Ken Burns
Author
Description
By April of 1944, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt have occupied the White House for more than eleven years. The President is secretly convalescing in South Carolina from a recently diagnosed bout of congestive heart failure while the war rages overseas and his family is under press scrutiny at home. Despite his failing health, FDR has ambitious postwar plans for his country: to see the horrific struggle through to victory, and then to bring the United...
Author
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"A treasury of American Presidents by historian Ken Burns"-- Provided by publisher.
Burns explores the legacy of each of America's presidents, from George Washington to Barack Obama. Each two-page spread covers the basic facts of the era, the man, and an important aspect of his presidency.
Description
1862 saw the birth of modern warfare and the transformation of Lincoln’s war to preserve the Union into a war to emancipate the slaves. Episode Two begins with the political infighting that threatened to swamp Lincoln’s administration and then follows Union General George McClellan’s ill-fated campaign on the Virginia Peninsula, where his huge army meets a smaller but infinitely more resourceful Confederate force. During this episode we witness...
Description
Explore the history of a uniquely American art form: country music. From its deep and tangled roots in ballads, blues and hymns performed in small settings, to its worldwide popularity, learn how country music evolved over the course of the 20th century, as it eventually emerged to become America’s music. COUNTRY MUSIC features never-before-seen footage and photographs, plus interviews with more than 80 country music artists. The eight-part series...
Description
The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, The Vietnam War, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides -- Americans who fought...
Description
Until the arrival of European and American settlers in the late nineteenth century, the southern Plains of the United States were predominantly grasslands, the home and hunting grounds of many Native American tribes and the range of untold millions of bison. It was seldom used for farming. Bitterly cold winters, hot summers, high winds and especially low, unreliable precipitation made it unsuitable for standard agriculture. But at the start of the...
11) The Civil War
Author
Description
Provides a history of the Civil War based on the PBS television series "The Civil War," with maps and text which interweave the author's narrative with the voices of the men and women who lived through the war; and includes essays by historians of the era.
Author
Description
As companion to his PBS series airing in September 2007, "The War" focuses on the citizens of four towns--Luverne, Minnesota; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama, following more than forty people from 1941 to 1945. Maps and hundreds of photographs enrich this compelling, unflinching narrative.
Description
Leaving behind his Boston childhood, Benjamin Franklin reinvents himself in Philadelphia where he builds a printing empire and a new life with his wife Deborah. Turning to science, Franklin gains worldwide fame from his lightning rod and experiments in electricity. After entering politics, he spends years in London trying to keep Britain and America together as his own family starts to come apart.
14) Risk
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Jazz, the official symbol of American democracy abroad, splinters at home into different camps: white and black, cool and hot, East and West, traditional and modern. Miles Davis becomes the most influential musician of his generation.
Description
Until the arrival of European and American settlers in the late nineteenth century, the southern Plains of the United States were predominantly grasslands, the home and hunting grounds of many Native American tribes and the range of untold millions of bison. It was seldom used for farming. Bitterly cold winters, hot summers, high winds and especially low, unreliable precipitation made it unsuitable for standard agriculture. But at the start of the...
16) Gumbo
Description
Jazz is born in the unique musical and social cauldron of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century, emerging from such genres as ragtime, marching bands, work songs, spirituals, European classical music, funeral parade music and the blues.
Description
"At the tiny Greenwood School in the small New England town of Putney, Vermont, its roughly 50 students, boys from the ages 11 to 17 are asked each year to memorize the Gettysburg Address. This would be a daunting assignment for any student, but the boys at Greenwood all suffer from learning differences that have made their personal, academic and social progress extremely challenging. As the students come to terms with the address's simple message...
Author
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In this evocative and lavishly illustrated narrative, Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan delve into the history of the park idea, from the first sighting by white men in 1851 of the valley that would become Yosemite and the creation of the world's first national park at Yellowstone in 1872, through the most recent additions to a system that now encompasses nearly four hundred sites and 84 million acres.
Description
My father was the first to see through the schemes of the white men….He said: “My son…when I am gone…you are the chief of these people….Always remember that your father never sold his country….This country holds your father's body. Never sell the bones of your father and mother."I pressed my father’s hand and told him I would protect his grave with my life….A man who would not love his father's grave is worse than a wild animal. -...




