American Experience

After an assassin's bullet took his brother's life, Robert F. Kennedy was bereft, not only of someone he loved, but of a role that had given meaning to his life. He had devoted himself to his glamorous brother John, suppressing his own ambitions for the sake of the Kennedy name. JFK's death plunged him into unremitting pain and grief, and left him struggling to find his own voice. In his suffering he began to empathize with impoverished Americans and others who were marginalized or disenfranchised — African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans. Just as he began to discover his own identity and move beyond the shadow of his brother, he, too, was assassinated.

The 1938 fight between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling and the political and social ideologies the world thought were represented by the boxers.

The rise of communist rule in Cuba and Castro's long era of leadership.

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE presents Building the Alaska Highway, the story of nearly 11,000 Army engineers who battled freezing temperatures, ice and snow, mountains, mud, muskeg, and mosquitoes to blaze a 1,500-mile road through one of the harshest landscapes in North America, and take a huge step forward in defending the nation from threats in the Pacific. The program interweaves interviews with historians and engineers who built the highway, and presents archival footage and beautiful cinematography of the sub-Arctic route the road took. The film also features never-before-seen home movies of the Alaska Highway.

The startling and controversial findings of a biologist who sought to understand the range of human sexual relations.

The life and career of one of the first "superstars" of the American screen.

America lays a telegraph cable across the Atlantic and enables almost-instant communication with Europe for the first time in history.

Racial anger erupts in Hawaii after five non-White men are wrongly accused of raping a Navy wife in the early 1930s.

How the end of World War II in the Pacific Theater affected Americans and Japanese.

The genesis of one of America's most influential performing families and the struggles to keep the group together in the face of personal problems.

The kidnapping of the heiress and her later sympathies to the cause of her captors.