
American Experience Season 27 Episode 5
By the dawn of the 19th century, the most deadly killer in human history, tuberculosis, had killed one in seven of all the people who had ever lived. Throughout the…

American Experience Season 26 Episode 8
In 1910, the Pennsylvania Railroad successfully accomplished the enormous engineering feat of building tunnels under New York City’s Hudson and East Rivers, connecting the railroad to New York and New…

American Experience Season 26 Episode 7
In 1959, at the very height of the Cold War, with American schoolchildren practicing duck-and-cover drills, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the man who Americans feared could incinerate them in a…

American Experience Season 26 Episode 2
Recalling 1964, a pivotal year in U.S. history. While the Beatles captured the imaginations of the nation’s youth, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, unveiled his vision…

American Experience Season 26 Episode 3
The Amish practice of shunning those who leave their faith is explored through the experiences of individuals who have left their communities. Also: faithful Amish men and women share the…

American Experience Season 25 Episode 5
Led by physicist Robert Noyce, Fairchild Semiconductor began as a start-up company whose radical innovations would help make the United States a leader in both space exploration and the personal…

American Experience Season 25 Episode 6
A broadcast that struck fear into an already anxious nation, Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast was the most famous alien invasion that never happened.

American Experience Season 25 Episode 4
An absorbing life story of a farm boy who rose from obscurity to become the most influential American innovator of the 20th century, Henry Ford offers an incisive look at…

American Experience Season 25 Episode 2
See how the activities of the five principals intersect and affect the anti-slavery movement.

American Experience Season 25 Episode 3
Examine the forces leading to war and to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.

American Experience Season 24 Episode 6
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…

American Experience Season 24 Episode 2
A profile of Gen. George Armstrong Custer (1839-76), nicknamed “the boy general” for his Civil War exploits, who died with many other members of the 7th Cavalry while battling the…

American Experience Season 23 Episode 15
The story behind a courageous band of civil rights activists called Freedom Riders who in 1961 challenged segregation in the American South.

American Experience Season 23 Episode 10
In 1969, homosexuality was illegal in almost every state… but that was about to change. The Stonewall riots marked a major turning point in the modern gay civil rights movement….

American Experience Season 23 Episode 8
It was the deadliest workplace accident in New York City’s history. A dropped match on the 8th floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory sparked a fire that killed over a…

American Experience Season 23 Episode 9
The little-known story of the American effort to relieve starvation in the new Soviet Russia in 1921, The Great Famine is a documentary about the worst natural disaster in Europe…

American Experience Season 23 Episode 7
In 1881, 25 men led by Adolphus Greely set sail from Newfoundland to Lady Franklin Bay in the high Arctic, where they planned to collect a wealth of scientific data…

American Experience Season 22 Episode 6
What drove a company of American soldiers — ordinary young men from around the country — to commit the worst atrocity in American military history? American Experience focuses on the…

American Experience Season 22 Episode 4
Dolley Madison lived through the two wars that established the U.S., was friends with the first 12 Presidents, and watched America evolve from a struggling young republic to the first…

American Experience Season 22 Episode 2
Wyatt Earp has been portrayed in countless movies and television shows by some of Hollywood’s greatest actors, including Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and more recently, Kevin Costner, but these popular…

American Experience Season 21 Episode 9
On the night of February 27, 1973, fifty-four cars rolled, horns blaring, into a small hamlet on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Within hours, some 200 Oglala Lakota and American…

American Experience Season 21 Episode 7
The Cherokee would call it Nu-No-Du-Na-Tlo-Hi-Lu, “The Trail Where They Cried.” On May 26, 1838, federal troops forced thousands of Cherokee from their homes in the Southeastern United States, driving…

American Experience Season 21 Episode 8
In February of 1909, the indomitable Chiricahua Apache medicine man Geronimo lay on his deathbed. He summoned his nephew to his side, whispering, “I should never have surrendered. I should…

American Experience Season 21 Episode 3
On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Over the next twelve days, as a fractured nation mourned, the largest manhunt ever attempted closed…

American Experience Season 21 Episode 2
The story of the polio crusade pays tribute to a time when Americans banded together to conquer a terrible disease. The medical breakthrough saved countless lives and had a pervasive…

American Experience Season 20 Episode 16
An examination of the athletic career and humanitarian interests of the acknowledged baseball star of the late 60s and earliest 70s.

American Experience Season 20 Episode 1
Few Americans then or now accept that a lone, inconsequential gunman could bring down a president and alter history. In that breach, a culture of conspiracy has arisen that points…

American Experience Season 19 Episode 18
A profile of the aristocratic founding father, his efforts to bring federal economic reforms to the fledgling country, and how his aloof personality led to opposition and tragedy.

American Experience Season 19 Episode 16
A story of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – its beginnings in 1830, the migration of its persecuted members, and its role and influence in the modern…

American Experience Season 19 Episode 17

American Experience Season 19 Episode 15
A profile of Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first treasury secretary and a leading force in the post-Revolutionary War push for a Constitution and strong central government. Included: his role in…

American Experience Season 18 Episode 13
A profile of Joseph Goebbels (1897-45), who helped launch Hitler’s rise to power. Kenneth Branagh provides voice-over readings of Goebbels’ personal diaries. Included: footage from German archives tracing Goebbels’ life;…

American Experience Season 18 Episode 7
A striking profile of the outlaw (1847-82) is told through reenactments, comments from historians and archival photographs. The hour traces James’ life from age 16 to his death at 34…

American Experience Season 18 Episode 6
A gripping study of the groundbreaking prosecution, which began Nov. 20, 1945, as Nazi Germany’s leaders were held accountable for war crimes, infamously blamed on “following orders.” Profiled are Hermann…

American Experience Season 18 Episode 3
The story of the gambling mecca is told via news clips and reminiscences. Part 1 of 2

American Experience Season 18 Episode 4
News clips and reminiscences tell the story of the gambling mecca, from a dusty railroad town to a leading tourist attraction. Part 2 of 2

American Experience Season 18 Episode 1
“Two Days in October” recalls two 1967 events — a Vietcong ambush and a violent antiwar demonstration at the University of Wisconsin — that together marked a turning point in…

American Experience Season 17 Episode 1
A shy, if driven man, Robert Kennedy “wasn’t built for the spotlight, he was built for the wings,” says journalist Jack Newfield. While John Kennedy was alive, that’s where Bobby…

American Experience Season 16 Episode 3
“Reconstruction” concludes by following whites and blacks in Georgia, South Carolina and Louisiana between 1867 and 1877. It begins with the granting of widespread voting rights for blacks in the…

American Experience Season 16 Episode 9
Recalling the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, a “graceful leap over an unprecedented space,” as narrator David Ogden Stiers calls it. The Golden Gate presented its engineers with a…