welty. |
| Original Air Date—10 January 1989 |
| Original Air Date—17 January 1989 The story of Emeline Bachelder, an early 19th-century New Englander who married a younger man - only to discover that he was the son she had give up when she was fourteen. |
| Original Air Date—3 October 1989 Follows the 1924 attempt by four U.S. Army Air Corps biplanes to circumnavigate the globe. |
| Season 2, Episode 2: Demon RumOriginal Air Date—10 October 1989 The spread of Prohibition from Henry Ford's Detroit factories nationwide |
| Original Air Date—17 October 1989 Lise Yasui explores three generations of her Japanese-American family - from their immigration to Oregon in the early 1900s through their imprisonment in internment camps during World War Two. |
| Original Air Date—24 October 1989 |
| Original Air Date—31 October 1989 America's experiences in France during World War I. |
| Original Air Date—7 November 1989 |
| Original Air Date—14 November 1989 |
| Original Air Date—21 November 1989 |
| Original Air Date—5 December 1989 |
| Original Air Date—12 December 1989 |
| Original Air Date—19 December 1989 |
| Original Air Date—1 January 1990 |
| Original Air Date—16 January 1990 |
| Original Air Date—29 January 1990 |
| Original Air Date—12 February 1990 |
| Season 3, Episode 1: LindberghOriginal Air Date—August 1990 |
| Original Air Date—10 October 1990 |
| Original Air Date—15 August 1990 |
| Original Air Date—22 October 1990 |
| Original Air Date—19 November 1990 |
| Original Air Date—19 November 1991 The building of the railroad between Sacramento, California and Omaha, Nebraska. |
| Original Air Date—5 November 1990 |
| Original Air Date—30 October 1990 The assassination of President James Garfield in 1880 by Charles Guiteau, who believed his actions were ordained by God, resulted in a trial where the plea "innocent by reason of insanity" was used for the first time. |
| Original Air Date—7 January 1991 |
| Original Air Date—28 January 1991 |
| Original Air Date—4 February 1991 The film explores the beginnings of America's first amusement park and takes us through its good times all the way up to its end. The show was originally produced for PBS's American Experience. |
| Original Air Date—22 April 1991 |
| Original Air Date—6 May 1991 |
| Original Air Date—30 September 1991 |
| Original Air Date—1 October 1991 |
| Original Air Date—October 1991 |
| Original Air Date—14 October 1991 Story of P.T. Barnum and his role in developing the American Circus into a large business and a cultural force. |
| Original Air Date—28 October 1991 |
| Original Air Date—11 November 1991 |
| Original Air Date—18 November 1991 |
| Original Air Date—9 December 1991 |
| Original Air Date—6 January 1992 America's love affair with the quiz show is dealt a blow when it's revealed that the games are fixed. |
| Original Air Date—13 January 1992 |
| Original Air Date—10 February 1992 |
| Original Air Date—17 February 1992 In 1875, Captain Richard Pratt escorted 72 Indian warriors suspected of murdering white settlers to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. Once there, Pratt began an ambitious experiment which involved teaching the Indians to read and write, English, putting them in uniforms and drilling them like soldiers. "Kill the Indian and the save the man," was Pratt's motto. A film about the experiment by Richard Pratt to change acculturate Native Americans into mainstream, white culture with the creation of the Carlise School for Indians in 1879. Pratt's school, and others like it, all begun in the most noble of humanistic intentions lasted well into the late 1930s. The schools were an outgrowth of the last westward expansion in the 1880s. |
| Original Air Date—20 January 1992 |
| Original Air Date—21 September 1992 |
| Original Air Date—28 October 1992 Doomed attempt to get to California in 1846. More than just a riveting tale of death, endurance and survival. The Donner Party's nightmarish journey penetrated to the very heart of the American Dream at a crucial phase of the nation's "manifest destiny. Touching some of the most powerful social, economic and political currents of the time, this extraordinary narrative remains one of the most compelling and enduring episodes to come out of the West. |
| Original Air Date—4 November 1992 Exploding dam kills thousands in massive flood catastrophe in Pennsylvania in 1889. |
| Original Air Date—11 November 1992 |
| Original Air Date—18 November 1992 |
| Original Air Date—25 November 1992 |
| Original Air Date—2 December 1992 |
| Original Air Date—11 January 1993 |
| Original Air Date—18 January 1993 The story of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP's effort to integrate public schools in the south, Simple Justice, based closely on Richard Kluger's book of the same name, recounts the remarkable legal strategy and social struggle that resulted in the US Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The Court's decision not only struck down segregated schools on the basis of race, but announced finally that America had begun to face the consequences of its dehumanizing social practice. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation along "separate but equal" terms was constitutional. Thirty years later, Charles Hamilton Houston took over Howard University's run-down segregated law school with the idea of training a cadre of elite African American lawyers who would wipe out the legal basis for segregation once and for all. Houston shaped the minds and the strategy that would triumph over segregation, but he wouldn't live to see the victory. It would be left to his brilliant student, Thurgood Marshall, to finish the work that Houston began. |
| Original Air Date—1 February 1993 |
| Original Air Date—8 February 1993 |
| Original Air Date—15 February 1993 |
| Original Air Date—22 February 1993 |
| Original Air Date—1 March 1993 |
| Original Air Date—20 September 1993 |
| Original Air Date—27 September 1993 |
| Original Air Date—27 October 1993 |
| Original Air Date—6 November 1993 |
| Original Air Date—26 January 1994 |
| Original Air Date—6 April 1994 |
| Original Air Date—25 May 1994 An award-winning documentary of the invasion of Normandy in World War II, using rare archival films and pictures from British, American, and German archives. The narrator provides the overall continuity, but the voices of over 50 participants who were involved in the staging of the invasion in Britain or were on the beaches of France bring the images to life. |
| Original Air Date—12 October 1994 |
| Original Air Date—13 October 1994 |
| Original Air Date—19 October 1994 Nineteenth-century Spiritualism. Life after death proved by "science." |
| Original Air Date—26 October 1994 |
| Original Air Date—9 November 1994 Documentary chronicling the history of World War II's "Battle of the Bulge", when the German army launched a major surprise counteroffensive against the American forces that caught them almost completely off-guard, sweeping away major portions of the front line, pushing deep into the rear areas and causing tens of thousands of casualties before it was finally halted. |
| Original Air Date—1995 Struggling to keep the family farm in the family. |
| Original Air Date—8 May 1995 |
| Original Air Date—9 May 1995 |
| Original Air Date—16 October 1995 A documentary chronicling the events surrounding the murder of famed architect Stanford White by millionaire Harry Thaw over the affections of showgirl Evelyn Nesbitt in New York in 1906. |
| Original Air Date—23 October 1995 The story of Thomas Edison's creation of a safe electric light system. |
| Original Air Date—13 November 1995 |
| Original Air Date—27 November 1995 |
| Original Air Date—13 November 1995 |
| Original Air Date—22 January 1996 |
| Original Air Date—29 January 1996 Documentary about the battle between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst over Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). Features interviews with Welles' and Hearst's co-workers also as a relative complete bio of Hearst. |
| Original Air Date—12 February 1996 |
| Original Air Date—26 February 1996 The story of America's high-altitude U-2 spy plane. |
| Original Air Date—6 October 1996 |
| Original Air Date—7 October 1996 |
| Original Air Date—20 January 1997 |
| Original Air Date—27 January 1997 |
| Original Air Date—3 February 1997 |
| Original Air Date—10 February 1997 A biography of Philo Farnsworth, an inventor of the television. |
| Original Air Date—17 February 1997 Follows the construction of the New York City subway system in the early 1900s. |
| Original Air Date—28 April 1997 The story of the female investigative reporter, Nellie Bly and her race around the world in less than 80 days. |
| Season 9, Episode 9: Gold FeverOriginal Air Date—1997 |
| Original Air Date—5 October 1997 Biography of U.S. President Harry S Truman. |
| Original Air Date—6 October 1997 |
| Original Air Date—13 October 1997 |
| Original Air Date—20 October 1997 |
| Original Air Date—27 October 1997 |
| Original Air Date—2 December 1997 |
| Original Air Date—9 December 1997 |
| Original Air Date—19 January 1998 A docudrama adaptation of Ulrich's Pulitzer-winning book, which was based on thousands of entries in the journal of Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife, in the late 1700's and early 1800's. The movie intercuts between reenactments of Ballard doing her Maine midwifery and related tasks, and Ulrich in her eight years of research on her book; in the end, clear comparisons are made between the work of the two women. |
| Original Air Date—2 February 1998 The story of Carl Graham Fisher, an Indiana entrepreneur who created Miami Beach out of the Florida swamps. |
| Original Air Date—9 February 1998 The great influenza pandemic of 1918 - the worst epidemic ever seen in the United States. |
| Original Air Date—23 February 1998 When he left the White House in 1989, Ronald Reagan was one of the most popular presidents of the century. A former Hollywood star and seemingly simple man, Reagan was consistently underestimated by his opponents. One by one, he overcame them all. Incorporating interviews with key political insiders, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and members of the Reagan family, "Reagan" explores the man who saw America as a "shining city on a hill" and himself as its heroic defender. The program follows Reagan's life from his itinerant boyhood in Illinois to his battle with "communist agitators" in the Screen Actors Guild and his dramatic 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter. Only 70 days into his presidency, a would-be assassin's bullet left him more debilitated than anyone knew. Reagan's massive military buildup and bold challenges to the Soviet Union caused his critics to portray him as a trigger-happy cowboy. But he negotiated deep cuts in nuclear weapons and resolved to end the Cold War. Five years after leaving office, Reagan announced he had Alzheimer's disease and dropped from public view. [info from DVD container] |
| Original Air Date—24 February 1998 |
| Original Air Date—2 March 1998
Next US airings: |
| Original Air Date—18 November 1998 Exploration of life in America in the first year of the 20th century, using archive film footage and photographs. |
| Original Air Date—11 January 1999 History of the American and Soviet development of the H-bomb. |
| Season 11, Episode 3: Hoover DamOriginal Air Date—18 January 1999
Next US airings: |
| Original Air Date—8 February 1999 Commander Richard Byrd's winter at the South Pole. |
| Original Air Date—15 February 1999 |
| Original Air Date—22 February 1999 The worst nuclear-power-plant accident in U.S. history. |
| Original Air Date—12 April 1999 |
| Season 11, Episode 9: Fly GirlsOriginal Air Date—1999 The story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) in World War II. |
| Season 11, Episode 10: MacArthurOriginal Air Date—17 May 1999 Biography of U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur. |
| Original Air Date—14 November 1999 |
| Original Air Date—15 November 1999 |
| Original Air Date—16 November 1999 |
| Original Air Date—17 November 1999 |
| Original Air Date—18 November 1999 |
| Original Air Date—10 January 2000 For more than thirty years, Eleanor Roosevelt was America's most powerful woman. Millions adored her, but her FBI file was thicker than a stack of phone books. She spoke out fearlessly for civil rights, and the KKK put a price on her head. She helped Franklin D. Roosevelt rise to power and was one of his most valuable political assets, but the media satirized her as an ugly busybody. Drawing on interviews with her closest relatives, friends, and biographers, as well as rare home movie footage, the film reveals the hidden dimensions of one of the century's most influential women. She was born to wealth and power but orphaned at the age of 10. Her private life was marked by tragedy, infidelity, and a never-ending search for intimacy. Yet she persevered, fighting tirelessly for social justice for all and taking a lead role in the United Nations landmark Declaration of Human Rights. |
| Original Air Date—10 February 2000 |
| Season 12, Episode 9: The DuelOriginal Air Date—2000 |
| Original Air Date—28 February 2000 |
| Season 12, Episode 11: HoudiniOriginal Air Date—2000 |
| Original Air Date—24 April 2000 |
| Original Air Date—25 April 2000 |
| Original Air Date—8 May 2000 |
| Original Air Date—24 November 2000 |
| Original Air Date—19 January 2001 Life story of the controversial African-American leader Marcus Garvey. |
| Original Air Date—19 February 2001 |
| Original Air Date—20 February 2001 |
| Original Air Date—21 February 2001 |
| Original Air Date—2 April 2001 |
| Season 13, Episode 11: Fatal FloodOriginal Air Date—2001 |
| Original Air Date—23 April 2001 |
| Original Air Date—1 October 2001 |
| Original Air Date—8 October 2001 |
| Original Air Date—11 November 2001 A documentary based on the book "War Letters; Extraordinary Correspondence From American Wars" by Andrew Carroll. |
| Original Air Date—20 January 2002 |
| Original Air Date—27 January 2002 |
| Original Air Date—24 February 2002 |
| Original Air Date—1 March 2001 |
| Original Air Date—1 April 2002 |
| Original Air Date—2 April 2001 |
| Original Air Date—21 April 2002 Few American artists have reached a wider audience, or enjoyed more widespread popularity in their own lifetime, than Ansel Adams. None has had more profound an impact on how Americans grasp the majesty of their continent, or done more to transform how people think and feel about the meaning of the natural world. A visionary photographer, a pioneer in photographic technique and a crusader for the environment, Adams would take part in an extraordinary revolution: in photography, and ways of seeing what he called "the continuous beauty of the things that are." His greatest photographs would seek to capture "the instant of revelation -- of timelessness" amidst the evanescence of the natural world. Ansel Adams is the intimate portrait of a great artist and ardent environmentalist -- for whom life and art, photography and wilderness, creativity and communication, love and expression, were inextricably connected. ANSEL ADAMS, a ninety-minute documentary film written and directed by Ric Burns, and broadcast on national public television in April 2002, provides an elegant, moving and lyrical portrait of this most eloquent and quintessentially American of photographers. |
| Original Air Date—28 April 2002 |
| Original Air Date—12 November 2002 |
| Original Air Date—13 January 2003 |
| Original Air Date—14 January 2003 |
| Original Air Date—15 January 2003 |
| Original Air Date—17 January 2003 A documentary examining the 1955 murder of a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago while visiting relatives in Mississippi, and the broad impact of his death, his funeral, and the subsequent trial and acquittal of his accused killers. |
| Original Air Date—27 January 2003 |
| Original Air Date—10 February 2003 During World War II and the era of staunch racial segregation, a Black carpenter's son named Vivien Thomas, who had a talent for surgery, along with a white surgeon named Dr. Alfred Blalock, who defied the medical establishment created a partnership that changed the course of cardiac surgery. With only a high school diploma, Thomas became a leading cardiac pioneer and educator of two generations of the United States' premiere heart surgeons. This moving documentary tells the story of Thomas and his relationship with Blalock, one that ushered in advances in surgery that are still in existence today. |
| Season 15, Episode 9: The PillOriginal Air Date—20 January 2003 A documentary recounting the development of the birth control pill. |
| Original Air Date—7 April 2003 |
| Season 15, Episode 11: SeabiscuitOriginal Air Date—29 March 2003 |
| Original Air Date—7 July 2003 |
| Original Air Date—14 July 2003 |
| Original Air Date—September 2003 |
| Original Air Date—19 January 2004 A documentary that draws on input from a broad cross-section of people to examine to last five years of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life. |
| Original Air Date—2 February 2004 |
| Original Air Date—9 February 2004 This is about the origins of Tupperware in Massachusetts. |
| Original Air Date—12 April 2004 |
| Original Air Date—3 May 2004 |
| Season 17, Episode 1: RFKOriginal Air Date—4 October 2004 |
| Season 17, Episode 2: The FightOriginal Air Date—January 2004 Documentary on the boxing match between American Joe Louis and German Max Schmeling, which captured the world's attention on June 22, 1938. |
| Original Air Date—31 January 2005 A biography of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. |
| Original Air Date—7 February 2005 The creation of the 1,500-mile Alaska-Canada Highway. |
| Season 17, Episode 5: KinseyOriginal Air Date—14 February 2005 Documentary examining the impact and continuing influence of 'Alfred Kinsey' 's groundbreaking research on human sexuality. |
| Original Air Date—4 April 2005 |
| Original Air Date—11 April 2005 The story of Cyrus Field and the creation of the transatlantic telegraph line. |
| Original Air Date—25 April 2005 |
| Original Air Date—May 2005 |
| Original Air Date—January 2004 A documentary on the curious American domestic terrorist group, infamous for the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst. |
| Original Air Date—4 July 2005 |
| Original Air Date—1 November 2005 |
| Original Air Date—31 October 2005 The story of the Apollo 8 mission to the moon. |
| Original Air Date—14 November 2005 |
| Original Air Date—15 November 2005 |
| Original Air Date—23 January 2006 |
| Original Air Date—30 January 2006 The story of the Nuremberg Trials and Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor. |
| Original Air Date—6 February 2006 The true story of the legendary outlaw Jesse James. |
| Season 18, Episode 8: HijackedOriginal Air Date—25 February 2006 |
| Original Air Date—21 March 2006 The life and career of American playwright Eugene O'Neill. |
| Original Air Date—10 April 2006 |
| Original Air Date—24 April 2006 |
| Original Air Date—8 May 2006 This one hour documentary examines the life of the famed Sharp Shooter and Wild West performer, Annie Oakley from her birth in mid nineteenth century rural Pennsylvania to her death in 1926. Many myths are overturned and the program also features a little known trial when Annie Oakley had to sue The Hearst Newspaper chain all throughout the country for libel when they reported the activities of someone who was impersonating the famed sharpshooter and besmirching her reputation. |
| Original Air Date—18 March 2006 |
| Original Air Date—2 October 2006 |
| Original Air Date—9 October 2006 |
| Original Air Date—16 October 2006 |
| Original Air Date—23 October 2006 |
| Original Air Date—30 October 2006 |
| Original Air Date—6 November 2006 |
| Original Air Date—29 January 2006 |
| Original Air Date—5 February 2007 |
| Original Air Date—12 February 2007 |
| Original Air Date—2 April 2007 |
| Original Air Date—9 April 2007 |
| Original Air Date—23 April 2007 |
| Original Air Date—30 April 2007 |
| Original Air Date—1 May 2007 |
| Original Air Date—15 May 2007 |
| Original Air Date—14 January 2008 |
| Original Air Date—21 January 2008 |
| Original Air Date—3 February 2008 |
| Original Air Date—4 February 2008 |
| Original Air Date—10 February 2008 |
| Original Air Date—17 February 2008 |
| Season 20, Episode 7: Kit CarsonOriginal Air Date—18 February 2008 |
| Original Air Date—24 February 2008 |
| Original Air Date—25 February 2008 |
| Original Air Date—31 March 2008 |
| Original Air Date—April 2008 |
| Original Air Date—21 April 2008 |
| Original Air Date—5 May 2008 |
| Original Air Date—6 May 2008 |
| Original Air Date—26 January 2009 |
| Original Air Date—2 February 2009 |
| Original Air Date—9 February 2009 |
| Original Air Date—23 February 2009 |
| Original Air Date—13 April 2009 |
| Original Air Date—20 April 2009 |
| Original Air Date—27 April 2009 |
| Original Air Date—4 May 2009 |
| Original Air Date—11 May 2009 |
| Original Air Date—18 May 2009 |
| Original Air Date—26 October 2009 |
| Original Air Date—2 November 2009 |
| Season 22, Episode 3: Hoover DamOriginal Air Date—9 November 2009 |
| Original Air Date—16 November 2009 |
| Season 22, Episode 5: SeabiscuitOriginal Air Date—23 November 2009 |
| Season 22, Episode 9: Earth DaysOriginal Air Date—2010 |
Related Links
You may add a new episode for this TV series by clicking the 'add episode' button