American Experience - Season 34

When Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O'Connor as the Supreme Court's first female justice in 1981, the announcement dominated the news. Time Magazine's cover proclaimed "Justice At Last," and she received unanimous Senate approval. Born in 1930 in El Paso, Texas, O'Connor grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona in an era when women were expected to become homemakers. After graduating near the top of her class at Stanford Law School, she could not convince a single law firm to interview her, so she turned to volunteer work and public service. A Republican, she served two terms in the Arizona state senate, then became a judge on the state court of appeals. During her 25 years on the Supreme Court, O'Connor was the critical swing vote on cases involving some of the 20th century's most controversial issues, including race, gender, and reproductive rights — and she was the tiebreaker on Bush v. Gore. Forty years after her confirmation, this biography recounts the life of a pioneering woman who both reflected and shaped an era.

In the 1930s, William Randolph Hearst's media empire included 28 newspapers, a movie studio, a syndicated wire service, radio stations, and 13 magazines. Nearly one in four American families read a Hearst publication. His newspapers were so influential that Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Winston Churchill all wrote for him. The first practitioner of what is now known as "synergy," Hearst used his media stronghold to achieve unprecedented political power, then ran for office himself. After serving two terms in Congress, he came in second in the balloting for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904. Perhaps best known as the inspiration for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and his lavish castle in San Simeon, Hearst died in 1951 at the age of 88, transforming the media's role in American life and politics. The two-part, four-hour film is based on historian David Nasaw's critically acclaimed biography, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst.

In the 1930s, William Randolph Hearst's media empire included 28 newspapers, a movie studio, a syndicated wire service, radio stations, and 13 magazines. Nearly one in four American families read a Hearst publication. His newspapers were so influential that Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Winston Churchill all wrote for him. The first practitioner of what is now known as "synergy," Hearst used his media stronghold to achieve unprecedented political power, then ran for office himself. After serving two terms in Congress, he came in second in the balloting for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904. Perhaps best known as the inspiration for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and his lavish castle in San Simeon, Hearst died in 1951 at the age of 88, transforming the media's role in American life and politics. The two-part, four-hour film is based on historian David Nasaw's critically acclaimed biography, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst.

Riveted: The History of Jeans reveals the fascinating and surprising story of this iconic American garment. At any given moment, half the people on the planet are wearing them. They have become a staple of clothing the world over, worn by everyone from presidents and supermodels to farmers and artists. More than just an item of apparel, America's tangled past is woven into the indigo blue fabric. From its roots in slavery to its connection to the Wild West, youth culture, the civil rights movement, rock and roll, hippies, high fashion, and hip-hop, jeans are the canvas on which the history of American ideology and politics is writ large.

The American Diplomat explores the lives and legacies of three African American ambassadors — Edward Dudley, Terence Todman, and Carl Rowan — who pushed past historical and institutional racial barriers to reach high-ranking appointments in the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations. At the height of the civil rights movement in the United States, the three men were asked to represent the best of American ideals abroad while facing discrimination at home. Oft reputed as "pale, male and Yale," the U.S. State Department fiercely maintained and cultivated the Foreign Service's elitist character and was one of the last federal agencies to desegregate. Through rare archival footage, in-depth oral histories, and interviews with family members, colleagues, and diplomats, the film paints a portrait of three men who left a lasting impact on the content and character of the Foreign Service and changed American diplomacy forever. Building lives of opportunity and influence, they advocated for a nation that did not always advocate for them. 

Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, about 40 miles north of Los Angeles, one of the biggest dams in the country blew apart, releasing a wall of water 20 stories high and causing the second deadliest disaster in California history. Ten thousand people lived downstream. Flood in the Desert tells the dramatic story of the St. Francis Dam disaster, which killed over 400 people and destroyed millions of dollars worth of property. The dam's collapse washed away the reputation of William Mulholland, the father of modern Los Angeles, and jeopardized more extensive plans to transform the West. A self-taught engineer, the 72-year-old Mulholland launched the city's remarkable growth by building both a cement aqueduct to pipe water 233 miles from the Owens Valley and Sierra Nevada Mountains across the Mojave Desert and the St. Francis Dam to hold a full year's supply of water for Los Angeles. Now, Mulholland was promoting a massive new project: the Hoover Dam. The collapse of the St. Francis Dam, the city's largest single reservoir, was a colossal engineering and human disaster that might have slowed the national project to tame the West. But within days, a concerted effort was underway to erase the dam's failure from popular memory. 

Over 100 years before the deadly COVID-19 pandemic set off a nationwide wave of fear and anti-Asian sentiment, an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco's Chinatown unleashed a similar crisis. The death of a Chinese immigrant in 1900 would have likely gone unnoticed if a sharp-eyed medical officer hadn't discovered a swollen black lymph node on his body — evidence of one of the world's most feared diseases, bubonic plague. It was the first time in history that civilization's most feared disease, the infamous Black Death, made it to North America. When others started dying, health officials and business leaders were torn about how to stave off an epidemic without causing panic and derailing the city's booming economy. 

Two doctors — vastly different in temperament, training, and experience — used different methods to lead the seemingly impossible battle to contain the disease before it could engulf the country. In addition to overwhelming medical challenges, they faced unexpected opposition from business leaders, politicians, and even the President of the United States. Fueling the resistance would be a potent blend of political expediency, ignorance, greed, racism, and deep-rooted distrust of not only federal authority but science itself. Scapegoated as the source of the disease early on, the Chinese-American community fought back against unjust, discriminatory treatment. Based on David K. Randall's Black Death at the Golden Gate, the film features interviews with various medical experts, authors, and Asian-American historians.