Summary: Music has been a constant in human history, an intermingling of voice and instrument that for all its local variation and increasing sophistication nevertheless endured in more or less the same form for centuries. Then came recording--and music was forever transformed. Soundbreaking, an eight-part event television series, traces this ongoing sonic revolution, and explores the nexus of...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2016

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: "In 1915, African American newspaper editor and civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter waged a battle against D.W. Griffith's notoriously Ku Klux Klan-friendly blockbuster The Birth of a Nation, which unleashed a fight still raging today about race relations and representation, and the power and influence of Hollywood. Birth of a Movement features commentary from Spike Lee, Reginald...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2017

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: With breath-taking CGI, beautiful landscape footage and some of the world's most important astronomical artifacts, Ancient Skies looks at the cosmos through the eyes of our ancestors, charting our changing views of the cosmos throughout history.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2019

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Challenges one of America's most cherished assumptions, the belief that slavery in the U.S. ended with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, by telling the harrowing story of how, in the South, a new system of involuntary servitude took its place with shocking force.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: PBS Distribution 2012

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: This elaborately produced documentary series made up of six episodes plunges into Parisian life at the beginning of the twentieth century, a hotbed of artistic creation with the blossoming of Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. Through illustrations, animation and stunning original archival footage, the films trace the highs and lows, scandals and celebrations, tragedies, and the triumphs...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2020

Copies Available at Woodmere

Robinson, Tony

Summary: Explores the history, geography, and historic sites of Great Britain.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Music Video Distributors 2017

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Dr. Lucy Worsley explores the royal wardrobes of our kings and queens over the last 400 years, from Elizabeth I to the present Queen Elizabeth II, explaining how the royal wardrobe is a carefully orchestrated piece of theater managed by the royals themselves to control the right image and project the right message to their subjects. Royal fashion is, and always has been, as much about politics...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2015

Copies Available at Woodmere

Conover, Julie

Summary: Julie Conover and Mark Jennings explore a variety of destinations across the planet.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Topics Entertainment 2013

Copies Available at East Bay

Summary: Conductor and violinist Scott Yoo is on the road again, for Season 4 of Now hear this. Join him in Buenos Aires, to learn the tango and Piazzolla's conflicted relationship with it. In Scotland and Germany, explore the connection between mental health and creative genius. In the boroughs of New York, meet a dynamic new composer pointing classical in a new direction. And in Spain, discover the...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2023

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: "In 2011, construction workers were shocked to uncover the remains of a woman in an abandoned lot in Queens, New York. Follow forensic archaeologist Scott Warnasch and a team of historians and scientists as they investigate this woman' story, revealing a vivid picture of what life was like for free African American people in the North."--

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2018

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Examines entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.'s journey to create his own identity, as a black man who embraced Judaism, through the shifting tides of civil rights and racial progress; a veteran of increasingly outdated show business traditions, he strove to stay relevant, even as he found himself bracketed by the bigotry of white America and the distaste of black America. Features new interviews with...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: PBS 2019

Copies Available at Woodmere

Wilson, August.

Summary: Explores the life and career of American playwright August Wilson.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Public Broadcasting Service. 2015

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: In 1946, Isaac Woodard, a Black army sergeant on his way home to South Carolina after serving in WWII, was pulled from a bus for arguing with the driver. The local chief of police savagely beat him, leaving him unconscious and permanently blind. The shocking incident made national headlines and, when the police chief was acquitted by an all-white jury, the blatant injustice would change the...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Examines the life and career of the inspiring actor and entertainer, Raul Julia.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2019

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Hannibal, one of history's most famous generals, achieved what the Romans thought to be impossible. With a vast army of 30,000 troops, 15,000 horses, and 37 war elephants, he crossed the mighty Alps in only 16 days to launch an attack on Rome from the north. In Hannibal in the Alps, a team of experts conclusively proves for the first time that Hannibal's army did indeed cross the Alps.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2018

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Cleopatra Thea Philopator was a woman no man could resist: strong, beautiful, and intelligent, she knew how to manipulate the patriarchal political system of Ancient Egypt to work in her favor. In many ways she seemed to have it all, so what could have driven her to take her own life at such a young age? From her noble birth to her famous liaisons with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony to her...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: A & E Television Networks 2007

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Examines the life and legacy of African American poet, memoirist, and civil rights worker Maya Angelou, from her upbringing in the Depression-era South to her work with Malcolm X in Ghana to the recitation of her inaugural poem for President Bill Clinton. Includes Angelou's own words woven together with archival photographs and videos as well as interviews with Angelou's friends and family.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2017

Copies Available at Peninsula

Summary: Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind since early childhood, was a passionate advocate for change, using her celebrity and wit to champion rights for women, people with disabilities, and people living in poverty. Becoming Helen Keller examines the complex legacy of this author, advocate, lecturer, and human rights pioneer.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2022

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: An unvarnished look at the unlikely author whose autobiographical fiction helped shape American ideas of the frontier and self-reliance. A Midwestern farm woman who published her first novel at age 65, Laura Ingalls Wilder transformed her frontier childhood into the best-selling Little House series.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

Copies Available at Woodmere

Gates, Henry Louis Jr.

Summary: Explores the historical period following the American Civil War known as Reconstruction.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Public Broadcasting Service 2019

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: In the late 19th century, as America's teeming cities grew increasingly congested, the time had come to replace the nostalgic horse-drawn trolleys with a faster, cleaner, safer, and more efficient form of transportation. Ultimately, it was Boston, a city of so many firsts that overcame a litany of engineering challenges, the greed-driven interests of businessmen, and the great fears of its...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2017

Copies Available at Woodmere