American Experience

- Season 22

(2010)

American Experience celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Founded by Roosevelt during the Great Depression, the CCC put over 3 million men to work improving the countries infrastructure and national parks.

Wyatt Earp has been portrayed in countless movies and television shows but these popular fictions belie the complexities and flaws of a man whose life is a lens on politics, justice and economic opportunity on the American frontier. He was a caricature of the Western lawman, and after his death in 1929, distressed Americans transformed him into a folk hero: a central figure in how the west was won, a man who took control of his own destiny.

On September 1, 1939 the first day of World War II in Europe President Franklin D. Roosevelt appealed to the warring nations to under no circumstances undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations. Just six years later, British and American Allied forces had carried out a bombing campaign of unprecedented might over Germany s cities, claiming the lives of nearly half a million civilians. The Bombing of Germany examines the defining moments of the offensive that led the U.S. across a moral divide. Weaving together interviews with WWII pilots and ...

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 modern democracy in the world.

Director Robert Stone traces the origins of the modern environmental movement through the eyes of nine Americans who propelled the movement from its beginnings in the 1950s.

American Experience investigates the My Lai massacre an atrocity during the Vietnam War that killed more than 300 unarmed civilians.

This film tells the story of an assassin, James Earl Ray, his target, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the seething, turbulent forces in American society that led these two men to their violent and tragic collision in Memphis in April 1968.

The American Experience looks at the history of American whaling from its off-shore origins in the 17th century to the golden age of deep water whaling and the eventual decline in the decades after the Civil War.