American Studies

In this video, artist and art educator Betty LaDuke presents the lives and work of three American women artists of diverse heritages—Lois Mailou Jones, Mine Okubo, and Pablita Velarde.

Based on a play by Puerto Rican playwright Rene marques, this video potrays the migration of a Puerto Rican family from the countryside to the San Juan ghetto and then to New York's Spanish Harlem.

Examines the adoption of Chinese children by U.S. parents, profiling six diverse families who share their adoption stories, meeting a parent who worked inside an orphanage before ever planning to adopt, one who lived through China's Cultural Revolution, and another who has spent over twenty years researching adoption in China. It is a video about building families, as well as overcoming cultural myths and misunderstandings.

Caution: Show Dogs profiles four top breeders and their dogs, who share the years of knowledge and experience required to produce consistent champions, and behind-the-scenes footage and interviews at numerous dog shows reveal the excitement and exhilaration of the world of Show Dogs.

This video shows the involvement of Puerto Rican women in the continuing protest movement against U.S. Navy use of the island of Vieques as a military training site.

This video profiles Frederick Brown, one of America’s most prolific expressionist painters, whose Soho loft studio in New York served as a gathering place for artists, musicians, writers, dancers and other creative personalities during the Sixties and Seventies.

This ten-part series on nineteenth and twentieth-century American history uses period graphics and innovative computer animation to make history accessible and exciting for high school, college and adult education students.

This video is a shocking but insightful expose of the taboo subject of homosexual rape and homosexual relations in prison.

This video follows the lives of four Mexican women and their families whose undocumented husbands and partners, as workers at the World Trade Center, lost their lives in the tragic events of 9/11.

Filmmaker Hali Lee grew up in suburban Kansas City, where she remembers her own high school prom as a drag. In later years, however, she became obsessed with trying to understand the appeal of this quintessentially American tradition—was it the pageantry, the poignant pretensions of teenagers dressing up as ‘adults,’ the myth of prom as a pagan coming-of-age ritual, or the ersatz memories?

O. Winston Link (1914-2001) was America's greatest photographer of the romance of the steam engine, as documented in his book, Steam, Steel & Stars: America's Last Steam Railroad. His extraordinary images were made at night, using elaborate flash equipment, capturing trains in action on the Norfolk and Western, the last steam railroad line in the U.S., during the 1950s. This video takes a journey with Link, then in his latest Seventies, along the tracks of the N&W, through Virginia and West Virginia, as he recounts the experience of setting up and taking his remarkable photos.

This documentary, hosted and narrated by Burt Lancaster, examines the effects of the highly publicized investigation of the motion picture industry by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which began in 1947.