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This program features FDR's first inaugural address and "Grilled Millionaire" speech, as well as the flamboyant Huey Long's "Every Man Is a King. Other speeches include a call for honesty in government by Populist Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette; two speeches praising, then criticizing, FDR's policies delivered by demagogue Father Charles Coughlin; and Coughlin supporter Gerald L. K. Smith's eulogy for Huey Long. Smith's keynote speech as third-party...
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The tremendous scope of the Grand Coulee dam on the Columbia River demanded a concentration of human will unmatched in U.S. history. Opposition to the dam prompted government newsreels to educate the public about this opportunity for new American jobs and a source of hydroelectric power for agriculture.
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This program shows the events of the Great Depression and explains how they prepared the way for the rise of Nazism, Japanese expansionism, and the altered role of government in the U.S. It covers the Bonus March in July 1932; the Boom of the 1920s and the Bust, speculation, overconfidence, and an economy out of control; and the end of the Dawes Plan. Would the New Deal solve the nation's problems or usher in the revolution?
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"From the co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Hamilton : The Revolution, a stunning group portrait of five American radicals fighting for their ideals as the country goes mad around them. Where do we find our ideals? What does it mean to live for them--and to risk dying for them? For Americans during World War I, these weren't abstract questions. Young Radicals tells the story of five activists, intellectuals and troublemakers who agitated...
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Roy E. Stryker headed the Historical Division of the Farm Security Administration from 1935 to 1943. This program tells the story of how Stryker, a low-level federal bureaucrat with integrity and vision, managed a massive New Deal project to document the Great Depression. These photos-nearly 200,000 by both established and aspiring photographers, including Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, and many others-became the defining statement...
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The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex. The wording of the 19th Amendment is as unflinchingly clear as the obstacles to its passage-sexism; cultural, political, and social prejudices; and even timidity on the part of women reluctant to challenge the status quo. This program examines the struggle of the women's suffrage movement and its role in the eventual...
9) Boom
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Henry Ford's Model T and assembly line, together with the discovery of abundant oil reserves, opened up a new way of life for Americans in the early decades of the twentieth century. This episode looks at those developments and traces the significance of World War I, prohibition, African-American migration from the South to northern cities, and the origin and growth of the Hollywood film industry.
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He introduced the lowly peanut to big business and changed the course of Southern agriculture. He turned soybeans into plastic and carved his place in history as one of the 20th century's greatest scientists. George Washington Carver was a slave set free with a microscope and a vision: this is his story.
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From travesties of justice to the pursuit of the most intimate truths, this program focuses on participants' ancestors in the early 20th century. Stories include the account of Tom Joyner's great-uncles who, in 1915, were convicted by an all-white jury and executed for a crime that new evidence suggests they did not commit. Meanwhile, Bliss Broyard learns more about her father, renowned New York Times critic Anatole Broyard-a light-skinned black man...
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The 20th century began with enormous hopes for a future made safe and humane by technology. Although it realized some of these hopes, the century neared its end under the shadow of superweapons that still threaten the earth with annihilation. In this program, Bill Moyers traces the evolution of three instruments that enabled combatants to mass-produce death-the machine gun, the submarine, and the bomber plane. Each weapon helped to close the gap between...
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The outbreak of World War II saw two motion picture experts from Germany and the United States battle each other with as much ferocity as any army or navy. Their respective missions: to ignite a public desire to wage and win a global conflict. This Bill Moyers program contains an interview with Fritz Hippler, chief filmmaker for the Nazi Party. Hippler unrepentantly claims to have spoken to the "soul of the masses" through films like The Eternal Jew,...
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Beginning in 1935, a group of New Deal-sponsored photographers roamed the American landscape, capturing the human face of the Great Depression. This film tells the story of the mammoth project, supervised by Roy Stryker of the Farm Security Administration and later made part of the Office of War Information. Viewers will encounter the poignant, iconic images and personal challenges of photographers Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Marion...
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For African-Americans, the 20th century was fraught with contrasts. There was the glowing promise of equality in the nation's charters and there was the actual bigotry that shadowed and shrank that promise. In this program, Bill Moyers is joined by a distinguished couple who have long spoken for black aspirations-Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. Together they re-create, in dramatic dialogue and often in original settings, the world of 20th-century black...
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For 80 years, one legal organization has supported the rights of the individual against the majority and the government, igniting rage in conservatives and liberals alike. That organization is the ACLU, and it has virtually molded our national ideal of liberty. Its history reads like a case study of freedom of expression and minority rights in the 20th century. This program, with commentary from Oliver North, Dave Barry, and Molly Ivins, traces the...
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As the Depression dragged on, jazz came as close as it ever would to being America's popular music. Now it was often called swing, and, as this program illustrates, it became the defining music of a generation. Suddenly, jazz bandleaders were the new matinee idols, with Benny Goodman hailed as the "King of Swing," while teenagers jitterbugged just as hard to the music of his rivals: Tommy Dorsey, Jimmie Lunceford, Glenn Miller, and the mercurial Artie...
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Amid the rise of suburbia, television, rock 'n' roll, and the baby boom generation, jazz lost a beloved and burned-out star: Billie Holiday. But the music still had its two guiding lights. In 1956, the first year Elvis topped the charts, Duke Ellington recaptured the nation's ear with a performance at the Newport Jazz Festival. The next year, Louis Armstrong made headlines when he condemned racism in Little Rock, Arkansas-risking his career while...
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During the 1920s, Babe Ruth's phenomenal performance at the plate made him the savior of baseball, rescuing the game from the Black Sox scandal of the previous decade. This program focuses on that miraculous period, in which power hitting became the centerpiece of baseball's allure and the monikers "Bambino" and "Sultan of Swat" conjured a magic understood by an entire nation. Viewers learn about the end of the "dead ball" era and the consequential...
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Danger has always surrounded the coal miner's profession, but in the early years of the Colorado coal fields, it was almost as risky for a worker to stay above ground and face the wrath of the company as it was to toil in the tunnels below. This Bill Moyers program presents the memories of the people who worked those mines, freeing the rocks, metals, and minerals on which much of 20th-century American industry was founded. The depths of their struggles...