Traveling from Devon to Cumbria, Scotland and Rome, Michael Wood tells the tale of King Alfred's grandson Aethelstan's wars and shows how he created a national coinage and established a political assembly that later became the English Parliament. But there's also a dark side, with legends that the king had his brother drowned at sea. Aethelstan defeated an invasion of Vikings and Scots in what became known as the Anglo-Saxon 'Great War.' Wood argues...

Choreographer David Rousséve has "a remarkable flair for fusing storytelling, characterization and a deftly explosive movement style into deeply affecting statements of personal and social conscience" - The Washington Post. This program features an excerpt from his solo, The Ten Year Chat, which celebrates a decade of his work and fuses early, recent and new work to create a sublimely self-effacing performing terrain that explodes issues of race,...

In Margaret Fuller's Memoirs she wrote, "I remember how, as a little child, I had stopped myself one day on the stairs, and asked, How came I here? How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?" During her brief life of 40 years, Fuller made every effort to answer those questions, supported and documented by her inquiring nature and writings, all to fulfill American women's growing intellectual and...

Bessie Coleman, or how a young woman from a poor family in Texas, oppressed by racial segregation, became the first African-American aviator thanks to the French flight school of the Caudron brothers in Baie de Somme. An incredible adventure of the "Roaring Twenties", against a backdrop of anti-racist and feminist battles.

In 1926, 49-year-old Violet Gibson, daughter of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland and a debutant at the Court of Queen Victoria, shot Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini at point-blank range in front of an adoring crowd in CampidoglIo Rome.Her assassination attempt saw her imprisoned and interrogated, before a deal was brokered by Mussolini and the British Foreign Office to have Violet committed to a lunatic asylum, written off as a lone "mad Irishwoman,"...

This video tells the story of Jesse James, putting it into the context of the Border Wars, the Civil War, and subsequent Reconstruction and the wranglings between the Republican and Democratic interests to take control of Missouri. It's told with enthusiastic support of the various Jesse James museums.

Profile of the Communist dictator believed to be responsible for the murders of 2-million Cambodians in the mid-1970s.

Chesley Bonestell was an architect and painter who worked on the Golden Gate Bridge and the Chrysler Building. He worked on famous movies like Citizen Kane as a matte artist, and his mesmerizing paintings of planets and star systems helped inspire America's space program.

This powerful documentary tells the story of Leon Blum, a Jew who served as prime minister of France, and who was also a prisoner of the Nazis at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Blum, the first Jew to lead France, devoted his life to improving the well-being of workers and was an early champion of women’s rights. In 1936, as the head of the Popular Front, an alliance of leftwing movements, he became prime minister. In 1940, his socialist views...

Melvyn Bragg explores the dramatic story of William Tyndale and his mission to translate The Bible into English. Bragg reveals the story of a man whose life and legacy have been hidden from history, but whose impact on Christianity in Britain and on the English language endures today. His radical translation of The Bible into English made him a profound threat to the authority of the church and state, and set him on a fateful collision course with...