Following a rich childhood on the American frontier, Ulysses S. Grant went on to be the leader not only of the Union Army, but of the United States itself. Learn more with this biography from American Experience.

In the 1840s, civil war and famine in southern China drove thousands of young men to seek their fortune in the California Gold Rush. This program traces the Chinese experience in America, from their welcome in San Francisco as "celestial men of commerce," through the Gold Rush and building of the Transcontinental Railroad, to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act banning their entry into this country. This program rediscovers the often-overlooked role of...

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and raised in China and Taiwan, Samuel Ting received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1976 and is now leading a multinational experiment with NASA to search for antimatter, the opposite of our known universe. In this program, Bill Moyers speaks with Dr. Ting about his childhood years in war-torn China, his current project, and his philosophy of science.

In the 1954 legal case Hernandez v. Texas, defense lawyers forged a daring strategy - one arguing that Mexican-Americans did not fit into a legal structure which recognized only white and black racial categories. This American Experience episode interweaves the story of that landmark case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, with the broader narrative of the civil rights movement. Viewers will learn about the heroic post-World War II struggle...

In this episode of New York: A Documentary Film, filmmaker Ric Burns explores the turbulent and often harrowing years from 1945 to 2003. Emerging from the Depression and the Second World War as the most powerful metropolis on Earth, New York soon confronted urban woes of unprecedented proportions, and fought for its very existence. In exploring the social, economic, and physical forces that swept through the city in the post-war period, this program...

Stonewall Uprising explores the dramatic events that launched a worldwide civil rights movement. When police raided a Mafia-run gay bar in Greenwich Village, the Stonewall Inn, on June 28, 1969, gay men and women did something they had not done before—they fought back. As the streets of New York erupted into violent protests and street demonstrations, the collective anger announced that the gay rights movement had arrived.

On the night of February 27, 1973, American Indian Movement (AIM) and Oglala Lakota activists seized the hamlet of Wounded Knee, and police cordoned off the area. Demanding redress for grievances, the protesters captured the world's attention for 71 gripping days. With heavily armed federal troops tightening a cordon around the Indians, the event recalled the massacre at Wounded Knee almost a century earlier. In telling the story of this iconic moment,...

This program opens in Haskell Ward's hometown of Griffin, Georgia. A prominent African American with vast experience in government, Ward narrates a personal story of accomplishments, struggle, and joy. Conversations with his ninth-grade teacher, a former classmate who is now a police captain, a 90-year-old resident, and other citizens of this community of 25,000 recapture the ambience of black life in a small Southern town between 1900 and 1950-a...

The great grandson of a slave, Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 2, 1908. At the age of 25, Marshall graduated first in his class from Howard Law and joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the nation's largest and oldest civil rights organization. As NAACP counsel, Marshall used the constitution to successfully argue for a slew of rights now taken for granted, and forced the University...

In the early 1900s, the average American medicine cabinet was a would-be poisoner's treasure chest. Deadly chemicals such as radioactive radium, thallium, potassium cyanide, and morphine lurked in health tonics, depilatory creams, teething medicine, and cleaning supplies. While the tools of the murderer's trade multiplied as the pace of industrial innovation increased, the scientific knowledge and the political will to detect and prevent the crimes...