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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.
Meet the Confederate guerrilla who helped invent his own myth after the Civil War as a Western Robin Hood. In reality, Jesse James was a brutal thief and murderer.
A peanut farmer who rose to become America's thirty-ninth president, Jimmy Carter was a failure in his single term in office. He turned to humanitarian work as an ex-president. Part of the award-winning The Presidents collection.
As a New York Yankee, Joe DiMaggio was a star in baseball's golden age. Privately, his celebrity status and tumultuous marriage to Marilyn Monroe brought him pain.
The second U.S. president, John Adams, was arguably the most influential of the founding fathers. Using letters John and his wife Abigail exchanged, this film explores their tumultuous times.
Murderer, martyr, hero - John Brown's violent crusade against slavery would divide the nation and spark the Civil War.
When an earthen dam broke without warning, a small city in Pennsylvania was swept away in a wall of water over 30 feet high.
In 1978 over 900 people led by Rev. Jim Jones died in the largest mass murder-suicide in history, at Jonestown, Guyana. The story is told by survivors, Temple defectors, relatives, and journalists.
Between 1890 and 1920, 12 million people emigrated from Europe arriving in New York Harbor and Ellis Island. It was one of the largest single human migrations in history.
In the decade after the Civil War, former slaves sing their way into a nation's heart with spirituals, the religious anthems of slavery.
A portrait of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert as they confront Alabama governor George Wallace over his determination to keep the all-white University of Alabama segregated.
A saga of ambition, wealth, family loyalty and personal tragedy. From Joseph Kennedy's rise on Wall Street, through John, Robert and Edward's successes and scandals, the family has left a storied political legacy.
With data compiled from tens of thousands of sex questionnaires, Alfred Kinsey changed America's views about sex when he published the bestselling Kinsey Reports.
The legendary trapper, scout and soldier helped map the Oregon Trail. The ultimate frontiersman, Carson inspired popular novels before being associated with the "Long Walk" of the Navajo people.
America's most renowned football coach, Knute Rockne of Notre Dame, was a pivotal figure in the sudden rise of sports to a position of financial and commercial power in American culture.
Originally settled as a mail stop, Las Vegas has undergone several makeovers, from an Old West vacation town, to a mafia haven, to the "Atomic City" and "Sin City."
Against Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, General George Custer and his men were badly surprised and surrounded. The quick battle with no white survivors, told from both sides.
Sworn in after the assassination of JFK, Lyndon Johnson pushed progressive programs like the Civil Rights Act through Congress and won a term as president before the Vietnam War eroded his support. Part of the award-winning The Presidents collection.
An updated look at the Alabama tenant farmer families that Walker Evans and James Agee documented in their 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
A look at five real-life "Rosies," the reality of working in defense plants during World War II and the women's reactions to having to give up those jobs for returning GIs.
The first man to fly across the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh was unprepared for the attention, particularly after his son was kidnapped. Strongly opposed to U.S. involvement in World War II, Lindbergh did support the war after Pearl Harbor.
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.
The story of the Mexican American miners whose labor battles shaped the course of Arizona history. It was only in 1946 that a two-tier wage system for white and Mexican Americans was abolished.
John Wesley Powell's epic journey into the unknown Grand Canyon was filled with adventure as his team mapped the Colorado River for the first time.
An American Communist family flees to Moscow in the late 1920s to avoid imprisonment. In 1935 they return to America but can not bring their 5-year-old son.
General Douglas MacArthur led American troops in World Wars I and II before being fired by President Harry Truman during the Korean War. A portrait of a complex, imposing and fascinating American.
Malcolm X, a man who both terrified and inspired, expressed the anger and struggle of black people for freedom in the 1960s. Who killed Malcolm X and why remains a mystery.
Joseph Goebbels, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, was the mastermind behind Adolf Hitler's success. His diaries reveal his chilling justifications for racism and the Holocaust.
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.
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