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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.
A minute-by-minute account, on both sides of the Pacific, leading up to the surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which brought America into World War II.
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.
Legendary bank robber John Dillinger garnered the admiration of many Americans hurt by the Great Depression. But J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI took him down with a message: crime doesn't pay.
Television game shows became an instant national phenomenon in 1955, but four years later contestant Charles van Doren admitted they were a scam.
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.
Her 1963 warnings about the effects of pesticides and herbicides - especially DDT - sparked a revolution in environmental policy and created a new ecological consciousness.
While the U.N. debated strategies for control of atomic energy, the U.S. Navy was preparing for nuclear tests on Bikini Island, forcing residents to move away for more than 40 years.
Roman Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin used the power of radio to become one of the first media stars as he railed against the nation's economic system in the midst of the Depression.
The life of the president who saw America as a "shining city on a hill" and himself as its heroic defender. Favoring deregulation and lower taxes, Reagan experienced wide popularity and controversy as well. Part of the award-winning The Presidents collection.
The stories of ordinary people in the tumultuous years after the Civil War, when America struggled to rebuild the Union and integrate former slaves into the life of the nation.
In the early 1830s Texas was home to more than 20,000 U.S. settlers, and 4,000 Mexican Tejanos. Still ruled by Mexico, the land was about to be mired in war. The Tejanos had to pick a side.
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.
American prisoners of war in North Vietnam tell of their experiences at the Hanoi Hilton and other notorious prisons. More than 20 veterans share their accounts, including Senator John McCain.
The remarkable and tragic life of the third Kennedy son, Robert F. Kennedy, who was the probable Democratic presidential candidate of 1968 when he was assassinated.
A look at the poor Scottish emigrant boy who built a fortune in telegraphy, railroads and steel, and then began systematically to give it all away.
The evocative stories of teenage hoboes crisscrossing America on trains during the Great Depression.
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.
Head of the most powerful family in America, billionaire John D. Rockefeller ran Standard Oil, a despised monopoly. It was up to John Jr. and his vast philanthropy to change the family's reputation.
Men and women, black and white, risked their lives to carve an elaborate network of escape routes out of slavery using trails, back roads, safe houses, river crossings and night trains.
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 Michael Curley and his sophisticated political machine dominated Boston for almost half a century, once winning a campaign from jail while Curley served a sentence for fraud.
The trial of nine falsely accused African American teens in Alabama would draw North and South into their sharpest conflict since the Civil War.
One of the most remarkable thoroughbred racehorses in history, Seabiscuit was the long shot that captured America's heart during the Depression.
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.
The legal efforts by a team of African American lawyers to eradicate segregation case by case and state by state ultimately led to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
The legendary tale of Emeline Gurney, who - as the story goes - sold an illegitimate child at the age of 14 only to marry him at a later age. She was cast out of 19th-century New England society and died in poverty.
The life story of Aimee Semple McPherson, the controversial and popular religious evangelist who was instrumental in bringing conservative Protestantism into mainstream culture and American politics.
In 1936, Walter Reuther fought auto makers to recognize the United Auto Workers. GM and Ford could not stop one of the worst battles of the American labor movement.
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