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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.
Bascom Lamar Lunsford and his campaign to preserve mountain music and dance.
Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst fought to suppress a film by boy genius director Orson Welles (of War of the Worlds fame). A brutal, fictionalized portrait of Hearst, the movie would eventually be acknowledged as one of cinema's masterpieces.
The influential musical pioneers from Appalachia whose recordings ("Wildwood Flower", "Keep on the Sunny Side") lifted spirits during the Great Depression. Their songs and style laid the foundations for American folk, country and bluegrass music.
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.
Prohibition's effect on Detroit, Michigan, the first major American city to "go dry," and the growth of the liquor smuggling industry.
The personal journey of three generations of a Japanese American family, including their stint in internment camps during World War II.
Before World War II, San Francisco's Chinatown was closed to outsiders, but second generation Chinese Americans defied cultural tradition to pursue their passion for American music and dance.
Nearly every American town has a baseball diamond. A wry philosophical essay on what makes baseball the great American pastime.
French settlers in Louisiana merged with African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans and others to create Cajun and Zydeco musical traditions.
Of all the alphabet agencies of the New Deal, none captured the public's imagination like J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. G-Men were public heroes, doing battle with John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde and other criminals.
A nostalgic and humorous look at how old world Chicago lives side by side with the new.
The bizarre saga of the Symbionese Liberation Army, Patty Hearst's kidnapping, Hearst's conversion to her captors' cause, and the bank robberies and shootouts that followed.
John Philip Sousa was America's favorite bandmaster. His organization was the first to make money on tour, and he helped invent the small town marching band.
The trial of Charles Julius Guiteau, who assassinated President James A. Garfield, turned into a public battle over the meaning of insanity.
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.
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.
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.
An updated look at the Alabama tenant farmer families that Walker Evans and James Agee documented in their 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
In 1931 Grace Hubbard Fortescue murdered a local Hawaiian accused of raping her daughter, a Navy wife. Island racial tensions flared when Fortescue received a one-hour sentence for her crime.
The little-known story of a black independent film industry that produced nearly 500 feature films for African American audiences, dealing with issues such as crime, racism and lynching.
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.
A complex portrait of Mormonism. From Joseph Smith's discovery of gold tablets to persecution, migration, and settlement in Utah, the film explores the history of the most American of religions.
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.
When Harry Thaw murdered Stanford White over showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, the sensational story had everything: money, power, class, love, rage, lust, and revenge against the backdrop of New York City.
Between 1854 and 1929 more than 100,000 abused or orphaned children were sent by train to the Midwest to begin new lives in foster families.
The story of the polio crusade pays tribute to a time when Americans banded together to conquer a terrible disease. The medical breakthrough saved countless lives and had a pervasive impact on American philanthropy that continues to be felt today.
Legendary bank robber John Dillinger garnered the admiration of many Americans hurt by the Great Depression. But J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI took him down with a message: crime doesn't pay.
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