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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.
Marcus Garvey, a black nationalist leader from Jamaica, had great successes and failures before being jailed and deported from the US in 1927. He influenced politics and culture around the world.
America's most celebrated silent film actress, Mary Pickford was also a businesswoman who played a pivotal role in shaping the first new media of the twentieth century and building Hollywood into the center of the motion picture industry.
The first officially formed regiment of northern black soldiers who fought in the Civil War was formed after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and consisted mostly of free men.
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.
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.
The little-known story of a black independent film industry that produced nearly 500 feature films for African American audiences, dealing with issues such as crime, racism and lynching.
Martha Ballard was a midwife and mother in Maine following the American Revolution. From her diary, see 18th-century America through a woman's eyes.
In 1897, Arctic explorer Robert Peary caused a sensation when he returned from Greenland with five Eskimos. Within months, four of the Eskimos had died, leaving a seven-year-old boy named Minik alone in a foreign land.
The country's oldest beauty contest is an Atlantic City seaside tradition that has become a battleground and a barometer for the changing position of women in society.
John Scopes' free speech trial pitted science against religion, and Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan, after the teacher presented Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in a Tennessee school.
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.
Richard Sears and Alva Curtis Roebuck brought consumer goods to the hands of every American with their Sears and Roebuck catalogue.
Dr. George Parkman, one of Boston's richest citizens, went missing in 1849. Accused by a janitor, a respected Harvard professor was hanged for Parkman's murder after a sensational trial.
Chicago teen Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi after whistling at a white woman. The acquittal of his murderers mobilized the civil rights movement, eventually leading to the Montgomery bus boycott.
When Harry Thaw murdered Stanford White over showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, the sensational story had everything: money, power, class, love, rage, lust, and revenge against the backdrop of New York City.
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 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.
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.
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.
The only American president to resign, Richard Nixon faced impeachment after the Watergate scandal, but also ended the Vietnam War and improved relations with China and the Soviet Union. Part of the award-winning The Presidents collection.
President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger initiated a secret diplomatic breakthrough with Mao Tse-tung that shocked and changed the world.
The story of the dramatic post-World War II tribunal that brought Nazi leaders to justice and defines trial procedure for state criminals to this day.
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.
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