American Experience is a television program airing on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Public television stations in the United States. The program airs documentaries, many of which have won awards, about important or interesting events and people in American history.
Grand Coulee Dam Aired in April 2012 – It would be the “Biggest Thing on Earth,” the salvation of the common man, a dam and irrigation project that would make the desert bloom, a source of cheap power that would boost an entire region of the country. Of the many public works projects of the New Deal, Grand Coulee Dam loomed largest in America’s imagination during the darkest days of the Depression. It promised to fulfill President Franklin Roosevelt’s vision for a “planned promised land” where hard-working farm families would finally be free from the drought and dislocation caused by the elements.
1964 Aired in February 2014 – In myriad ways, 1964 was the year when people began to take sides, when the comfortable consensus that had ruled the country since the New Deal began to disintegrate, and when the future of the nation was fiercely and passionately debated. 1964 will tell the story of the momentous choices faced by Americans during that year: between the liberalism of Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater’s grass-roots conservatism, between support or opposition to the civil rights movement, between an embrace of the emerging counter-culture or a defense of traditional values.
