Amanda Pollak
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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.
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Like everything else about General George Custer, his martyrdom was shrouded in controversy and contradictions. The final act of his larger-than-life career played out on a grand stage with a spellbound public engrossed in the drama. In the end, his death would launch one of the greatest myths in American history. Part of the Wild West collection.
Description
How one of the most impactful, lifesaving tests for women was created and popularized by a Greek immigrant and his wife, a famous Japanese-American illustrator who was detained in a WW2 internment camp, and a groundbreaking Black female surgeon. In the 1950's, survival rates from cancer of any kind were low. Damaging surgery and unsophisticated radiotherapy were the main treatments, assuming the disease was detected in time for anything to be done....
4) 1964
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It was the year of the Beatles and the Civil Rights Act; of the Gulf of Tonkin and Barry Goldwater's campaign for the presidency; the year that Americans learned smoking was bad for their health and Cassius Clay became Mohammad Ali; the year that cities across the country erupted in violence and Americans tried to make sense of the assassination of their president. Based on The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964, the film will follow some of the...
Description
In the 1930s, William Randolph Hearst's media empire included 28 newspapers, a movie studio, a syndicated wire service, radio stations and 13 magazines. Nearly one in four American families read a Hearst publication. His newspapers were so influential that Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Winston Churchill all wrote for him. The first practitioner of what is now known as 'synergy, ' Hearst used his media stronghold to achieve unprecedented political...
7) Space men
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On an August morning in 1960, Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger stepped out of a helium balloon twenty miles above Earth, hurtling down at over 400 miles per hour. The little-known story of the men whose scientific experiments laid critical groundwork for NASA's manned space program, a decade before President Kennedy committed the nation to sending a man to the moon.
8) The big burn
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Inspired by Timothy Egan's best-selling book, The Big Burn is the dramatic story of an unimaginable wildfire that swept across the Northern Rockies in the summer of 1910. The fire devoured more than three million acres in 36 hours, confronting the fledgling U.S. Forest Service with a catastrophe that would define the agency and the nation's fire policy for the rest of the 20th century and beyond.
9) Panama Canal
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On August 15th, 1914, the Panama Canal opened, connecting the world's two largest oceans and signaling America's emergence as a global superpower. This film, using an extraordinary archive of photographs and footage, interviews with canal workers, and firsthand accounts of life in the Canal Zone, unravels the remarkable story of one of the world's most significant technological achievements.
10) The Great War
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In conjunction with the 100th anniversary of America's entry into the war on April 6, 1917, a six-hour documentary presented over three nights, explores how World War I changed America and the world. Drawing on the latest scholarship, including unpublished diaries, memoirs and letters, it tells the rich and complex story of the conflict through the voices of nurses, journalists, aviators and the American troops who came to be known as 'doughboys.'...
11) American veteran
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Today, America has nearly eighteen million living military veterans, from the Greatest Generation to men and women coming home from recent tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. They join the now-silent ranks of American veterans reaching back to our earliest conflict, the Revolutionary War.
Description
For generations, Monopoly has been America's favorite board game, a love letter to unbridled capitalism and, for better or worse, the impulses that make our free-market society tick. An exhilarating game of no-holds-barred competition and brutal domination of opponents, it's a celebration of greed and accumulation of wealth with only one player standing at the end.
"For generations, Monopoly has been America's favorite board game, a love letter to...
13) Sealab
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In 1969 off the California coast, a US Navy crane carefully lowered a massive tubular structure into the waters. It was designed for an elite group of divers to spend days or even months at a stretch living and working on the ocean floor. The video tells the little-known story of the daring program that tested the limits of human endurance and revolutionized undersea exploration.
14) Edison
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Documentary about Thomas Edison that explores the complex alchemy that accounts for the enduring celebrity of America's most famous inventor. It offers new perspectives on the man and his milieu, and illuminates not only the true nature of invention, but its role in turn-of-the-century America's rush into the future.
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Faces of America introduces a wide range of cultural figures--representing a vast range of cultural and ethnic roots--to their ancestors and their stories, from the old country through the journey to America. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. traces the family trees of authors, actors, musicians, athletes, educators, intellectuals and discovers stories and figures that had been forgotten or lost through the generations. Through original documents and photos,...
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American Experience volume 2
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Chart America's entry into the conflict, examining the breathtaking speed of mobilization and the profound transformations required if America was to play a central role in the Great War. In 1917, the U.S. was deeply divided about going to war. Wilson hired former journalist George Creel to lead an unprecedented propaganda campaign to support the war. But for those who resisted the patriotic fervor, the consequences could be severe. Repressive legislation...
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American Experience volume 1
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Explore America's tortured, nearly three-year journey to war. In August 1914, a war unprecedented in size and violence broke out on the European continent. Ever the idealistic diplomat, Wilson vowed to keep his country out of "the Great War." His neutrality was supported but reports from Europe began to challenge America's delicate position. From behind the battle lines came reports detailing German atrocities in Belgium and France: history's first...
18) Sealab
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Sealab tells the little-known story of the daring program that tested the limits of human endurance and revolutionized undersea exploration.