This is a timeline of the life of the Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus. An admiral, and navigator, he set sail westwards from Spain in 1492 with the aim of arriving in the Far East, but instead, landed in the Americas, then unknown to Europeans. Seen as a hero and pioneer by some, by others he is seen as someone whose arrival brought suffering to people living in the Americas.

The political and economic turmoil of Europe drove millions to leave their countries of origin and emigrate to the U.S. where a lady held a welcoming lamp "beside the Golden Door." This ABC News program anchored by Peter Jennings tells the dramatic story of the transformation of America into a truly multicultural nation, from the teeming ethnic neighborhoods of New York to the black migration to northern cities during the Great Depression. Also discussed...

Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin describes how past presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, mastered the technology of their times to bring their message to the masses.

In this program, Rattle presents an eclectic selection of works by living composers to illustrate the rich variety of new musical trends he believes pave the way to the future. The music of Berio and Henze illustrates how the past has become just one ingredient in today's world of instant access to sounds, pictures, and ideas from every continent and every era. Strange and compelling works by Gubaidulina and Kurtag echo with Eastern European and central...

In 1960, four Black students staged a sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina to protest against racial segregation in the United States. The stools they sat on are the most visited artifacts at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.

Ukraine, April 26, 1986. The nuclear power plant near Chernobyl is due for routine tests. The tests are to check if it can be restarted independently after a total outage of the electricity network. Foreman Anatoli Diatlov is supervising tests on reactor number 4. Confident in his equipment, Diatlov decides, against the advice of his engineers, to push the reactor tests to the limit and disables several security measures. When the team notices the...

The U.S. Constitution is the world's oldest written charter of government in continuous effect. Much of the success of this document can be attributed to the way the Constitution has changed to meet the needs of the American people. The framers of the Constitution wisely anticipated the need to make changes to the Constitution as the world itself changed. Between 1787, when the Constitution was written, and the present time, thousands of proposed...

Alive with the music of Mahalia Jackson and Muddy Waters, this episode describes how rural people blended into Chicago's urban culture. In the 1950s, there were abundant jobs in the stockyards and steel mills and they adapted easily to life on the assembly line. But the dream of the promised land was turning sour. The South Side of Chicago - home for most of the black Americans - had turned into notorious ghetto and was now a ticking time bomb with...

By December 1944, Americans had grown weary of the war: the stream of newspaper headlines telling of new losses and telegrams bearing bad news seemed endless. In episode 6, The Ghost Front, Ken Burns explores the unpredictable and unnerving months toward the near-end to the war. In the Pacific, American progress had been slow and costly, while in Europe, no one was prepared for the massive counterattack Hitler launches in the Ardennes forest of Belgium...

This program examines the most tumultuous and consequential period in African-American history: the Civil War and the end of slavery, and Reconstruction's thrilling but brief "moment in the sun." From the beginning, African Americans were agents of their liberation-by fleeing the plantations and taking up arms to serve in the United States Colored Troops. After Emancipation, African Americans sought to realize the promise of freedom-rebuilding families...