Summary: Covering the years 1900 to 1910, this program introduces some of baseball's most celebrated and colorful characters-including Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and Ty Cobb. The film spotlights Cobb's reputation as perhaps the most aggressive and least likeable player in the history of the game (a standing reflected in the episode's title, drawn from one of the outfielder's...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011

View online at AVOD

Summary: No sport is more American than baseball, but, contrary to popular opinion, the game likely predates the birth of our nation and has substantial roots overseas. This program explores baseball's origins as a folk pastime and depicts the early phases of its complex evolution. Refuting the myth that Civil War general Abner Doubleday single-handedly invented the game, the film looks at parallels in...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011

View online at AVOD

Summary: The War Between the States rages. In 1863, the Confederate Army seems poised for victory. Following the bloody battle of Antietam, President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation. Former slaves join the Union army in droves. With superior transportation (railroads), communication (telegraph lines), and battlefield technology, the Union prevails and America is on track to become a global...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011

View online at AVOD

Summary: In 1869, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of America became linked through a massive implementation of rail technology. The Transcontinental Railroad connected Americans in new ways and altered the entire ecology of the continent. The vast Plains, where buffalo and Native Americans had once roamed, were remade by land speculators and industrialists. In less than a quarter of a century, the West...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011

View online at AVOD

Summary: 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.

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011

View online at AVOD

Summary: America became a nation just as a revolution in commerce and industry swept the Western world. This program explores the economic growth of the United States in the context of rising friction between the North and South-over the moral issue of slavery, but also over the differences between industrial power and an agricultural economy focused on cotton. With the election of Abraham Lincoln,...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011

View online at AVOD

Summary: Comparing sports with religion only goes so far, but in early-20th-century America, the reverence accorded baseball and its players resembled the trust and respect a priest might elicit from his parishioners. This program examines the life of the game between 1910 and 1920-the decade in which a godlike figure named Babe Ruth first appeared and the Black Sox scandal threatened, in the words of...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011

View online at AVOD

Summary: American inventor, scientist, and businessman, this episode of A&E Classroom profiles Thomas Alva Edison, dubbed 'The Wizard of Menlo Park' for his creation of the long-lasting electric light bulb, the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the sound recording. Edison originated more than 1,000 U.S. and international patents for devices that greatly influenced communication around the world.

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011

View online at AVOD

Summary: A battle over a dry-goods monopoly in Lincoln County, New Mexico, exposes corrupt politicians, cattle rustling, and cold-blooded murder in 1876. Erupting into a full-blown range war involving numerous Western legends, such as Billy the Kid and John Chisum, the conflict ultimately accomplishes very little.

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011

View online at AVOD

Summary: In 1871, Chicago burned to the ground, and from the ashes of the old city a new kind of metropolis rose up. This program shows the restless spirit embodied in the skyscrapers of American cities (as well as in the Statue of Liberty) but it also addresses new social problems, such as poverty and organized crime, that came with growing urbanization. Worker uprisings, immigration, and the expansion...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011

View online at AVOD

Kurutz, Steven

Summary: "The little-engine-that-could story of how a band of scrappy entrepreneurs are reviving the enterprise of manufacturing clothing in the United States"--

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Riverhead Books 2024

Sorry, no copies available

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

View online at AVOD

Summary: Martin Sheen-impersonating the voice of author Dashiell Hammett-narrates this compelling docudrama on immigrant labor and anti-war politics in 1917. As a young employee of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Hammett spied for the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in Butte, Montana, during the height of labor struggles there. Using a wealth of archival footage, first-rate dramatizations, interviews...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006

View online at AVOD

Summary: This program presents the Spanish-American War as the defining event of America’s rise to superpower status.

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1998

View online at AVOD

Summary: In the 1840s, civil war and famine in southern China drove thousands of young men to seek their fortune in the California Gold Rush. This program traces the Chinese experience in America, from their welcome in San Francisco as "celestial men of commerce," through the Gold Rush and building of the Transcontinental Railroad, to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act banning their entry into this country....

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005

View online at AVOD

Summary: Outside the boundaries of America's collective folk imagination and underlying the sweeping narrative of U.S. history lies the lived experience of the nation's westward pioneers. Without exaggeration or embellishment, this captivating documentary focuses on the lives of the common people who headed West between the early 1860s and the turn of the 20th century. Accounts of personal challenges...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007

View online at AVOD

Summary: 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...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010

View online at AVOD

Summary: From the Czarist persecutions to those of Hitler, America provided a haven for Jews. Their influx made New York the world's most densely populated city. They went on to become one of the most influential immigrant groups in America.

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007

View online at AVOD

Summary: The story of 35 million Europeans who left their troubled homelands for the promise of freedom and opportunity, and the hardships of the transatlantic voyage they endured to reach America.

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007

View online at AVOD

Summary: The first decades of the 20th century saw the rise of America to superpower status-an ascendancy fueled in large measure by the social and industrial impact of anthracite coal mining in northeastern Pennsylvania. This meticulously researched program uses location footage, archival film, period photos, dramatizations, and academic commentary to examine the coming-of-age of American labor. The...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005

View online at AVOD

Summary: More than 10% of Americans have German blood in their veins. Their ancestors came as religious and political refugees, but their dream of building a German society within America was largely shattered by the two world wars.

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007

View online at AVOD

Summary: In this episode of New York: A Documentary Film, filmmaker Ric Burns follows the city into the 20th century in the wake of an extraordinary wave of immigration and the birth of the skyscraper. As New York spilled into the new century, the extraordinary interplay of capitalism, democracy and transformation surged to a climax. During a single generation, over 10 million immigrants arrived in New...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2003

View online at AVOD

Summary: As industrial progress continues and the gap between the rich and poor widens, a new labor movement emerges to advocate for workers' rights. The strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, is a victory for workers; and Susan B. Anthony paves the way for women's right to vote.

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2002

View online at AVOD