American Experience

Freedom Riders is the powerful harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever.

The murder of a 14-year-old black boy and the subsequent trial horrified the nation and the world. Emmett Till's death was a spark that helped mobilize the Civil Rights movement.

The women of New York came together like nowhere else to push for their state’s ratification of the 19th Amendment and win a pivotal victory in the long fight for women’s suffrage.

Preview the second half of the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton, who veered between sordid scandal and grand achievement.

A biography of a president who rose from a broken childhood in Arkansas to become one of the most successful politicians in modern American history.

Black women have long been at the forefront of the right to vote. Today, 100 years after the passage of the 19th Amendment and 55 years after the Voting Rights Act, their fight continues.

They were just some of the first generation of suffragists: Elizabeth C. Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sarah Remond, Susan B. Anthony.

She Resisted explores the final decade of the women’s suffrage movement through its most powerful images, brought to life with color for the first time. Live through the epic 1913 Washington, D.C. ...

Part Two examines the mounting dispute over strategy and tactics, and reveals how the pervasive racism of the time, particularly in the South, impacted women's fight for the vote.

The hard-fought campaign waged by American women for the right to vote.

Virginia recently became the latest state to ratify a constitutional amendment that the country has been fighting about for nearly 100 years since it was first proposed by Alice Paul and other women's ...

Black women played an essential role in the suffrage movement.

While studying in London, Alice Paul joined the 'suffragettes'. In the summer of 1909, she and 111 other suffragettes were arrested. In jail, she declared herself a political prisoner, refused ...

Ida B. Wells, a prominent journalist exposed racial violence in the South and led a trip to Washington, D.C. in 1913 to march in the national suffrage parade.

A veteran of the suffrage wars, Harriot Stanton Blatch organized labor activists, spoke to crowds of voting men and lobbied Albany for a suffrage bill.

Get an inside look at the making of Chasing the Moon. Premieres July 8, 9/8c on PBS.

Ed Dwight Jr. was the first African American to be trained as an astronaut. In 1962, Dwight was selected for astronaut training at the urging of the Kennedy Administration.

In the 1930s, Wernher Von Braun’s rocket work was supported by the Nazi regime. At the end of WWII, the United States government enlisted von Braun’s expertise.. During the Cold War, his rocket ...

In May of 1961, the Freedom Riders crossed into Mississippi. They entered a white only waiting room in Jackson and were arrested. They were sent to Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Prison and ...

With the rising concern over Communist aggression in Asia and beyond, President Harry S. Truman committed American troops in South Korea, stating that involvement in Korea was necessary for ...

In the mid-20th century, a small band of high-altitude pioneers exposed themselves to the extreme forces of the space age long before NASA's acclaimed Mercury 7 would make headlines. In California, a ...