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American Experience on IMDB
First Aired: October 4th, 1988
Status: Continuing
Network: PBS
Summary: TV's most-watched history series brings to life the compelling stories from our past that inform our understanding of the world today.
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Episode Statistics:
# of Episodes: 468
# of Episodes I watched: 0
# of Episodes I haven't watched: 468
Last Episode I watched: -
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Season 17
Episode 0: The Fall of Saigon
Air Date: April 25th, 2005
Summary: Events surrounding the loss of the South Vietnamese city and the struggle of those who lived there.
Episode 1: RFK (Part 1 & 2)
Air Date: October 4th, 2004
Summary: A shy, if driven man, Robert Kennedy "wasn't built for the spotlight, he was built for the wings," says journalist Jack Newfield. While John Kennedy was alive, that's where Bobby stayed -- making certain that JFK remained in the spotlight.
Episode 2: The Fight
Air Date: January 24th, 2005
Summary: "The Fight" recalls the June 1938 heavyweight title bout between Joe Louis and the German Max Schmeling, and assesses its political and social ramifications. "It was going to pit whole nations and whole ideologies against each other," says narrator Courtney B. Vance. Producer-director Barak Goodman also explores Louis's place in America's racial divide as well as the genial Schmeling's ties to Hitler.
Episode 3: Fidel Castro
Air Date: January 31st, 2005
Summary: Fidel Castro's march through Cuba and the second half of the 20th century is chronicled by filmmaker Adriana Bosch. Here, Cuban exiles and former Castro confreres, foreign-policy experts, a former Castro brother-in-law and his daughter Alina Fernandez paint a portrait of a dictator, a social reformer -- and a survivor.
Episode 4: Building the Alaska Highway
Air Date: February 7th, 2005
Summary: Recalls the construction of the 1500-mile "shortcut to Tokyo" through Canada in 1942 by 11,000 U.S. troops (4,000 of them black). It wasn't the Army's greatest World War II triumph, but it was one of the first, and it gave Americans, who feared a Japanese buildup in the Aleutians, a needed morale boost. This hour is light on military and engineering detail, and packed with proud GIs recalling mud, cold and toil.
Episode 5: Kinsey
Air Date: February 14th, 2005
Summary: Profiling Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the Indiana University zoologist whose "revolutionary picture of American sexuality" rocked the country in the late 1940s and early '50s. Filmmakers Barak Goodman and John Maggio interview Kinsey colleagues and biographers, along with people took part in his studies, to paint a portrait of an "unyielding" proponent of sexual freedom who practiced what he preached. Says sexologist Paul Gebhard, a Kinsey assistant: "He was a rebel."
Episode 6: Mary Pickford
Air Date: April 4th, 2005
Summary: Profiling Mary Pickford, the silent-screen "sweetheart" who blazed the trail to Hollywood and became "America's first superstar." Pickford (1893-1979) was also an astute businesswoman: She founded United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and her husband-to-be Douglas Fairbanks. But, as filmmaker Sue Williams stresses here, there was no glorious sunset. As Pickford biographer Eileen Whitfield puts it, she was "the first has-been created by film."
Episode 7: The Great Transatlantic Cable
Air Date: April 11st, 2005
Summary: Cyrus Field's struggle to lay telegraph cables across the Atlantic in the 1850s and '60s is chronicled. When Field finally succeeded, in 1866, it marked "the annihilation of space and time," says historian David Czitrom. But the 13-year effort -- recalled here in re-creations and comments from historians and engineers -- included many false starts and one spectacular failure. Still, says Czitrom, "he never let up."
Episode 8: The Massie Affair
Air Date: April 18th, 2005
Summary: "The Massie Affair" chronicles a 1931 Honolulu rape case involving a young white Navy wife that became even more serious when one of the acquitted Hawaiian defendants was later kidnapped and murdered. Although marital discord and social "honor" play into the story, it's mostly about stark racial injustice that touched even the White House. It uncovers "cold, hard truths about America and the people who ruled it."
Episode 9: Victory in the Pacific
Air Date: May 2nd, 2005
Episode 10: The Carter Family: Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
Air Date: May 9th, 2005
Summary: Recalls "the first family of country music" in interviews with Carter relatives, music writers, and singers Gillian Welch, Joan Baez, Marty Stuart and Rodney Crowell. The tough early lives of A.P. Carter, his sister Maybelle and wife Sara were lightened by music, and their 1927 RCA audition proved to be "the big bang of commercial country music." But A.P. and Sara's marriage couldn't survive the turmoil that followed.
Episode 11: Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
Air Date: May 23rd, 2005
Episode 12: Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
Air Date: May 30th, 2005
Episode 13: The Massie Affair
Air Date: July 4th, 2005
Summary: "The Massie Affair" chronicles a 1931 Honolulu rape case involving a young white Navy wife that became even more serious when one of the acquitted Hawaiian defendants was later kidnapped and murdered. Although marital discord and social "honor" play into the story, it's mostly about stark racial injustice that touched even the White House. It uncovers "cold, hard truths about America and the people who ruled it."
Episode 15: RFK (2): The Awful Grace of God
Air Date: October 4th, 2004
Summary: After Nov. 22, 1963, \"we saw [RFK] grow,\" says civil-rights veteran John Lewis. Kennedy's famously tense relationship with LBJ was ruptured beyond repair by Vietnam, and he made the plight of the dispossessed his moral and political passion. Says Newfield: \"He saw somebody hurting and he hurt.
Episode 20: The Fall of Saigon
Air Date: April 25th, 2005
Summary: The Fall of Saigon is the final episode of the multi-award-winning 1983 series Vietnam: A Television History. Told in news clips and recollections by Vietnamese and Americans (including Gerald R. Ford and Henry Kissinger), the hour begins with the January 1973 peace treaty. It amounted to a death sentence for South Vietnam, says a South Vietnamese colonel. And when the end came, it was chaotic. We really just cut and ran, recalls U.S. aide William LeGro.
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