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New Orleans

Aired February 12, 2007

New Orleans: the utterly original American city that lies at the mouth of the mighty Mississippi and at the beating heart of the great American experiment. Walled in on almost all sides by water, pressed together by the demands and dangers of geography, the crowded streets of New Orleans have always been a laboratory where the social forces that characterize American life play out in dramatic and, at times, disastrous fashion. Over the course of two provocative hours, American Experience tells the story of this remarkable city.

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The Living Weapon

Aired February 5, 2007

The international race to develop biological weapons during the 20th century.

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The Berlin Airlift

Aired January 29, 2007

It could have been the start of World War III. Instead, it became the largest humanitarian campaign the world had ever seen. On June 24, 1948, one of the first major crises of the Cold War occurred when the Soviet Union blocked railroad and street access to West Berlin. For nearly a year two million civilians and twenty thousand allied soldiers in the city's western sector were fed and fueled entirely from the air.

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The Gold Rush

Aired November 6, 2006

The sight of gold in the rushing waters of the American River sent a ripple around the world and set the stage for an event that would forever change a city, a fledgling state, and the nation.

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The Great Fever

Aired October 30, 2006

In 1900, Major Walter Reed, Chief Surgeon of the U.S. Army, led a medical team to Cuba on a mission to investigate yellow fever. For more than two hundred years the disease had terrorized the United States, killing an estimated 100,000 people in the nineteenth century alone. Shortly after Reed and his team arrived in Havana, they began testing the radical theories of Carlos Finlay, a Cuban doctor who believed that mosquitoes spread yellow fever.

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Test Tube Babies

Aired December 14, 2022 | 53 min

Test Tube Babies tells the story of doctors, researchers, and hopeful couples who pushed the limits of science and triggered a technological revolution in human reproduction.

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Test Tube Babies (español)

Aired October 23, 2006 | 53 min

Test Tube Babies cuenta la historia de los médicos, los investigadores y las esperanzadas parejas que empujaron los límites de la ciencia y desencadenaron una revolución tecnológica en la reproducción humana.

Eyes on the Prize

Aired April 4, 2021

Eyes on the Prize is an award-winning 14-hour television that covers all of the major events of the civil rights movement from 1954-1985., including the Montgomery bus boycott in 1954 to the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

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The Man Behind Hitler

Aired May 22, 2006

A symbol of Nazi cruelty and a master of cynical propaganda, Joseph Goebbels was the mastermind behind Adolf Hitler's disturbing success. Goebbels, called the "genius of spin" and the "Reich-Liar-General," was a complicated man whose attitudes fluctuated between extremes of self-pity and grandiose excess.

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Annie Oakley

Aired May 14, 2019 | 53 min

As the star attraction of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Annie Oakley thrilled audiences around the world with her shooting feats.

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Annie Oakley (español)

Aired May 14, 2019 | 53 min

Como la principal atracción del Show del Lejano Oeste de Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley emocionó al público de todo el mundo con sus hazañas de tiro.

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The Alaska Pipeline

Aired April 24, 2006 | 120 min

In the early weeks of 1968, after a decade-long search for oil in Alaska's frozen wilderness, gas burst out of an exploratory well on the North Slope with such force the crew thought it was about to blow. Geologists soon calculated that as much as ten billion barrels of oil lay below the frozen tundra of Prudhoe Bay -- the largest oil find in North America.

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