Polish immigrants were the driving force behind Chicago's remarkable industrial growth. But they never achieved political cohesiveness, and while a million Poles now live in Chicago, their political power is not commensurate with the number of votes they cast.

The reign of Big Tech is here, and Americans' First Amendment rights hang by a keystroke. Amassing unimaginable amounts of personal data, giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple-once symbols of American ingenuity and freedom-have become a techno-oligarchy with overwhelming economic and political power. Decades of unchecked data collection have given Big Tech more targeted control over Americans' daily lives than any company or government in...

"The dramatic rise-and unimaginable fall-of America's most iconic corporation by New York Times bestselling author and pre-eminent financial journalist William D. Cohan. No company embodied American ingenuity, innovation, and industrial power more spectacularly and more consistently than the General Electric Company. GE once developed and manufactured many of the inventions we take for granted today, nearly everything from the lightbulb to the jet...

On November 29, 1864, Col. John Chivington and 800 troops of the First Colorado Cavalry attacked a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho camp-massacring women, children, and the elderly. This program introduces the Sand Creek atrocity to viewers in a way that written texts and dramatizations cannot. It consists of oral histories passed down from firsthand accounts through the generations and movingly conveyed by descendants of Native American eyewitnesses....

As with many historic American figures of the 19th century, Sojourner Truth's story is incomplete and somewhat mythical, a fact compounded by her having been born a slave. This detailed program traces the lifelong odyssey of a woman who literally walked out of bondage, changed her name in 1843, and traveled the country as an abolitionist and women's rights advocate. Along the way she would meet Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and be further...

Martin Sheen-impersonating the voice of author Dashiell Hammett-narrates this compelling docudrama on immigrant labor and anti-war politics in 1917. As a young employee of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Hammett spied for the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in Butte, Montana, during the height of labor struggles there. Using a wealth of archival footage, first-rate dramatizations, interviews with historical experts, and the personal recollections of...

A progenitor of the National Geographic Society, John Wesley Powell was a naturalist, a rough-and-ready explorer, and a visionary in his understanding of the uncharted Colorado River. This program illustrates Powell's historic passage through the Grand Canyon in 1869, when the 35-year-old set out with eight companions from Green River, Wyoming, into the unknown. The film describes how, at various stopping points, four members of the crew abandoned...

Get set for an adventure that marked a new era in America! Filmmaker Ken Burns presents the hilarious 1903 saga of the first transcontinental automobile trip. On a visionary whim and a

This poignant collage features members of the Oglala Lakota Sioux living on and off the Pine Ridge reservation who present their unself-pitying yet pointed observations on Lakota history and modern-day Lakota life. Their creation myth and their attitudes toward Mother Earth and the concept of time contribute insights into their worldview, while footage of a major powwow and a tepee-raising offer glimpses of the people's cultural heritage. Wounded...

This program explains how the transcontinental railroad was built, and then how it opened up the West to European settlers and brought on the extermination of the buffalo and the defeat of Southern Plains Indian tribes. Viewers will witness the transformation through first-person accounts from Native Americans, European immigrants, Chinese laborers, buffalo hunters, homesteaders from the eastern U.S., and cowboys on the dusty trails leading from Texas....