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"Most people are familiar with the famous Precolumbian civilizations of the Aztecs and Maya of Mexico, but few realize just how advanced were contemporary cultures in the American Southwest. Here lie some of the most remarkable monuments of America's prehistoric past, such as Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. Visitors marvel at the impressive ruined pueblos and spectacular cliff dwellings, but often have little idea of the cultures that produced these...
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Ken Burns documents the worst human-made ecological disaster in American history, when a frenzied wheat boom on the southern Plains, followed by a decade-long drought during the 1930s, nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation. Menacing black blizzards killed farmers' crops and livestock, threatened the lives of their children, and forced thousands of desperate families to pick up and move elsewhere. Vivid interviews, dramatic photographs, and...
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In a vast and all-embracing study of Africa, from the origins of mankind to the AIDS epidemic, John Iliffe refocuses its history on the peopling of an environmentally hostile continent. Africans have been pioneers struggling against disease and nature, and their social, economic and political institutions have been designed to ensure their survival. In the context of medical progress and other twentieth-century innovations, however, the same institutions...
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The book Why Didn't I Think of That! Includes the passage "If a toy has magic, when people see it they say, 'Oooh! What is that?' . . . It appeals to the kid in everybody." That same kind of magic captures "the kid in everybody" when they pick up Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them. Timeless Toys represents one of the finest documentaries and displays of modern toys ever written. Author Tim Walsh, a successful toy inventor...
7) Prohibition
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This videodisc explores the extraordinary story of what happens when a freedom-loving nation outlaws the sale of intoxicating liquor, and the disastrous unintended consequences that follow. The utterly relevant cautionary tale raises profound questions about the proper role of government and the limits of legislating morality. When the country goes dry in 1920, after a century of debate, millions of law-abiding Americans become lawbreakers overnight....
9) From Hell
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In 1888 London's Whitechapel slums, poor women like Mary Kelly and her friends walk the streets for a living. When the streetwalkers begin to be murdered one by one, it attracts the attention of Inspector Abberline, who takes a personal interest in the case, and Mary Kelly. Now he must use his psychic abilities to stop the most notorious serial killer in history--Jack the Ripper--before Mary is killed.
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The story of the American Indians has, until now, been told as a 500-year tragedy, a story of violent and fatal encounters with Europeans and their diseases, followed by steady retreat, defeat, and diminishment. Yet the true story begins much earlier, and its final recent chapter adds a major twist. Jake Page, one of the Southwest's most distinguished writers and a longtime student of Indian history and culture, tells a radically new story, thanks...
13) Far and away
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A poor young Irish man immigrates to the United States along with the daughter of a wealthy land owner.
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In 1954 a reclusive ex-soldier is thrown into the woes of rebellion when he's ordered to escort a villager accused of murder to prison during the Algerian War. As their journey leads them through a deadly fire-fight between settlers and rebels, the two men on opposite sides of the conflict must join forces to survive.
15) The Long Riders
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The story of the Jesse James gang, with the Carradine brothers playing the Youngers and the Keach brothers starring as Jesse and Frank James.
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Journalist Ball confronts the legacy of his family's slave-owning past, uncovering the story of the people, both black and white, who lived and worked on the Balls' South Carolina plantations. It is an unprecedented family record that reveals how the painful legacy of slavery continues to endure in America's collective memory and experience. Ball, a descendant of one of the largest slave-owning families in the South, discovered that his ancestors...
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Begins powerfully with the Sioux triumph over General Custer at Little Big Horn and goes on to center around three powerful men. Charles Eastman is a young, Dartmouth-educated Sioux doctor. Sitting Bull is the proud Lakota chief who refuses to submit to U.S. government policies designed to strip his people of their identity, dignity and sacred land. Senator Henry Dawes is one of the men responsible for the government policy on Indian affairs. While...
19) Longitude: the true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time
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The story of mariners' centuries-long search for ways of determining longitude that tells not only of the scientific advances but of the perseverance, pettiness, politics, & interesting anecdotes involved. Longitude is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest, and of John Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, brilliance and the absurd, it is...