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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1897, Arctic explorer Robert Peary caused a sensation when he returned from Greenland with five Eskimos. Within months, four of the Eskimos had died, leaving a seven-year-old boy named Minik alone in a foreign land.
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.
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.
From Reconstruction to the 1960s, this film offers a portrait of New Orleans that reflects the best and the worst in America: Mardi Gras, jazz music, and struggles with segregation.
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 only American president to resign, Richard Nixon faced impeachment after the Watergate scandal, but also ended the Vietnam War and improved relations with China and the Soviet Union. Part of the award-winning The Presidents collection.
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.
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