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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 civil rights leader in Harlem before entering politics, Powell was one of the most charismatic black leaders of the 20th century. He served as a New York congressman during the Fifties and Sixties.
The life of the legendary photographer, known best for his black and white images of the wilderness of the American West.
Bascom Lamar Lunsford and his campaign to preserve mountain music and dance.
After the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, British and American pilots delivered tons of food and fuel to the German city by airplane for nearly a year in the first battle of the Cold War.
Mathematician John Nash's career was cut short by paranoid schizophrenia, but his work became a foundation of modern economic theory. In 1994, as Nash began to show signs of improving, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics.
Following the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic National Convention saw a clash of political visions on the convention floor and violence outside between police and protesters on the streets of Chicago.
An African American minister whose dream of ending racism galvanized millions of Americans in the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968 but left an enduring legacy.
From a small-town Texas murder emerged a landmark civil rights case. The little-known story of the Mexican American lawyers who took Hernandez v. Texas to the Supreme Court, challenging Jim Crow-style discrimination.
For 21 years, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley ruled the city, building the Sears Tower and O'Hare Airport. He was mayor during Chicago's tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention.
This acclaimed 14-hour series covers all of the major events of the civil rights movement from 1954-1985, tracing African Americans' struggle for equality and justice.
Cuba's Communist leader defied the odds, surviving his Soviet benefactors, the wrath of U.S. presidents, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and several assassination attempts.
The Freedom Summer of 1964 saw whites and blacks coming together in a nonviolent army to register African American voters, create schools and bring national attention to the struggle for racial equality.
The Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate promised segregation forever, but after an assassination attempt he asked to be forgiven by African Americans.
In a nostalgic celebration of old fashioned neighborhood life, the black residents of Tulsa relive their community's remarkable rise and tragic decline.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was a decorated general, a skillful politician, a tough Cold War adversary and one of America's least understood presidents. Part of the award-winning 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The story behind the development of the oral contraceptive that put women in control of birth control.
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