Amanda Pollak

By the time he died in 1931, Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most famous men in the world. The holder of more patents than any other inventor in history, Edison had achieved glory as the genius behind such revolutionary inventions as sound recording, motion pictures, and electric light. Born on the threshold of America's burgeoning industrial empire, Edison's curiosity led him to its cutting edge.

Chart America's entry into the conflict, examining the breathtaking speed of mobilization and the profound transformations required if America was to play a central role in the Great War. In 1917, the U.S. was deeply divided about going to war. Wilson hired former journalist George Creel to lead an unprecedented propaganda campaign to support the war. But for those who resisted the patriotic fervor, the consequences could be severe. Repressive legislation...

Explore America's tortured, nearly three-year journey to war. In August 1914, a war unprecedented in size and violence broke out on the European continent. Ever the idealistic diplomat, Wilson vowed to keep his country out of "the Great War." His neutrality was supported but reports from Europe began to challenge America's delicate position. From behind the battle lines came reports detailing German atrocities in Belgium and France: history's first...

Documentary about Thomas Edison that explores the complex alchemy that accounts for the enduring celebrity of America's most famous inventor. It offers new perspectives on the man and his milieu, and illuminates not only the true nature of invention, but its role in turn-of-the-century America's rush into the future.

Documents the story of assassin, James Earl Ray, his target, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the seething, turbulent forces in American society that led these two men to their violent and tragic collision in Memphis in April of 1968. Explores the wildly disparate, yet fatefully entwined stories of Ray and King to create a complex, engaging, and thought-provoking portrait of America in that crisis-laden year.

It was the year of the Beatles and the Civil Rights Act; of the Gulf of Tonkin and Barry Goldwater's campaign for the presidency; the year that Americans learned smoking was bad for their health and Cassius Clay became Mohammed Ali; the year that cities across the country erupted in violence and Americans tried to make sense of the assassination of their president. Based on The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964, the film will follow some of the...

In conjunction with the 100th anniversary of America's entry into the war on April 6, 1917, a six-hour documentary presented over three nights, explores how World War I changed America and the world. Drawing on the latest scholarship, including unpublished diaries, memoirs and letters, it tells the rich and complex story of the conflict through the voices of nurses, journalists, aviators and the American troops who came to be known as 'doughboys.'...

Today, America has nearly eighteen million living military veterans, from the Greatest Generation to men and women coming home from recent tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. They join the now-silent ranks of American veterans reaching back to our earliest conflict, the Revolutionary War.