American History to 1877: Streaming Videos

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Films on Demand (48 min)
In the first of a three-part series, Lucy Worsley explores how American history has been mythologized and manipulated by generations of politicians, writers, and protesters. This episode examines the American Revolution—a David-and-Goliath battle of men with high ideals taking on the might of the British Empire. But how much of America's founding story is based on fact?

Alexander Street Video (55 min)
Discover how a man born into slavery became one of the most influential voices for democracy in U.S. history. A gifted writer and charismatic orator, it is estimated that more Americans heard Frederick Douglass speak than any other 19th-century figure — Black or white.

Films on Demand (1 hr 53 min)
Leaving behind his Boston childhood, Benjamin Franklin reinvents himself in Philadelphia where he builds a printing empire and a new life with his wife Deborah. Turning to science, Franklin gains worldwide fame from his lightning rod and experiments in electricity. After entering politics, he spends years in London trying to keep Britain and America together as his own family starts to come apart.

Films on Demand (45:27)
This program is part one of For Love of Liberty: The Story of America’s Black Patriots (University Edition).

Alexander Street Video (55 min)
Go beyond the legend and meet the woman who repeatedly risked her life and freedom to liberate others from slavery. One of the greatest freedom fighters in U.S. history, Tubman was an Underground Railroad conductor, a Civil War scout, nurse and spy.

Films on Demand (1 hr 4 min)
Walt Whitman rises from a hardscrabble boyhood in New York to write Leaves of Grass in 1855; a work that revolutionizes poetry. This episode explores the mystery of how a seemingly ordinary writer, with little education or training, could have created such a literature-altering masterpiece. Many of Whitman’s most famous poems are profiled, including There Was a Child Went Forth, I Hear America Singing, Song of the Open Road, I Sing the Body Electric, and Song of Myself.

Films on Demand (01:23:10).
The Revolution begins, and the outbreak of war spreads beyond the colonies into the remote frontier; Daniel Boone's life-or-death struggle for the future of his settlement becomes a fight for the future of America.

Films on Demand (51:02)
Bubonic plague, starvation, maybe even cannibalism—such were the miseries of life in England’s Jamestown settlement, circa 1609. Four centuries later, this program explores the colony’s story with the help of dramatic reenactments and information on recent historical discoveries. Sophisticated forensics and archaeological methods reveal the contents of Jamestown graves, producing shocking evidence of hunger and disease as well as political intrigue and espionage. Viewers also learn how the Church of England has allowed the attempted exhumation of 17th-century remains—female bones that could hold clues to the Jamestown struggle and to the contributions of an unsung hero named Bartholomew Gosnold.

Films on Demand (45 min)
This program focuses on a period marked by rapid growth for the nation and contentious politics in Washington. It includes the rancid politics of the John Quincy Adams presidency; the Indian Removal Act of Andrew Jackson’s presidency; the economic turmoil of Martin Van Buren’s term; William Henry Harrison’s death, leading to the first crisis of succession; John Tyler’s expulsion from his own political party; and the Mexican War of James K. Polk’s presidency. Distributed by A&E Television Networks. A part of the series The Presidents.

Alexander Street Video (56:00)
Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents a vital new four-hour documentary series on Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. The series explores the transformative years following the American Civil War, when the nation struggled to rebuild itself in the face of profound loss, massive destruction, and revolutionary social change. The twelve years that composed the post-war Reconstruction era (1865-77) witnessed a seismic shift in the meaning and makeup of our democracy, with millions of former slaves and free black people seeking out their rightful place as equal citizens under the law. Though tragically short-lived, this bold democratic experiment was, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, a ‘brief moment in the sun’ for African Americans, when they could advance, and achieve, education, exercise their right to vote, and run for and win public office.