Grand Central
Season 1, Episode 1 TV-G
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On January 8, 1902, a commuter train traveling through a tunnel in New York City's Grand Central Depot ran into another train, killing 17 people. An engineer's innovative response to the crisis gave birth to one of America's greatest establishments: Grand Central Terminal. By 1947, over 65 million people had traveled through the station. Today, it is one of New York's most famous spaces and a living monument to the nation's great railway age.
The Lobotomist
Season 1, Episode 2 TV-14
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The lobotomy was hailed by The New York Times as a "surgery of the soul", a landmark medical procedure promising hope to mentally ill patients. Championed by neurologist Walter J. Freeman, this “last resort” caught on fast. A decade later, Freeman was decried as a moral monster and the lobotomy as a barbaric mistake of modern medicine. This program tells the gripping tale of medical intervention gone awry. Campbell Scott narrates.
The Polio Crusade
Season 1, Episode 3 TV-PG
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This film interweaves the personal accounts of polio survivors with the story of an ardent crusader who tirelessly fought on their behalf while scientists raced to eradicate this dreaded disease. The Polio Crusade features interviews with historians, scientists, polio survivors, and the only surviving scientist from the core research team that developed the Salk vaccine, Julius Youngner.
The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Season 1, Episode 4 TV-PG
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J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and legacy are inextricably linked to America’s most famous top-secret initiative - the Manhattan Project. But after World War II, this brilliant and intense scientist fell from the innermost circles of American science, and at the height of the Red Scare, the veil of suspicion fell over Oppenheimer. This biography presents a complex and revealing portrait of one of America’s most influential scientists.
Wyatt Earp
Season 1, Episode 5 TV-PG
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He has been portrayed in countless movies and television shows by some of Hollywood's greatest actors, including Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart and, more recently, Kevin Costner, 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. As a young man, Wyatt Earp was a caricature of the Western lawman, spending his days drinking in saloons, gambling, visiting brothels and gaining notoriety as the legendary gunman in the shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. Shortly after his death in 1929, distressed Americans down on their luck transformed Wyatt Earp into a folk hero: a central figure in the American narrative of how the West was won, a man who took control of his own destiny.
The Bombing of Germany
Season 1, Episode 6 TV-14
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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. From International Emmy Award and Peabody Award-winning producer Zvi Dor-Ner (Israel's Next War, House of Saud) comes "The Bombing of Germany" a film that examines the defining moments of the offensive that led the U.S. across a moral divide. Weaving together interviews with WWII pilots and historians, and archival footage of the bombing and its aftermath, the film is a reminder of the dilemma imposed by war's civilian casualties, a topic that continues to resonate as America enters the eighth year of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dolley Madison
Season 1, Episode 7 TV-G
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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. She was nicknamed “Queen Dolley,” and when she died in 1849 at the age of 81 — one of the last remaining members of the founding generation — Washington City honored her with the largest state funeral the capital had ever seen for a woman.
Roads to Memphis
Season 1, Episode 8 TV-PG
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This is 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 film will explore the wildly disparate, yet fatefully entwined stories of Ray and King to create a complex, engaging and thought-provoking portrait of America in the crisis-laden year of 1968.
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