Amanda Pollak
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.
Description
Like everything else about General George Custer, his martyrdom was shrouded in controversy and contradictions. The final act of his larger-than-life career played out on a grand stage with a spellbound public engrossed in the drama. In the end, his death would launch one of the greatest myths in American history. Part of the Wild West collection.
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.
Description
Documents the story of assassin, James Earl Ray, his target, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the seething, turbulent forces in American society that led these two men to their violent and tragic collision in Memphis in April of 1968. Explores the wildly disparate, yet fatefully entwined stories of Ray and King to create a complex, engaging, and thought-provoking portrait of America in that crisis-laden year.
5) 1964
Description
It was the year of the Beatles and the Civil Rights Act; of the Gulf of Tonkin and Barry Goldwater's campaign for the presidency; the year that Americans learned smoking was bad for their health and Cassius Clay became Mohammed Ali; the year that cities across the country erupted in violence and Americans tried to make sense of the assassination of their president. Based on The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964, the film will follow some of the...
Description
For this television series, Peter Sagal grabbed a red, white, and blue Harley Davidson and drove across the United States to try to understand how regular Americans feel about the constitution. He sought out many different points of view on what different parts of it mean. He explored how federalism has worked and where the holes are in it. Holes like the federal government's stand on marijuana and the state's right to legalize it. He examined how...
7) Space men
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.
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.
Description
Featuring the men and women who lived and worked at Grand Coulee in the wake of the Great Depression and the Native people whose lives were changed alongside historians and engineers, the film explores how the tension between technological achievement and environmental impact hangs over the project's legacy.
10) American veteran
Description
Today, America has nearly eighteen million living military veterans, from the Greatest Generation to men and women coming home from recent tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. They join the now-silent ranks of American veterans reaching back to our earliest conflict, the Revolutionary War.
11) The great war
Author
Description
In conjunction with the 100th anniversary of America's entry into the war on April 6, 1917, a six-hour documentary presented over three nights, explores how World War I changed America and the world. Drawing on the latest scholarship, including unpublished diaries, memoirs and letters, it tells the rich and complex story of the conflict through the voices of nurses, journalists, aviators and the American troops who came to be known as 'doughboys.'...
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