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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.
Richard Byrd was hailed as the greatest American polar explorer after claiming to fly an airplane over both the north and south poles. In 1934 he became the first to experience winter in Antarctica's interior.
Politics, culture, race relations, and technology in a year of change, from Gibson Girls to immigrants, Booker T. Washington to W.E.B. Du Bois, striking coal miners to the Galveston hurricane, new inventions, and a presidential election.
The life of the legendary photographer, known best for his black and white images of the wilderness of the American West.
In the Philippines, the most daring rescue mission of World War II took place when Army Rangers liberated 513 prisoners of war three years after the Bataan Death March.
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.
City of the Century chronicles Chicago's dramatic transformation from a swampy frontier town of fur traders and Native Americans to a massive metropolis that was the quintessential American city of the nineteenth century.
The dramatic story of a Vietnamese mother, the Amerasian daughter she sent away for adoption, and their reunion 22 years after the Vietnam War.
Alexander Hamilton -- founding father and coauthor of the Federalist Papers -- went up against political rival and former vice president Aaron Burr in one of history's most famous duels.
As First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt supported President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies and advocated for civil rights. She became one of the 20th century's most influential women.
In 1927, the Mississippi River flooded from New Orleans up to Illinois, leaving a million people homeless and leading to a major black migration to the North. A dramatic natural disaster story.
During World War II more than a thousand women signed up to fly with the U.S. military as WASPS. 38 died in service, though they received no benefits as they had no official military status.
The Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate promised segregation forever, but after an assassination attempt he asked to be forgiven by African Americans.
During the Great Depression, Americans built the Hoover Dam, overcoming technical challenges to erect one of the greatest engineering works in history.
The world famous escape artist was an entrepreneur most famous for his underwater acts. He could escape from everything - except his own mortality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Equipment failure, human error and bad luck led to the country's worst nuclear accident in 1979. Radioactive gases were released inside the plant, and there was threat of a widespread meltdown.
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.
John Scopes' free speech trial pitted science against religion, and Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan, after the teacher presented Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in a Tennessee school.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt constitute the world's largest piece of sculpture on a hillside in South Dakota, completed by temperamental and determined artist Gutzon Borgium.
Dr. George Parkman, one of Boston's richest citizens, went missing in 1849. Accused by a janitor, a respected Harvard professor was hanged for Parkman's murder after a sensational trial.
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.
The history of New York City and the people and forces that have shaped it over the past 400 years is told in a seven-part 14.5-hour series.
President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger initiated a secret diplomatic breakthrough with Mao Tse-tung that shocked and changed the world.
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