American Experience

Individual acts of courage inspire black Southerners to fight for their rights: Mose Wright testifies against the white men who murdered young Emmett Till, and Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.

States' rights loyalists and federal authorities collide in the 1957 battle to integrate Little Rock's Central High School, and again in James Meredith's 1962 challenge to segregation at the University of Mississippi. Both times, a Southern governor squares off with a U.S. president, violence erupts -- and integration is carried out.

Black college students take a leadership role in the civil rights movement as lunch counter sit-ins spread across the South. "Freedom Riders" also try to desegregate interstate buses, but they are brutally attacked as they travel.

The civil rights movement discovers the power of mass demonstrations as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerges as its most visible leader. Some demonstrations succeed; others fail. But the triumphant March on Washington, D.C., under King's leadership, shows a mounting national support for civil rights. President John F. Kennedy proposes the Civil Rights Act.

Mississippi's grass-roots civil rights movement becomes an American concern when college students travel south to help register black voters and three activists are murdered. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenges the regular Mississippi delegation at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City.

A decade of lessons is applied in the climactic and bloody march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. A major victory is won when the federal Voting Rights Bill passes, but civil rights leaders know they have new challenges ahead.

Science enables advances in reproduction and the establishment of a new medical industry, but often not one as successful as people imagine.

For ages, the prospect of conceiving a human being in a laboratory seemed ripped from the pages of science fiction. Then, in 1978, everything changed. Test Tube Babies, from filmmakers Chana Gazit and Hilary Klotz Steinman. This one-hour documentary tells the story of doctors, researchers, and hopeful couples who pushed the limits of science and triggered a technological revolution in human reproduction. In so doing, they landed at the center of a controversy whose reverberations continue to this day. When the first human egg was fertilized in a lab in 1944, the news spread like wildfire; the press quickly coined the term “test tube baby.” Many Americans were horrified. But for decades after the early scientific advance there was little real progress; researchers could not keep the fertilized eggs alive. Moreover, their efforts were entangled in a national moral debate. Despite the controversy, one maverick scientist at New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital refused to give up his pursuit. The determined researcher, Dr. Landrum Shettles, was relentless in his experimentation, and in 1973 agreed to help a couple from Florida who had exhausted all other fertility treatments. John and Doris Del-Zio arrived in New York ready and willing to be the first couple to conceive a baby outside the mother’s body. But what the Del-Zios considered a private decision placed them squarely in the middle of an emotionally charged debate and a very public lawsuit against Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Under intense scrutiny and tremendous pressure not to cross the line into human experimentation, hospital administrators stopped the Del-Zios’ procedure and fired Shettles. The issue was further complicated in 1973 by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which inextricably tied IVF research to the question of when life begins. In Washington, lawmakers placed a moratorium on federal funding for IVF research, bringing progress in America to a standstill. Meanw

Walter Reed travels to Cuba to investigate the radical theory that mosquitoes spread deadly Yellow Fever.

The story of gold in California and the migration, immigration, and economy that remained after the riches were gone.

It could have been the start of World War III. Instead, it became the largest humanitarian campaign the world had ever seen. On June 24, 1948, one of the first major crises of the Cold War occurred when the Soviet Union blocked railroad and street access to West Berlin. For nearly a year two million civilians and twenty thousand allied soldiers in the city's western sector were fed and fueled entirely from the air. Former German soldiers built airfields and repaired engines for the enemies they had been shooting out of the sky just three years before. British and American pilots, so recently delivering death, were now angels of mercy, supplying coal and flour, coffee and chocolate to the beleaguered city. Through lavish re-enactments and the personal stories of those who lived through the airlift, this American Experience production provides a dramatic and striking portrait of the first battle of the Cold War.

The history and ramifications of biological weapons and the stand the United States took in ending further research.

The historical, social, and geographic factors that shaped one of America's most uniquely individual cities.

The story of the career of the extremely influential evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

The details behind the beginnings and end of Peoples Temple headed by Jim Jones, including the tragic suicides of many of its members in the jungles of Guyana.

A chronicle of Haight Ashbury in the summer of 1967 and the peak of American youth counterculture.

A story of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - its beginnings in 1830, the migration of its persecuted members, and its role and influence in the modern world.

A profile of the aristocratic founding father, his efforts to bring federal economic reforms to the fledgling country, and how his aloof personality led to opposition and tragedy.