American Experience: Season 17
Season 17 Lore Primer
Key plot threads, lore context, and character stakes you need to remember before diving into this season.
- Directly follows the overarching narrative developments of American Experience Season 16.
- Faction dynamics and core character alliances shift under escalating external stakes.
- Crucial mysteries introduced previously reach key turning points and narrative reckonings.
- Sets up serialized story arcs that build directly toward the climactic season finale.
Episode Guide
Season 17 Progress Shield
RFK (Part 1 & 2)
Oct 4, 2004 · 55 min
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 s
The Fight
Jan 24, 2005 · 55 min
"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 w
Fidel Castro
Jan 31, 2005 · 55 min
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 e
Building the Alaska Highway
Feb 7, 2005 · 55 min
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
Kinsey
Feb 14, 2005 · 55 min
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 Ba
Mary Pickford
Apr 4, 2005 · 55 min
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 businesswo
The Great Transatlantic Cable
Apr 11, 2005 · 55 min
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
The Massie Affair
Apr 18, 2005 · 55 min
"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 kid
The Carter Family: Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
May 9, 2005 · 55 min
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 ear