Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 2
Description
Ken Burns explores the other side of the writer - an American icon who, through tragedy and bad financial decisions, falls hard with failure. In contrast to the wildly successful Twain, Clemens is an inept businessman who squanders his fortunes on pipe dream patents and bad investments. Clemens turns to the lecture circuit and tours extensively, leaving behind his beloved Hartford home and, often, his family, to pay off his creditors.
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 1
Description
As one of America's founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson is considered by some to be the man of the millennium, analogous to the progress of the first 200 years of American history. He was a man of freedom and expansion, yet he had the restraint that is necessary to succeed with that freedom--the commitment to becoming learned and skilled. As the third president of the United States, Jefferson was responsible for doubling the size of the country with...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 2
Description
Discover the true story of America's “Great Experiment” — the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawing alcohol — in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's PROHIBITION. In 1920, Prohibition goes into effect, making it illegal to manufacture, transport or sell intoxicating liquor. This episode examines the problems of enforcement, as millions of law-abiding Americans become lawbreakers overnight. While a significant portion of the country is...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 7
Description
Frail and failing but determined to see the war through to victory, FDR wins re-election and begins planning for a peaceful postwar world, but a cerebral hemorrhage kills him at 63. After her husband's death, Eleanor Roosevelt proves herself a shrewd politician and a skilled negotiator in her own right, as well as a champion of civil rights, civil liberties and the United Nations. When she dies in 1962, she is mourned everywhere as the First Lady...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 7
Description
Public support for the war declines, and American men of draft age face difficult decisions and moral choices. After police battle with demonstrators in the streets of Chicago, Richard Nixon wins the presidency. In Vietnam the war goes on.
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 4
Description
North Vietnamese troops and materiel stream down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into the South. As an antiwar movement builds back home, soldiers and Marines discover that the war they are fighting in Vietnam is nothing like their fathers' war.
7) The Address
Author
Series
Description
Ken Burns tells the story of a tiny school in Putney, Vermont, the Greenwood School, where each year the students are encouraged to memorize, practice and recite the Gettysburg Address. In its exploration of Greenwood, whose students, boys ages 11-17, all face a range of complex learning differences, the film also unlocks the history, context and importance of President Lincoln's most powerful address.
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 1
Description
In 1851, word spreads across the country of a beautiful area of California's Yosemite Valley, attracting visitors who wish to exploit the land's scenery for commercial gain and those who wish to keep it pristine. Among the latter is a Scottish-born wanderer named John Muir, for whom protecting the land becomes a spiritual calling. In 1864, Congress passes an act that protects Yosemite from commercial development for "public use, resort and recreation"...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 9
Description
As rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll erode jazz' audience still further, the music nonetheless enjoys a time of tremendous creativity. Saxophonist Sonny Rollins makes his mark on the scene, Duke Ellington reemerges as a star after a triumphant performance at the Newport Jazz Festival and Miles Davis makes several now-legendary albums. Young trumpeter Clifford Brown achieves great artistry, but his life is cut short in a car accident. Vocalist Sarah...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 7
Description
The infectious music of the swing bands sets the mood for soldiers going off to fight in World War II. Gifted trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, in after-hours jam sessions with other young rebels, including the drummer Kenny Clarke and pianist Thelonious Monk, take jazz in startling new directions with their complex music--bebop. Their innovations, however, are largely unnoticed amidst the war effort. Armed Forces Radio...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 2
Description
Thomas Jefferson is by most accounts the most admired and greatest figure in American history. However, he was a man whose behavior in many ways contradicted his public declarations. He supported resistance and revolution in America and France, yet was not a charismatic politician or front-line soldier. His eloquence was immortalized in the Declaration of Independence, which declared that "All men are created equal." He disapproved of the slave trade,...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 6
Description
As the Great Depression deepens, jazz thrives. The saxophone emerges as an iconic instrument of the music; the episode introduces two of its masters, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. Young migrates to Kansas City, where a vibrant music scene is prospering. Out of this ferment emerges pianist Count Basie, who forms a band that epitomizes the Kansas City sound. With the help of John Hammond, Basie takes his band to New York, where his remarkable rhythm...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 2
Description
By the end of the 19th century, widespread industrialization has left many Americans worried about whether the country - once a vast wilderness - will have any pristine land left. At the same time, poachers in the parks are rampant, and visitors think nothing of littering or carving their names near iconic sites like Old Faithful. Congress has yet to establish clear judicial authority or appropriations for the protection of the parks. This sparks...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 4
Description
Franklin Roosevelt runs for vice president in 1920 and seems assured of a still brighter future until polio devastates him the following summer. He spends seven years struggling without success to walk again, while Eleanor builds a personal and political life of her own. FDR returns to politics in 1928 and, as governor of New York, acts with such vigor and imagination during the first years of the Great Depression that the Democrats turn to him as...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 7
Description
The episode begins with the presidential campaign of 1864 that set Abraham Lincoln against his old commanding general, George McClellan. The stakes are nothing less than the survival of the union itself: with Grant and Sherman stalled at Petersburg and Atlanta, opinion in the north has turned strongly against Lincoln and the war. But eleventh hour union victories at Mobile Bay, Atlanta, and the Shenandoah Valley, tilt the election to Lincoln, and...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 8
Description
Jazz becomes the official symbol of American democracy abroad. At home, the music splinters into different camps: white and black, cool and hot, East and West, traditional and modern. Television supplants radio, but offers fewer opportunities for jazz to be heard. Most big bands are forced to dismantle. The rhythm and blues phenomenon further erodes the audience for jazz. Charlie Parker dies of pneumonia and cirrhosis of the liver at age 34; Dizzy...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 3
Description
This episode charts the dramatic events that led to Lincoln's decision to set the slaves free. Convinced by July 1862 that emancipation was now morally and militarily crucial to the future of the union, Lincoln must wait for a victory to issue his proclamation. But as the year wears on, there are no union victories to be had thanks to the brilliance of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. The episode comes to a climax in September 1862 with Lee's...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 1
Description
Jazz is born in the unique musical and social cauldron of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century, emerging from several forms of music, including ragtime, marching bands, work songs, spirituals, European classical music, funeral parade music and, above all, the blues. Musicians who advance early jazz in New Orleans include Creole pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton, cornetist Buddy Bolden and clarinet prodigy Sidney Bechet. Composer W.C....
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 4
Description
While visiting the parks was once predominantly the domain of Americans wealthy enough to afford the high-priced train tours, the advent of the automobile allows more people than ever before to visit the parks. Mather embraces this opportunity and works to build more roads in the parks. Some park enthusiasts, such as Margaret and Edward Gehrke of Nebraska, begin "collecting" parks, making a point to visit as many as they can. In North Carolina, Horace...
Author
Series
Ken Burns volume 1
Description
A frail, asthmatic young Theodore Roosevelt transforms himself into a vigorous champion of the strenuous life, loses one great love and finds another, leads men into battle and then rises like a rocket to become the youngest president in American history at 42. Meanwhile, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, brought up as the pampered only child of adoring parents, follows his older cousin's career with worshipful fascination and begins to think he might one...
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Request an item not in the catalog. Submit Request