Watch American Experience (1988) Online!
TV's most-watched history series brings to life the compelling stories from our past that inform our understanding of the world today.
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Episode 1 - FDR (1): The Center of the World (1882-1921)
Release Date: 1994-10-12 -
Episode 2 - FDR (2): Fear Itself (1922-1933)
Release Date: 1992-10-12 -
Episode 3 - FDR (3): The Grandest Job in the World (1933-1940)
Release Date: 1994-10-13 -
Episode 4 - FDR (4): The Juggler (1940-1945)
Release Date: 1994-10-13The portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt concludes with his years as preside (1932 until his death in 1945), how he dealt with the Great Depression, and his link with Winston Churchill during World War II.
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Episode 5 - Telegrams from the Dead
Release Date: 1994-10-19For 40 years, a new religion called spiritualism affected the nation as no other ever had. Abraham Lincoln, P.T. Barnum, Frederick Douglass, senators, and scientists argued over the discoveries of the spirit world as revealed through mediums. Congress debated whether to provide $40,000 to research the feasibility of using the new wireless technology to reach the other world. But by 1880, as one spectacular fraud after another was revealed, the movement began to fade.
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Episode 6 - Midnight Ramble
Release Date: 1994-10-26The little-known story of a black independent film industry that thrived outside of Hollywood and produced close to 500 feature movies for African American audiences between 1910 and 1940. Many race movies tackled some of the difficult social issues that confronted black urban society: alcoholism, crime, morality, class conflict, even racism and lynching, setting the stage for today's independent black cinema movement.
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Episode 7 - Battle of the Bulge
Release Date: 1994-11-09The history of World War II's "Battle of the Bulge", when the German army launched a major surprise counteroffensive against the American forces that caught them almost completely off-guard, sweeping away major portions of the front line, pushing deep into the rear areas and causing tens of thousands of casualties before it was finally halted.
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Episode 8 - Freedom on My Mind
Release Date: 1994-11-16In the summer of 1964, two groups converged in Mississippi: one mostly young, white and well educated from out of state; the other, African Americans who lived in the most violently segregated state. Recruits in a nonviolent army, together they fought the white political establishment to register black voters, create schools and bring national attention to the struggle. It was a summer of rage, pain and enormous danger.
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Episode 9 - Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern
Release Date: 1994-01-16In the late 1980s, Iowa farmers Russ and Mary Jane Jordan faced a $200,000 debt and a bottom-line oriented bank. This is a personal story of one family's dramatic effort to hold onto their family farm as massive foreclosures sweep the nation.
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Episode 10 - One Woman, One Vote (1)
Release Date: 1995-01-23From Elizabeth Cady Stanton's electrifying call to arms at Seneca Falls in 1848, to the last battle for passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, a recounting of the infighting, the alliances and betrayals, defeats and victories on the way to winning the right to vote. The struggle split the suffragist movement into two opposing forces: the militants who faced imprisonment and riots and those who argued for a quieter, more persuasive ways. Both tactics, it turned out, were needed.
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Episode 11 - One Woman, One Vote (2)
Release Date: 1995-01-30From Elizabeth Cady Stanton's electrifying call to arms at Seneca Falls in 1848, to the last battle for passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, a recounting of the infighting, the alliances and betrayals, defeats and victories on the way to winning the right to vote. The struggle split the suffragist movement into two opposing forces: the militants who faced imprisonment and riots and those who argued for a quieter, more persuasive ways. Both tactics, it turned out, were needed.
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Episode 12 - The Way West (1): Westward, the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1845-1864)
Release Date: 1995-05-08A six-hour documentary of how the West was lost and won, from the time of the Gold Rush in 1848 until after the last gasp of the Indian Wars at Wounded Knee in 1893, when the West was settled, subdued, exploited and incorporated into the American empire. Lakotas, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Poncas, Apaches, Nez Perces and Utes fought back, then watched as everything they had was taken from them, their way of life all but destroyed.
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Episode 13 - The Way West (2): The Approach of Civilization (1865-1869)
Release Date: 1995-05-09A six-hour documentary of how the West was lost and won, from the time of the Gold Rush in 1848 until after the last gasp of the Indian Wars at Wounded Knee in 1893, when the West was settled, subdued, exploited and incorporated into the American empire. Lakotas, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Poncas, Apaches, Nez Perces and Utes fought back, then watched as everything they had was taken from them, their way of life all but destroyed.
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Episode 14 - The Way West (3): The War for the Black Hills (1870-1876)
Release Date: 1995-05-16A six-hour documentary of how the West was lost and won, from the time of the Gold Rush in 1848 until after the last gasp of the Indian Wars at Wounded Knee in 1893, when the West was settled, subdued, exploited and incorporated into the American empire. Lakotas, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Poncas, Apaches, Nez Perces and Utes fought back, then watched as everything they had was taken from them, their way of life all but destroyed.
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Episode 15 - The Way West (4): Ghost Dance (1877-1893)
Release Date: 1995-05-17A six-hour documentary of how the West was lost and won, from the time of the Gold Rush in 1848 until after the last gasp of the Indian Wars at Wounded Knee in 1893, when the West was settled, subdued, exploited and incorporated into the American empire. Lakotas, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Poncas, Apaches, Nez Perces and Utes fought back, then watched as everything they had was taken from them, their way of life all but destroyed.
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Episode 16 - The Way West (4): Ghost Dance (1877-1893)
Release Date: 1995-05-17A six-hour documentary of how the West was lost and won, from the time of the Gold Rush in 1848 until after the last gasp of the Indian Wars at Wounded Knee in 1893, when the West was settled, subdued, exploited and incorporated into the American empire. Lakotas, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Poncas, Apaches, Nez Perces and Utes fought back, then watched as everything they had was taken from them, their way of life all but destroyed.