PBS Video The road to rock bottom

As the Great Depression progressed economic collapse took its toll on rural America. Crops went unsold, farm mortgages were called in by banks, hungry farmers protested, and robberies increased dramatically. The U.S. Army was called in to defend the nation's capital from veterans who were demanding that President Hoover and Congress pay a bonus for their services in World War I. The film ends with Franklin Roosevelt's landslide election to the presidency

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PBS Video To be somebody

Through its examination of the intense racial and religious conflicts of the 1930s, this episode focuses on those who stood up for the promise of justice and liberty for all Americans: NAACP leaders Walter White and Charles Houston, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and heavyweight champion Joe Louis

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PBS Video We have a plan

We have a planʺ chronicles the 1934 campaign of Socialist-turned-Democrat Upton Sinclair, whose plans to save California from poverty were fought by powerful Republicans. This volume also examines FDR's own plans to turn the unprecedented idea of social security into legislation

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PBS Video America becoming

Looks at the United States as it becomes an increasingly diverse nation. Since 1965 immigration patterns have changed, bringing in more people from Asia and Latin America, with new cultures, languages and religions

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PBS Video Arsenal of democracy

The five years preceding World War II are captured in this episode with a host of images that reflect the turbulent timesas the promise of progress is comprised by continued poverty, despair and the horrors of Hitler's Blitzkrieg across Europeuntil finally, America is shown going back to work

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PBS Video A job at Ford's

Vintage film clips and first-hand recollections present a portrait of how Henry Fordthe man and his company contributed to the economic boom of the early 1920s and came to symbolize its near collapse fewer than ten years later.

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PBS Video Mean things happening

This episode addresses the struggle of tenant farmers and steel workers to improve their circumstances through union organization.

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PBS Video The New Deal/New York

This episode demonstrates how an unlikely partnership between New York City' Republican Fiorello La Guardia and the Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt changed the face of America's largest city and expanded the role of the U.S. Government

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PBS Video Abraham Lincoln

a new birth of freedom

Describes Abraham Lincoln as a person and tells of his responsibility in bringing an end to slavery in the United States

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