Current Season

Writer and journalist George Plimpton (1927–2003) did not show much early promise when he flunked out of the college preparatory school Exeter (Phillips Exeter Academy), where his family held an esteemed reputation. In a film excerpt, Plimpton's son reads his father's essay: "How Failing at ...

"It was like a light on top of the Empire State Building went out when he died," says filmmaker Ric Burns about Plimpton's death in 2003. "You felt like he couldn't die. His indescribably handsome, boyish quality kept on giving the older he got. His ...

Join American Masters and The Paris Review for an extended, pre-broadcast online preview of Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself, exploring the participatory journalist’s tall-tale life through previously unseen material and new interviews with family, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Hugh Hefner, Gay Talese, Graydon Carter, The ...

This timeline of key moments in environmental history and the environmental movement is adapted from Tom Turner's chronology for American Earth, an anthology edited by Bill McKibben. The timeline includes important early writing, the first conservation groups, disasters, legislation, community and non-profit activism, and more. Early ...

In this web exclusive video, learn why the Indian women of the Chipko Movement became known as tree huggers and what their defensive tactics were. The Kenyan environmental and political activist Wangari Maathai (1940 - 2011) founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977 and was ...

For the April 1, 1985, issue of Sports Illustrated, George Plimpton profiled Sidd Finch, an incredible rookie baseball pitcher for The New York Mets. The story was too good to be true, and Plimpton asked his then personal assistant at The Paris Review, the now ...

In the 1980s the fate of the Amazon rainforest turned on an unlikely environmental hero: a poor rubber tapper and union organizer in Brazil named Chico Mendes (1944 - 1988).

By Mark Kitchell, producer, director, writer of A Fierce Green Fire Like Berkeley in the Sixties, my previous work which has become one of the defining films about the protest movements of the 1960s, A Fierce Green Fire started with the idea that a big-picture ...

In the late 1960s, the Sierra Club's fight to save the Grand Canyon from dams was met by retaliation by the IRS. Between the Sierra Club's advertising campaign and the involvement of the IRS, public opinion was galvanized to protect the Grand Canyon. This video ...