American Experience | PBS
American Experience, television's most-watched history series, brings to life the incredible characters and epic stories that helped form our nation. Get stories to go in this podcast, or tune in to PBS Monday nights. American Experience is produced by WGBH Boston.
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Minik, The Lost Eskimo | American Experience
When Arctic explorer Robert Peary returned from Greenland in 1897, he brought with him a seven-year-old boy named Minik.
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The Presidents: Critical Elections | American Experience
Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin looks back at the 1968 presidential campaign and discusses the theory of "critical elections."
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The Fight | American Experience
In the 1930s, Joe Louis crossed boxing's color line to become the most famous and influential black person in America.
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Buffalo Bill | American Experience
As the American frontier was disappearing, William Cody transformed himself into a master showman named Buffalo Bill.
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Kit Carson | American Experience
The legendary trapper, scout and soldier was fluent in Spanish and five Indian languages. When the West was a mystery to most Americans, Kit Carson mastered it.
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The Presidents: Campaigning and the Primary System | American Experience
Boston University historian Bruce Schulman, author of The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, looks back at the 1976 presidential campaign and finds parallels to the 2008 campaign.
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The Lobotomist | American Experience
Walter J. Freeman was an ambitious neurologist that invented a radical surgery to combat mental illness: the transorbital lobotomy. A patient of Doctor Freeman and families of lobotomy recipients describe how the procedure changed their lives.
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Oswald's Ghost | American Experience
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963 left a psychic wound on America that is with us still today. Filmmaker Robert Stone discusses his deconstruction of the assassination and how this single event forever changed the face of American culture.
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Grand Central Preview | American Experience
Executive producer Mark Samels and filmmaker Michael Epstein discuss an upcoming American Experience film on New York's Grand Central Station.
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Daughter from Danang | American Experience
In 1975, the U.S. sponsored Operation Babylift, evacuating war orphans from Vietnam. Author Aimee Phan talks about the AMERICAN EXPERIENCE program DAUGHTER FROM DANANG, which tells the story of a Babylift evacuee's troubled reunion with her Vietnamese birth mother.
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The Black Lions Remember Vietnam | American Experience
Meet the men of the Black Lions battalion. Forty years ago, they walked into a Viet Cong ambush.
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The Space Race | American Experience
On October 4, 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. Roger Launius, curator at the National Air and Space Museum, describes Sputnik's impact on the Space Race.
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World War II Memories | American Experience
World War II veterans describe the brutal conditions and deadly combat faced on the battlefronts of Europe and the Pacific.
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Chicago: City of the Century | American Experience
In the mid nineteenth century Chicago emerged as an industrial metropolis, fueled by a diverse work force. Historian Dominic Pacyga describes Chicago's prominence in the national labor movement and its reaction to the Labor Day holiday. Their organized efforts were emblematic of a growing natio …
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Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film | American Experience
From the day that a 14-year-old Ansel Adams first saw the transcendent beauty of the Yosemite Valley, his life was, in his words, "colored and modulated by the great earth-gesture of the Sierra." Nature and wilderness photographer Michael Frye describes following in Adams' footsteps, working in Yose …
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Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life | American Experience
Former Commissioner of Major League Baseball Fay Vincent talks about one of the greatest sports heroes ever. Joe DiMaggio joined the New York Yankees in 1936 and quickly rose to become the star of baseball's golden age.
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Summer of Love | American Experience
In the summer of 1967, thousands of young people from across the country flocked to San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district to join in the hippie experience, only to discover that what they had come for was already disappearing.
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Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple | American Experience
In tape recordings from the 1970s, Jim Jones describes his church, the Peoples Temple.
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New Orleans | American Experience
Filmmaker Stephen Ives details the challenges of making a documentary about New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
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The Living Weapon | American Experience
In early 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt received an alarming intelligence report: Germany and Japan were developing biological weapons for potential offensive use. In response, the U.S. and its allies rushed to develop their own germ warfare program.
American Experience | PBS
