American Experience Films
Series
Pub. Date
[2015].
Description
By the dawn of the nineteenth century, tuberculosis had killed one in seven of all the people who had ever lived. The disease struck America with a vengeance, ravaging communities and touching the lives of almost every family. The battle against the deadly bacteria had a profound and lasting impact on the country, It shaped medical and scientific pursuits, social habits, economic development, western expansion, and government policy. The story is...
2) JFK
Pub. Date
c2013
Description
This film explores Kennedy's childhood years as the privileged but sickly son of one of the wealthiest men in America, his early political career as a lackluster congressman, his successful run for the U.S. Senate, and the game-changing presidential campaign that made him the youngest elected president in U.S. history.
3) The Big Burn
Author
Pub. Date
c2014
Description
Inspired by Timothy Egan's best-selling book, The Big Burn is the dramatic story of an unimaginable wildfire that swept across the Northern Rockies in the summer of 1910. The fire devoured more than three million acres in 36 hours, confronting the fledgling U.S. Forest Service with a catastrophe that would define the agency and the nation's fire policy for the rest of the 20th century and beyond.
Pub. Date
[2014].
Description
Tells the story of the dawn of forensic investigation, focusing on a number of cases of death by poisoning as well as accidental death by exposure to deadly chemicals. Examines the pioneering efforts of New York's first medical examiner Charles Norris and his assistant, toxicologist Alexander Gettler.
Pub. Date
[2022]
Description
It is the fascinating and surprising story of the iconic American garment. Worn by everyone from presidents to supermodels, farmers to rock stars, they're more than just a pair of pants America's tangled past is woven deeply into the indigo fabric. From its roots in slavery to the Wild West, youth culture, the civil rights movement, rock and roll, hippies, high fashion, and hip-hop, jeans are the fabric on which the history of American culture and...
Series
Pub. Date
[2011]
Description
The fire that tore through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the gruesome culmination of years of unrest in America's most profitable manufacturing industry. Two years earlier, led by a spontaneous walkout in the same factory, twenty thousand garment workers, in the largest women's strike in American history, took to the streets of New York to protest working conditions. They gained the support of both progressives...
7) Space men
Pub. Date
©2016.
Description
On an August morning in 1960, Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger stepped out of a helium balloon twenty miles above Earth, hurtling down at over 400 miles per hour. The little-known story of the men whose scientific experiments laid critical groundwork for NASA's manned space program, a decade before President Kennedy committed the nation to sending a man to the moon.
Pub. Date
[2015]
Description
Walt Disney was uniquely adept at art as well as commerce, a master filmmaker who harnessed the power of technology and storytelling. This new film examines Disney's complex life and enduring legacy. Features rare archival footage from the Disney vaults, scenes from some of his greatest films, interviews with biographers and animators, and the designers who helped turn his dream of Disneyland into reality.
10) Rachel Carson
Pub. Date
[2017]
Description
Often called the mother of the modern environmental movement, Rachel Carson rocked the world in 1962 with her book Silent Spring, which warned the American public of the impact of pesticides on the environment and unleashed an extraordinary national debate about science and safety. At the center of that firestorm stood Ms. Carson, a strong, intensely private woman who balanced her love of the natural world and passion for writing with personal strife....
Pub. Date
[2013]
Description
"Radicals. Agitators. Troublemakers. Liberators. Called many names, the abolitionists tore the nation apart in order to create a more perfect union. Men and women, black and white, Northerners and Southerners, poor and wealthy, these passionate anti-slavery activists fought body and soul in the most important civil rights crusade in American history"--Container.
12) The vote
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
One hundred years after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, it tells the dramatic culmination story of the hard-fought campaign waged by American women for the right to vote, a transformative cultural and political movement that resulted in the largest expansion of voting rights in US history.
Pub. Date
[2015]
Description
Documentary about Thomas Edison that explores the complex alchemy that accounts for the enduring celebrity of America's most famous inventor. It offers new perspectives on the man and his milieu, and illuminates not only the true nature of invention, but its role in turn-of-the-century America's rush into the future.
Pub. Date
[2023]
Description
For generations, Monopoly has been America's favorite board game, a love letter to unbridled capitalism and, for better or worse, the impulses that make our free-market society tick. An exhilarating game of no-holds-barred competition and brutal domination of opponents, it's a celebration of greed and accumulation of wealth with only one player standing at the end.
Pub. Date
c2012
Description
Explores the insular religious community, whose intense faith and adherence to 400-year-old traditions have by turns captivated and baffled Americans for more than a century. The film examines the beliefs, lifestyle, and history of the Amish, as well as their complex relationship to mainstream American culture. The Amish is part history, part observational documentary that takes viewers into the world of the Amish.
Pub. Date
©2011
Description
Explores the dramatic event that launched a worldwide rights movement. When police raided a Mafia-run gay bar in Greenwich Village, the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969, gay men and women did something they had not done before: they fought back. As the streets of New York erupted into violent protests and street demonstrations, the collective anger announced that the gay rights movement had arrived.
Pub. Date
[2011]
Description
On August 15th, 1914, the Panama Canal opened, connecting the world's two largest oceans and signaling America's emergence as a global superpower. This film, using an extraordinary archive of photographs and footage, interviews with canal workers, and firsthand accounts of life in the Canal Zone, unravels the remarkable story of one of the world's most significant technological achievements.
Pub. Date
[2013]
Description
What began as a broadcast performance of H.G. Welles' fantasy, The War of the Worlds, turned into one of the biggest mass hysteria events in U.S. history. American Experience examines the elements that together created this frenzy, including our longtime fascination with life on Mars; the emergence of radio as a powerful new medium; and the creative wunderkind Orson Welles, the twenty-three-year-old director of the drama and mischief-maker supreme....
Series
Pub. Date
[2020]
Description
"The Super Outbreak of 1974 was the most intense tornado outbreak on record, tearing a vicious path of destruction across thirteen states, generating 148 tornadoes from Alabama to Ontario, damaging thousands of homes, and killing more than 300 people. Meteorologist Tetsuya Theodore 'Ted' Fujita spent ten months studying the outbreak's aftermath in the most extensive aerial tornado study ever conducted, and through detailed mapping and leaps of scientific...
Series
Pub. Date
[2023]
Description
"Raised in the small all-Black Florida town of Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston studied at Howard University before arriving in New York in 1925. She would soon become a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, best remembered for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. But even as she gained renown in the Harlem literary circles, Hurston was also discovering anthropology at Barnard College with the renowned Franz Boas. She would make several trips to...