American Experience: Season 2

S2·E1 Mytharc

The Great Air Race of 1924

Oct 3, 1989

The first around-the-world air race, sponsored by the Army Air Service to prove that the airplane had a commercial future, was the ultimate test of man and machine. Four pilots too

S2·E2 Core

Demon Rum

Oct 10, 1989

Prohibition's effect on Detroit, Michigan, the first major American city to "go dry," where smuggling liquor across the Canadian border became the second largest indusry in town. A

S2·E3 Core

A Family Gathering

Oct 17, 1989

Lise Yasui explores three generations of her Japanese-American family - from their immigration to Oregon in the early 1900s through their imprisonment in internment camps during Wo

S2·E4 Core

The Great War: 1918

Oct 24, 1989

All lingering 19th-century notions of the romance of battle were replaced by the terrible reality of 20th-century mechanized warfare. At Verdun, the French lost 300,000 men; at the

S2·E5 Core

Wildcatter: A Story of Texas Oil

Oct 31, 1989

The tale of mavericks whose risk-taking, sweat and dreams changed an American industry. Starting with Spindletop, the first Texas gusher in 1902, rare archival film and interviews

S2·E6 Core

Forever Baseball

Nov 7, 1989

There is hardly a city, town or village without a baseball diamond. More than a game, baseball is a tradition, rite of passage, an enduring passion, a code for understanding the cu

S2·E7 Core

Mr. Sears' Catalogue

Nov 14, 1989

They started selling watches. Then Richard Sears and Alva Curtis Roebuck started a revolution -- a "wish book" that made life on the farm a little easier and put consumer goods wit

S2·E8 Core

Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven

Nov 21, 1989

A stunning film portrait of Yosemite National Park. The film's narration is taken from using the 1851 diary of the first expedition of soldiers into the sacred valley home of the A

S2·E9 Core

Adam Clayton Powell

Nov 28, 1989

Affluent, handsome, light-skinned and blond, he could pass for white. But his message about "economics and jobs" would make him one of the most charismatic black leaders in the 20t

S2·E10 Core

Journey to America

Dec 5, 1989

A tribute to the twelve million people who emigrated to the U.S. between 1890 and 1920. A recapturing of the journey through Europe to seaport towns, to the arrival in New York Har

S2·E11 Core

Ballad of a Mountain Man

Dec 12, 1989

Bascom Lamar Lunsford was a pioneer folklorist who in the 1920s began a campaign to preserve mountain music and dance. He dignified what was known as "hillbilly music." Knocking on

S2·E12 Core

Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice

Dec 19, 1989

Born into slavery, she became a journalist and newspaper owner in Memphis, and was radicalized following the lynching of three friends. Her crusade against lynching led to death th

S2·E13 Core

Orphans of the Storm

Dec 26, 1989

In the summer of 1940, as the German Luftwaffe began its assault on England, 10,000 British children were sent on a perilous sea voyage to safe havens in the United States. There,

S2·E14 Core

Forbidden City, USA

Jan 2, 1990

Before WWII, San Francisco's Chinatown was a separate world, closed to outsiders, ruled by rigid homeland customs. But in the 1930s, second generation Chinese Americans defied cult

S2·E15 Mytharc

Battle for Wilderness

Jan 9, 1990

The first major battle for wilderness preservation erupted over the building of Hetch Hetchy Dam in Yosemite National Park in 1906. On the one side were the purists who argued that

S2·E16 Mytharc

Roots of Resistance: The Story of the Underground Railroad

Jan 16, 1990

Men and women, black and white, risked their lives to carve an elaborate network of escape routes out of slavery in the mid 1800s -- trails and backroads, safehouses, river crossin