The Eugenics Crusade

Tracking the country’s oldest beauty contest—from its inception in 1921 as a local seaside pageant to its heyday as one of the country’s most popular events—Miss America paints a vivid picture of an institution that has come to reveal much about a changing nation. The pageant is about commercialism and sexual politics, about big business and small towns. But beyond the symbolism lies a human story—at once moving, inspiring, infuriating, funny, and poignant. Combining rare archival footage, with a host of intimate interviews with distinguished commentators including Gloria Steinem, Margaret Cho, Isaac Mizrahi, former contestants and behind–the–scenes footage and photographs, the film reveals why some women took part in the fledgling event and why others briefly rejected it - how the pageant became a battle ground and a barometer for the changing position of women in society.

An intimate portrait of the woman whose groundbreaking books revolutionized our relationship to the natural world. When 'Silent Spring' was published in September 1962 it became an instant bestseller and would go on to spark dramatic changes in the way the government regulated pesticides.

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to investigate why Black neighborhoods all over the country were “rioting” in protest. He was blindsided by the findings, which blamed the government for race-exclusive policies that fomented poverty, housing crises, unemployment, and discrimination. The film commemorates the landmark report and hints at lessons for a world where racism continues to be a divisive, damaging force.

He was boxy, with stumpy legs that wouldn't completely straighten a short straggly tail and an ungainly gait; though he didn't look the part, Seabiscuit was one of the most remarkable thoroughbred racehorses in history. In the 1930s, when Americans longed to escape the grim realities of Depression-era life, four men turned Seabiscuit into a national hero. They were his fabulously wealthy owner Charles Howard, his famously silent and stubborn trainer Tom Smith and the two hard-bitten, gifted jockeys who rode him to glory. By following the paths that brought these four together and in telling the story of Seabiscuit's unlikely career, this film illuminates the precarious economic conditions that defined America in the 1930s and explores the fascinating behind-the-scenes world of thoroughbred racing. Scott Glenn narrates.

The wildly disparate yet fatefully entwined stories of assassin James Earl Ray and his target, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

One hundred years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, The Vote 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 U.S. history.

In 1918, New York City hired its first scientifically trained medical examiner, Charles Norris. Over the course of a decade and a half, Norris and his extraordinarily driven and talented chief toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, would turn forensic chemistry into a formidable science, sending many a murderer to the electric chair and setting the standards that the rest of the country would ultimately adopt.

By the time he died in 1931, Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most famous men in the world. The holder of more patents than any other inventor in history, Edison had achieved glory as the genius behind such revolutionary inventions as sound recording, motion pictures, and electric light. Born on the threshold of America's burgeoning industrial empire, Edison's curiosity led him to its cutting edge. With just three months of formal schooling, he took on one seemingly impossible technical challenge after another, and through intuition, persistence, and a unique team approach to innovation, invariably solved it. Driven and intensely competitive, Edison was often neglectful in his private life and could be ruthless in business. Challenged by competition in the industry he'd founded, Edison launched an ugly propaganda campaign against his rivals, and used his credibility as an electrical expert to help ensure that high-voltage electrocution became a form of capital punishment.

Traces the often surprising, endlessly entertaining history of the country's most outrageous playground. Interviews with Las Vegas insiders as well as everyday citizens in search of the American Dream chronicle how Las Vegas transformed itself from remote frontier way station into the Depression-era "Gateway to the Hoover Dam," then into the mid-century gangster metropolis known as "Sin City," and finally into a family vacation destination and the fastest-growing city in the United States.

The American Vice President explores the little-known story of the second-highest office in the land, tracing its evolution from a constitutional afterthought to a position of political consequence. Focusing on the fraught period between 1963 and 1974, when a grief-stricken and then scandal-plagued America was forced to clarify the role of the vice president, the film examines the passage and first uses of the 25th Amendment and offers a fresh and surprising perspective on succession in the executive branch.

An account of Orson Welles' 1938 radio drama broadcast that inadvertently started a mass panic.

TV's most-watched history series brings to life the compelling stories from our past that inform our understanding of the world today.

The shocking story of Richard Leopold and Nathan Loeb, two wealthy college students who murdered a 14-year-old boy in 1924 to prove they were smart enough to get away with it.

In 1995, Kelli Peterson started a gay and straight club at her Salt Lake City high school. The story of her ensuing battle with school authorities in interspersed with looks back at the diary of Michael Wigglesworth, a 17th-century Puritan cleric, at the 30-year love affair of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Adams Fields, at Henry Gerber's attempt after World War I to establish a gay-rights organization, at Bayard Rustin's role in the civil rights movement, and at Barbara Gittings' taking on of the American Psychiatric Association's position that homosexuality is illness. One person comments, "To create a place for ourselves in the present, we have to find ourselves in the past."

In the wake of hurricane Katrina, as Americans begin a dialogue about the future of one of the nation's most distinctive cities, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE presents a provocative history of the city that lies at the mouth of the mighty Mississippi. Walled in on almost all sides by water, pressed together by the demands of geography, New Orleans has always been a laboratory where the social forces play out in dramatic and, at times, disastrous fashion.

On August 15th, 1914, the Panama Canal opened, connecting the world's two largest oceans and signaling America's emergence as a global superpower.