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American Experience Season 35 Episodes
Season 35 Episode Guide
9 Episodes 2023 - 2023
Episode 1
The Lie Detector
Tue, Jan 3, 202353 mins
Discover the story of the polygraph, the controversial device that transformed modern police work, seized headlines and was extolled as an infallible crime-fighting tool. A tale of good intentions, twisted morals and unintended consequences.
Episode 2
Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space
Tue, Jan 17, 2023
Raised in the small all-Black Florida town of Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston studied at Howard University before arriving in New York in 1925. She would soon become a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, best remembered for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. But even as she gained renown in the Harlem literary circles, Hurston was also discovering anthropology at Barnard College with the renowned Franz Boas. She would make several trips to the American South and the Caribbean, documenting the lives of rural Black people and collecting their stories. She studied her own people, an unusual practice at the time, and during her lifetime became known as the foremost authority on Black folklore. Directed by Tracy Heather Strain, produced by Randall MacLowry and executive produced by Cameo George, Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space is an in-depth biography of the influential author whose groundbreaking anthropological work would challenge assumptions about race, gender and cultural superiority that had long defined the field in the 19th century.
Episode 3
Ruthless: Monopoly's Secret History
Mon, Feb 20, 202352 mins
For generations, Monopoly has been America's favorite board game, a love letter to unbridled capitalism and -- for better or for worse -- the impulses that make our free-market society tick. But behind the myth of the game's creation is an untold tale of theft, obsession and corporate double-dealing. Contrary to the folksy legend spread by Parker Brothers, Monopoly's secret history is a surprising saga that features a radical feminist; a community of Quakers in Atlantic City, New Jersey; Parker Brothers, America's greatest game company; and an unemployed Depression-era engineer. And the real story behind the creation of the game might never have come to light if it weren't for the determination of an economics professor and impassioned anti-monopolist. Part detective story, part sharp social commentary and part pop-culture celebration, "Ruthless: Monopoly's Secret History" presents the fascinating true story behind America's favorite game.
Episode 4
The Movement and the 'Madman'
Tue, Mar 28, 202382 mins
Two antiwar protests in the fall of 1969 cause President Richard Nixon to cancel his "madman" plans for a massive escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam.
Episode 5
The Sun Queen
Tue, Apr 4, 202353 mins
Scientist Mária Telkes dedicated her career to harnessing the power of the sun. Though undercut and thwarted by her male colleagues, she persevered to design the first successfully solar-heated house in 1948 and held more than 20 patents.
Episode 6
Casa Susanna
Tue, Jun 27, 2023
In the 1950s and 1960s, an underground network of both transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed -- dressed as and living as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalized for their self-expression. Told through the memories of those men who visited the house, and the memories of some of the children of the men, the film provides a moving look back at a secret world where the persecuted and frightened found freedom, acceptance and, often, the courage to live out of the shadows.
Episode 7
The Busing Battleground
Mon, Sep 11, 2023113 mins
On June 21, 1974, in response to decades of racial segregation and evidence of educational disparities, the U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the Boston Public Schools to integrate through a court-mandated busing plan. Despite the city's self-proclaimed reputation as the "cradle of liberty" and the "birthplace of abolition," it had always been, as historian Zebulon Miletsky writes, a deeply racially divided city. Forced busing would catalyze racial violence and class tensions across the city, and media coverage of the unrest would shape Boston's reputation and attitudes towards school desegregation across the country for decades to come. Drawing upon eyewitness accounts of participants, oral histories, and rare news archives, The Busing Battleground examines the 1974 effort to end segregation in Boston's public schools, detailing the decade's long struggle for educational equity that preceded the busing crisis.
Episode 8
The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi's Schools
Tue, Sep 12, 2023120 mins
In "The Harvest", Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas A. Blackmon looks back at how school integration transformed his hometown of Leland, Mississippi. After the 1954 Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, little more than token efforts were made to desegregate Southern schools. That changed dramatically on October 29, 1969, when the high court ordered that Mississippi schools to fully -- and immediately -- desegregate. As a result, a group of children, including six-year-old Blackmon, became part of the first class of Black and white children who would attend all 12 grades together in Leland. Set against vast historic and demographic changes unfolding across America, "The Harvest" follows a coalition of Black and white citizens working to create racially integrated public schools in a cotton town in the middle of the Mississippi Delta, the most rigidly segregated area in America. It tells the extraordinary story of how that first class became possible, then traces the lives of Blackmon and his classmates, teachers and parents from the first day through high school graduation in 1982. It is a riveting portrait of how those children's lives were transformed and how the town -- and America -- were changed. But as the film follows the lives of those children into the present, it is also a portrait of what our society has lost in its failure to finish the work begun a generation ago.
Episode 9
The War on Disco
Mon, Oct 30, 202360 mins
The War on Disco explores the culture war that erupted over the spectacular rise of disco music. Originating in underground Black and gay clubs, disco had unseated rock as America's most popular music by the late 1970s. But many diehard rock fans viewed disco, with its repetitive beat and culture that emphasized pleasure, as shallow and superficial. A story that's about much more than music, The War on Disco explores how the powerful anti-disco backlash revealed a cultural divide that to some seemed to be driven by racism and homophobia. The hostility came to a head on July 12, 1979, when a riot broke out at "Disco Demolition Night" during a baseball game in Chicago.