American Studies

Between 1840 and 1870, over 250,000 Americans traveled west by covered wagon on the Oregon Trail. Some claimed land in Oregon; others headed for California gold country. Many went enthusiastically. Others reluctantly left homes, family and friends to face hardship and an uncertain future. Actress Amy Warner vividly presents the experiences and feelings of these pioneers in her one-woman performance based on entries from diaries, letters and memoirs of pioneer women and a young girl who trekked the Oregon Trail.

This video tells the story of a controversial mural painted on a Los Angeles building in 1932 by Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Dr. Robert Butler, a psychiatrist and specialist in gerontology, discusses the ways in which American society compartmentalizes people into age groups and discriminates aginst its senior citizens, who often face neglect, a lack of emotional and intellectual stimulation and economic hardship.

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.

Features interviews with retired artists' film and theater actors and actresses, set designers, cinematographers, casting directors, script supervisors, and so on—who reside in the Motion Picture Country Home in Los Angeles or in the Performing Arts Lodge in Toronto.

What do daughters learn from their fathers about men? This video is an intimate family view of how adult love is often shaped by what a child learns at home.

Tells the story of the Open Admissions policy at the City University of New York, the third largest university system in the U.S., with the largest minority population.

Focuses on the Russian city of Ekaterinburg as a case-study illustration of the former Soviet Union's difficult transition from a socialist to a capitalist economy.

The Cuban Excludables is about the thousands of Cuban detainees held in prisons throughout the U.S. With no due process or legal redress, some of them spent years behind bars and cannot be sent back to Cuba by INS due to lack of agreements between the US and Cuba. These Cuban 'excludables' are thus in a legal limbo that leaves them imprisoned indefinitely.