History

Historian Niall Ferguson explores philosophical and political developments that have enabled the Western hemisphere to dominate the globe for the past 500 years. And he asks, as the developing world adopts the ways of the West, can the West survive?

 Reading To Kill a Mockingbird has been a national pastime for the last five decades – and it’s still selling nearly a million copies a year. Behind the iconic story of Gregory Peck and Atticus was a young Southern girl named Nelle Harper Lee, who once said she wanted to be Alabama’s Jane Austen. This program explores Lee’s life and unravels her mysteries, particularly why she never published again, as well as how the book shaped many lives.

On April 2, 1936, when the 22-year-old son of a sharecropper entered the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, he was, he later remembered, barely able to control his anger at the insults and racism. But the young athlete was able to channel his raw emotions into some of the most remarkable achievements in the history of athletics – winning four gold medals.This American Experience program follows Owens’ life, success and struggle to find a place for himself in a United States that was still wrestling to overcome its own deeply entrenched racism.

Lewinsky to a balanced budget, the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton veered between sordid scandal and grand achievement. This film explores the story of an American president who rose from a broken childhood in Arkansas to become one of the most successful politicians in modern American history and one of the most complex and conflicted characters to ever stride across the public stage.

“Slavery By Another Name” challenges one of America’s most cherished assumptions: The belief that slavery in this country ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. This documentary tells a harrowing story of how, in the South, even as chattel slavery came to an end, new forms of involuntary servitude, including convict leasing, debt slavery and peonage, took its place with shocking force – brutalizing and ultimately circumscribing the lives of hundreds of thousands of African Americans well into the 20^th century.

During World War II, Hitler’s scientists developed terrifying new weapons of mass destruction. Alarmed by rumors about advanced rockets and missiles, Allied intelligence recruited a team of brilliant minds from British universities and Hollywood studios to a country house near London. Here, they secretly pored over millions of air photos shot at great risk over German territory by specially converted, high-flying Spitfires.

On April 28, 1881, 21-year-old Henry McCarty, alias Billy the Kid, just days from being hanged for murder, outfoxed his jailors and electrified the nation with the latest in a long line of daring escapes. Just a few weeks later, the notorious young outlaw was gunned down by an ambitious sheriff.

On June 26, 1876, near the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, General George Armstrong Custer ordered his soldiers to drive back a large army of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors. The battle pitted two larger-than-life antagonists against one another: Sitting Bull, the charismatic and politically savvy leader of the Plains Indians, and Custer, one of the Union’s greatest cavalry officers and a man with a reputation for fearless and often reckless courage. By day’s end, Custer and nearly a third of his army were dead.

Watch all four episodes of this Emmy-winning drama online at Think^TV. Limit time only 10/18/2011

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