American Experience (1988)

At 25, Charles A. Lindbergh arrived in Paris, the first man to fly across the Atlantic -- handsome, talented, and brave -- a hero. But the…

He possessed a fateful combination of strengths and weaknesses that propelled him to the White House and then brought him down. One of the…

Frank Popiolek was 14 when he came to America in 1911, one of 2 million Polish immigrants who made the journey. He settled in Chicago and b…

On July 2, 1881, Charles Julius Guiteau shot and fatally wounded President James A. Garfield in the lobby of the Baltimore & Potomac train…

Few events shocked America more than the news in 1957 that Russia had launched the first satellite. It was an assault on our national pride…

In 1929, while the stock market was rising, there were few critics. It was a "New Era" when everyone could get rich. But it was a small gro…

A tale of high adventure, enormous human effort and engineering brilliance. On May 2, 1869, when the last railroad spike was driven, bells…

When French settlers, exiled from Nova Scotia, migrated to Louisiana in the 1750s, they mixed with African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and…

After the stock market crashed in 1929, thousands suffered unemployment and poverty in the Great Depression. The most desperate year, 1932,…

The story of Mexican American miners -- "los mineros" -- whose pitched labor battles, beginning with the first strike in 1903, shaped the c…

Before there was Disneyland, there was Coney Island. By the turn of the century, this tiny spit of New York real estate was internationally…