Summary: Get set for an adventure that marked a new era in America! Filmmaker Ken Burns presents the hilarious 1903 saga of the first transcontinental automobile trip. On a visionary whim and a
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2003
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Summary: This installment of the Famous Authors series offers overviews of Jane Austen’s life and works. The video profiles Austen’s family and their connections to England’s society. Austen, born in 1775 and raised in the rectory of Steventon, had five brothers and a sister, all known for their cleverness and humor. She had no formal education but was well-read and came to admire Fanny Burney,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: This program from the Famous Composers series offers an overview of the life and work of composer and pianist Johannes Brahms beginning with an introduction to Brahms' family and hometown, the nineteenth century seaport city of Hamburg. The film follows Brahms' musical education with teachers Otto Cossel and Eduard Marxsen, his days of playing in bars and teaching to earn money, and his...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: How did Alcoholics Anonymous begin? What influences shaped it into the worldwide, support-focused organization it is today? And what goes on inside a typical AA meeting? This program follows a quest for answers undertaken by two filmmakers-Orly Yadin, an Israeli-born animator and archival film specialist who questions the idea of genetic alcoholism, and Eleanor Lanahan, a documentarian whose...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: This episode of American Stories by acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns presents the history of one of our greatest icons. For over a century, she has stood on Liberty Island, a gift from France created by sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi. Torch eternally aloft, Lady Liberty has been the symbol of hope for generations of immigrants. Interviews with ordinary Americans reveal the statue’s great...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1985
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Summary: Opening by introducing William Wordsworth's boyhood home in the Lake District of England, this film from the Famous Authors series offers an overview of the writer's work and biography. The Lake District greatly inspired Wordsworth and resulted in his apparent fascination with nature. The film contextualizes the poet's life at Cambridge and then in France, the ongoing conditions of the French...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: What happens when asthma goes undetected until adulthood? This program features four individuals (including the film’s director) who have suffered from the condition for decades but have only recently realized that it is the source of their health problems. Each describes for the camera how they are coming to terms with asthma’s impact on their lives - from the constant battle for breath...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: This introduction to the life and literature of Oscar Wilde from the Famous Authors series begins by introducing Wilde's passionately political, literary, and flamboyant parents and nineteenth century Dublin, the earliest and strongest influences on the writer. Wilde went on to study classics at Oxford and develop his talents. The film discusses Walter Pater's large influence on Wilde's...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: This classic tale of revenge and murder depicts a victim lured to his doom by the false promise of riches-in this case, a highly prized cask of vintage wine. Pomerleau portrays both victim and villain with consummate skill as greed is punished with inescapable and eternal imprisonment.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: In 1908, the first Model T rolled off the assembly line, quickly asserting itself as a dream machine that would take America down the highway and into the future. Bill Moyers shows how that future represented not only a new landscape bustling with high-speed transport and travel, but a new vision of ourselves. He uses film clips, photographs, music, and poetry to trace America's transformation...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Out of the tradition of the great 19th-century European trade exhibitions came a 20th-century American phenomenon, one that provided recreation, inspiration, and what amounted to a cultural barometer-the World's Fair. At the time this classic program was produced, the United States had hosted nine of them, from the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 to the sprawling 1982 celebration in Knoxville,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Innovation enabled the United States to take on the mantle of world leadership-most importantly, innovation in military technology. But among the great minds that drove American innovation, using science to make war sometimes led to questions, dilemmas, and even second thoughts. In this program, Bill Moyers presents a profile of I. I. Rabi, winner of the 1944 Nobel Prize in physics and an early...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: The growth of mass communication provided a new understanding of ways to manipulate images and influence popular opinion, giving birth to the concept of public relations. In this program, Bill Moyers examines the public-relations campaign designed by Ivy Lee in 1914 to improve the image of John D. Rockefeller. He also talks with Edward Bernays-the man who helped immortalize Thomas Edison and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1984
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Summary: Other than Freud, no psychologist has been so discussed, critiqued, and, at times, maligned as B. F. Skinner. Using both archival and newer film, this program takes a penetrating look at who Skinner was and what he really said in his 20 books. Skinner’s specialized terminology is introduced in context so students will understand how it was intended to be used and the research that produced it....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1999
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Summary: Emotions deeply color individual human existence and shape all aspects of our interpersonal and intellectual experiences. In this program, animations and fMRI images introduce students to the sub-cortical emotional circuits in the brain and chemical processes that produce emotional responses and contribute to decision making and mental health. Live action sequences, both in laboratory and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Liszt frequently expanded upon the work of previous composers to create new musical forms. His transcription of Verdi's Rigoletto was part of a completely new style of piano composition. In this program, Martino Tirimo guides students toward a mastery of the Rigoletto paraphrase and an understanding of its compositional layers. Assembled at London's Royal Academy of Music, pianists from the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: This program with Bill Moyers examines the crisis within the American court system. In many parts of the country, funding for already burdened and backlogged courts is being reduced. And public defenders and legal aid attorneys are in short supply, leaving the poor without adequate or timely representation. Yet, few politicians have stepped forward with solutions. In this program, a panel of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: This program with Bill Moyers talks to Americans in San Antonio, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C., about why they don't vote, and to citizens who are trying to increase voter registration and turnout. Featured in the program are Father Andrew Greeley, author, priest, and sociologist; and Michael Franti, a rap artist.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: This program explores the two great religions to come from India. "The historian of religion can find almost anything he wants in India, enacted with intensity. What remains is to carry its insight into everyday life. Smith uncovered the mysteries of multiphonic chanting among Tibetan lamas, previously unknown in the West. Characterizing these chants as "the holiest sound I have ever heard,"...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: The effect of Jane Hirshfield's reading is almost transcendental, like the sound of distant echoes in a canyon. "I know that many of my poems don't evoke clapping," she says, "and I want to assure you that I take silence as a high compliment. In this program, Bill Moyers and Ms. Hirshfield discuss topics including her experience as a practitioner of Zen and the relative merits of sound and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Raised with parental expectations that she become a Christian missionary, the teenaged Jeanette Winterson embarked instead upon a defiant journey of self-discovery-sparked by the books she smuggled into her bedroom. In this conversation with Bill Moyers, the author of Sexing the Cherry, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and Lighthousekeeping talks about Weight, her new version of the story of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: In the Martin Amis novel London Fields, a cynical and disjointed society hurtles toward doomsday; in Amis's follow-up book, Time's Arrow, the narrative follows an absurdly reversed course-backward from the Holocaust to purity and innocence. Bill Moyers talks with Martin Amis about humanity's present condition and the ongoing conflict between fundamentalism and secular values.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Experts are increasingly focusing on prevention efforts based on community and family. This documentary looks at two of those efforts. One works with parents addicted to heroin by teaching them how to repair the damage to family wrought by drug abuse, and in spite of it, how to raise strong, resilient children. In a second program, vigilant counselors in Dade County schools watch for kids at...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: “Opera is usually full of drama, tragedy, and death. In fact the writer George Bernard Shaw once said that he knew when it was the end of an opera because no one was left alive on stage. But there are also many comic operas, operas that are full of comic characters and situations. According to the great composer Giuseppe Verdi, the greatest comic opera ever written is the subject of today’s...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2004