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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.
The story of a frontiersman farmer and a wealthy Confederate slave-owner's daughter. He would become president of the nation during its worst crisis, the Civil War, and free slaves as the Great Emancipator.
Just days after the Civil War ended, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre. As a fractured nation mourned, a manhunt closed in on his assassin, the twenty-six-year-old actor, John Wilkes Booth.
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.
Murderer, martyr, hero - John Brown's violent crusade against slavery would divide the nation and spark the Civil War.
In the decade after the Civil War, former slaves sing their way into a nation's heart with spirituals, the religious anthems of slavery.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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