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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.
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.
America's first great songwriter, Stephen Foster, wrote 200 songs including "Oh! Susanna" and "Camptown Races." Largely unhappy, Foster died a penniless alcoholic at 37.
Sleek designs and revolutionary diesel engines made the U.S. passenger train system the envy of the world in the late 1930s.
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.
A new religion called spiritualism affected the nation in the era of Abraham Lincoln, P. T. Barnum and Frederick Douglass. The movement faded by 1880 as frauds were revealed.
Though first seen only as an expensive luxury for doctors and businessmen, Alexander Graham Bell's telephone soon transformed American life and became a necessity.
The pioneering researchers in the effort to conceive babies through in vitro fertilization faced daunting obstacles and much controversy before the world's first test tube baby was born on July 25, 1978.
The evolution of rhythm and blues through the careers of singers Ruth Brown and Charles Brown, from the 1940s into the 50s, with contemporary performances by both.
Author, soldier, scientist, outdoorsman and caring father, he was the youngest man to become president. He embodied the confidence and exuberance of America at the turn of the century. Part of the award-winning The Presidents collection.
Ingenious entrepreneurs, brilliant engineers, armies of workers, Native Americans, and the Credit Mobilier scandal figure in the remarkable story of how a railroad was built connecting California to the East.
A brilliant scientist, Oppenheimer was tasked with the development of the atomic bomb in the top-secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico during World War II.
A personal story of one family's dramatic effort to hold onto their family farm in Iowa as massive foreclosures sweep the nation in the 1990s.
As president, Harry Truman was responsible for dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, ending World War II and finding America's place in the international order at the start of the Cold War. Part of the award-winning The Presidents collection.
The plastic food container that became a phenomenally successful business - and an American cultural icon.
In Vietnam, a U.S. battalion marched into a deadly ambush. Half a world away, a student demonstration turned violent for the first time. Two days in 1967 revealed a nation divided over a war that continues to haunt us.
The greatest hero of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant was an ineffective president who was ill equipped to manage Reconstruction. His two terms in office were rocked by racial conflict and corruption scandals.
The story of the end of World War II, told through American and Japanese first-hand accounts. From the firebombing of Tokyo to the dropping of the atomic bomb, the film chronicles the dreadful losses.
A war in southeast Asia changed a generation and continues to color American thinking today. This 11-hour series analyzes the costs and consequences of the Vietnam War.
The journey of Prince Maximilian, German naturalist, and artist Karl Bodmer, who explored the Mississippi River area from 1832-1834 documenting the landscape, plants and the lives of Native Americans.
Today one of the most-recognized figures in American literary history, poet Walt Whitman, author of Leaves of Grass and chronicler of the damage done by Civil War, was denounced by critics in his own time.
From the Revolutionary War to Operation Desert Storm - newly discovered letters read by celebrity actors tell of courage, longing, and sacrifice.
A six-hour series on how the West was lost and won, from the Gold Rush in 1848 until the end of the Indian Wars at Wounded Knee in 1893 when Native Americans saw their way of life all but destroyed.
The story of Native peoples’ valiant resistance to expulsion from their lands and the extinction of their culture -- from the Wampanoags of New England, who used their alliance with the English to weaken rival tribes (episode 1, “After the Mayflower”), to the bold new leaders of the 1970s who harnessed the momentum of the civil rights movement to forge a pan-Indian identity (episode 5, “Wounded Knee”). Also, contemporary Native Americans tell their own stories and NativeNow explores important issues of language, sovereignty and enterprise.
Robert Marshall, Aldo Leopold and Howard Zahniser dedicated their lives to protect the shrinking American wilderness. As a result, the Wilderness Act passed in 1964.
The tale of oil-seeking mavericks whose risk-taking, sweat and dreams changed an American industry.
George Eastman introduced the Kodak and Brownie camera systems and transformed photography into something anybody could do.
President Woodrow Wilson is credited with creating the Federal Reserve, though he is most revered for leading America during World War I. In 1919 he helped create the League of Nations. Part of the award-winning The Presidents collection.
Robert Moses built bridges, highways, Jones Beach, Lincoln Center and the United Nations in New York. His were some of the most ambitious -- and controversial -- public works projects ever conceived.
Brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright built a flying machine that made its first flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903, and changed transportation forever.
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