In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, during what has become known as the Gilded Age, the population of the United States doubled in the span of a single generation. As national wealth expanded, two classes rose simultaneously, separated by a gulf of experience and circumstance that was unprecedented in American life. These disparities sparked passionate and violent debate over questions still being asked in our own times: How is wealth best distributed, and by what process? Does government exist to protect private property or provide balm to the inevitable casualties of a churning industrial system? The outcome of these disputes was both uncertain and momentous, and marked by a passionate vitriol and level of violence that would shock the conscience of many Americans today.
In 1910, the Pennsylvania Railroad successfully accomplished the enormous engineering feat of buildi...
Shortly before dawn on August 21, 1992, six heavily armed U.S. marshals made their way up to the iso...
Based on eight years of continued prosperity, presidents and economists alike confidently predicted ...
The film interweaves the personal accounts of polio survivors with the story of an ardent crusader w...
As a general, he had fought to preserve the Union. As president, he helped to oversee the transforma...
On August 8, 1908, at a racetrack outside Paris, Wilbur Wright executed what was, for him, a routine...
The Triangle Fire chronicles the 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City kill...
In the 50s and 60s, deep in the American countryside at the foot of the Catskills, a small wooden ho...
In the spring of 1927, after weeks of incessant rains, the Mississippi River went on a rampage from ...
The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995 is the worst act...
Actor Dustin Hoffman narrates this decade-spanning documentary that highlights the contributions of ...
Rob Williams was an African-American living in Monroe, North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s. Living...
Arguably one of the most fateful and resonant events of the last half millennium, the Pilgrims journ...
In February 1939, more than 20,000 Americans filled Madison Square Garden for an event billed as a “...
Filmed over five years in Kansas City, this documentary follows four transgender kids – beginning at...
In 1988, after two terms in office, Ronald Reagan left the White House one of the most popular presi...
On August 15th, 1914, the Panama Canal opened, connecting the world's two largest oceans and signali...
The remarkable story of Earl Silas Tupper, an ambitious but reclusive small-town inventor, and Brown...
American Experience celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Founded by R...
Follow General George Armstrong Custer from his memorable, wild charge at Gettysburg to his lonely, ...