American Studies

This video features a fugitive woman slave describing life, work, and day-to-day resistance to slavery on a North Carolina cotton plantation during the 1840s and 1850s.

This video is based on the life of Boston shoemaker George Robert Twelves and reveals how working people helped make the American Revolution.

This video is a film-noir spoof, private eye Clio Malarkey investigates the central role played by working Americans in U.S. history and the hazards of misinterpreting the past.

This historical documentary chronicles New York real estate developer William Levitt's postwar construction of affordable housing for returning WWII veterans and their families in Levittown and other Long Island communities, thereby establishing the prototype for modern suburbia.

This provocative documentary, blending interviews with archival footage, examines the nature of shared national identity and what it means to be an American today.

Examines Pulaski, Tennessee, the town where the Ku Klux Klan was founded right after the Civil War, and where today its memory still runs very deep.

Examines the Anti-Apartheid Movement at the University of California at Berkeley during 1985-86, which led to similar student protests nationwide.

Dramatizes a real-life incident involving a fight between two high school girls--one white, one black-and then traces in parallel fashion the response of the two families to the incident, revealing the real feelings underlying racial tensions as well as the existence of common interests.

A contemporary portrait of the small southern town where, in June 1964, three young civil rights workers were murdered for registering blacks to vote. In the thirty years since, Philadelphia, Mississippi has retained its infamous reputation as a racist backwater.

Features the musical traditions and verbal recollections of eight retired African-American railroad track laborers, whose occupational folk songs were once heard along the railroad lines that crisscross the South.

Shows how the Black Church has embraced African-American lesbians and gay men as dedicated members of its spiritual family.

Examines the life and scientific career of Albert A. Michelson (1852-1931), a pioneer in the world of physics who in 1907 became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.