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African Americans Social life and customs Depressions 1929 United States Economics Study and teaching Jazz History and criticism Moyers, Bill D Music 20th century History and criticism Musical form Style, Musical United States History 1901-1953 United States Politics and government 1901-1953Filter By Subjects
African Americans Social life and customs Depressions 1929 United States Economics Study and teaching Jazz History and criticism Moyers, Bill D Music 20th century History and criticism Musical form Style, Musical United States History 1901-1953 United States Politics and government 1901-1953Summary: Seabiscuit’s fame as a champion racehorse was unexpected yet it was timely. In the 1930s, when American’s longed to escape the grim realities of the Great Depression, Seabiscuit became the working man’s hero. Despite his boxy build, stumpy legs, scraggly tail, and ungainly gait, he was one of the most remarkable Thoroughbred racehorses in history. Seabiscuit, from the PBS American...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: The flowering of the Jazz Age is a tale of two great cities, Chicago and New York, and two extraordinary artists whose achievements spanned nearly three-quarters of a century. Louis Armstrong was a fatherless waif who grew up on the rough streets of New Orleans, developing his extraordinary gifts before moving to Chicago, where his transcendent sound inspired a new generation of musicians. Duke...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2000
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Summary: During the early 20th century, Washington, D.C., was the cultural capital of black America. Prefiguring Harlem in the 1920s, D.C.'s Uptown area nurtured dynamic figures such as Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Mary Church Terrell, Justice Thurgood Marshall, and Dr. Charles Drew. In this program, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith tells the often-overlooked story of the heyday,...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Best known for its flappers, gangsters, and jazz, the Roaring Twenties was also an era of social tensions and political change. This program is a time capsule of a boisterous era that began with a surge of hope and ended on the verge of the Great Depression. Topics include the presidencies of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the post-World War I "return to normalcy," the economic boom and...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: The story of jazz begins in New Orleans, 19th-century America's most cosmopolitan city. Here, in the 1890s, African-American artists created a new music out of ragtime syncopations, Caribbean rhythms, marching band instrumentation, and the soulful feeling of the blues. This program introduces the pioneers of this revolutionary art form: half-mad cornet player Buddy Bolden, pianist Jelly Roll...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2000
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Summary: This Bill Moyers program features news correspondent Richard Strout, who covered Washington and the White House from 1925 to his retirement in 1984. Strout's reports, filed for the Christian Science Monitor and The New Republic, are studied here not only as chronicles of American history but as milestones circumscribing our nation's capital-and its evolution from a "small town" to the nerve...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: 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...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: When America entered World War II, jazz became part of the arsenal, with bandleaders like Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw taking their swing to troops overseas. For many black Americans, however, that sound had a hollow ring. Segregated at home and in uniform, they found themselves fighting for liberties their own country denied them-as when authorities padlocked the integrated Savoy Ballroom....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: Saint or Sinner? Sister Aimee, a part of the PBS American Experience collection, tells the dramatic life story of Aimee Semple McPherson— the controversial, charismatic, and wildly popular evangelist (reportedly drawing bigger crowds than P. T. Barnum and Harry Houdini) and her instrumental role in bringing conservative Protestantism into mainstream culture and American politics in the 1920s...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: In 1931, the rains stopped. Soon, blinding black dirt swept across the southern plains of America. Acres of crops withered and died as over-plowing created conditions for disaster: tiny dust particles invading food, water, and the lungs of millions of animals and people alike. Less well-known than those who sought refuge in California—typified by the Joad family in John Steinbeck's “The Grapes...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: 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...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: 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....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: In the years preceding 1929, the stock market rose, seemingly without limits, to usher a “New Era” of prosperity—one where it was widely believed that in America, everyone could become rich. Yet in reality, only the rich were becoming richer. As told by the descendants of the financial “folk heroes” of the economic boom of early 1920s, The Crash of 1929, from the PBS American Experience...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: 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...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: 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...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: With Black Thursday, and the collapse of the stock market, America heads into the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt builds a New Deal, while, overseas, Adolf Hitler rises to power and invades Poland. Responding to Pearl Harbor, the worst attack in American history to that time, FDR guides the nation through World War II.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2002
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Summary: From the collapse of the stock market on October 29, 1929-Black Tuesday-to the many federal initiatives designed to revive the faltering U.S. economy, this program offers an insightful overview of life during the Great Depression. The presidential administrations of Herbert Hoover and FDR; the New Deals and their effects on labor, conservation, and cultural life; the Dust Bowl; and the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: In the early 20th century, community centers called settlement houses were established across America. This documentary relates the history of one such facility-the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House, known in its time as "the greatest settlement house in the U.S. for Negroes." The program profiles its first director, W. Gertrude Brown, who touched the lives of generations of African-Americans,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: The stock market surged through the 1920s and jazz was everywhere in America. Now, for the first time, soloists and singers took center stage, transforming the music with distinctive voices and unique stories. This program introduces Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, whose songs eased the pain of life for millions of black Americans; Bix Beiderbecke, the first great white jazz star, inspired...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: The social tensions underlying America's postwar prosperity were reflected in the broken rhythms and dissonant melodies of bebop-and in the troubled life of Charlie Parker. Nicknamed "Bird," Parker demonstrated ideas and techniques as overwhelming for musicians of his generation as Louis Armstrong's had been a quarter-century before. But Parker wasn't the only bebop innovator. Dizzy Gillespie...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: Dixieland, swing, bebop, modal, free, avant-garde, these were some of the terms critics used during the 1960s to categorize the diverse manifestations of jazz music. As for the artists themselves, many were desperate for work and headed for Europe, including bebop saxophone master Dexter Gordon. At home, jazz sought relevance. During the Civil Rights struggle it became a voice of protest, while...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: In 1911, the first newsreels flickered in America's nickelodeons. In the mid-1960s, they vanished from movie theaters as nightly television newscasts came to dominate visual journalism. In between, newsreels grew into a unique 20th-century institution that informed and entertained whole generations. In this program, Bill Moyers conducts a tour of the cultural and political landscape so...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: 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...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: With farms and factories falling victim to the Great Depression, jazz was one of the few American industries poised for explosive growth. This program explores the art form during the first half of the decade, a period in which New York City usurped Chicago as America's jazz capital, Louis Armstrong revolutionized Broadway song craft, and Chick Webb forged his big-band sound at the Savoy...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011