Ken Burns

"From one of our most treasured filmmakers, a pictorial history of America-a stunning and moving collection of Ken Burns's favorite photographs"--

Thomas Jefferson is a two-part portrait of one of the most fascinating and complicated figures ever to walk across America’s public stage – our enigmatic and brilliant third president. Thomas Jefferson embodies within his own life the most profound contradictions of American history: as the author of our most sacred document, the Declaration of Independence, he gave voice to our fervent desire for freedom, but he also owned more than 150 human...

Mark Twain was a lifelong creator and keeper of scrapbooks. He took them with him everywhere and filled them with souvenirs, pictures, and articles about his books and performances. But in time, he grew tired of the lost glue, rock-hard paste, and the swearing that resulted from the standard scrapbook process. So, he came up with the idea of printing thin strips of glue on the pages to make updates neat and easy to do. In 1872, he patented his “self-pasting”...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1933 presidential inauguration comes during the nation's worst economic crisis – the Great Depression. Banks have failed and savings accounts have been wiped out, so to explain the banking system and how it works, Franklin Roosevelt gives his first "fireside chat" to the American people. In fourteen and a half minutes he calms the public, and by the next Monday people begin to redeposit their money, thereby averting a...

With his election to the New York State Senate in 1910, Franklin D. Roosevelt sets out to make a name for himself in Albany, much as Theodore Roosevelt had done twenty-nine years earlier. He joins forces with reform-minded Democrats to fight against the powerful bosses of their own party, and battles for state government and labor reforms – but to the dismay of many, his support is sometimes unreliable. For Eleanor Roosevelt, distance away from...

The longest-serving president in U.S. history, and leader through the Great Depression and World War II -- two of the nation's worst crises -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt is considered by many to be our greatest president. In his early years, as a pampered, sheltered scion of a wealthy family, FDR exhibited no outward signs of greatness. With his cousin Theodore as a role model, however, FDR purposely forged a successful political career for himself,...

By the late summer of 1939, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is halfway through his second term in office. Both he and Eleanor are tired and looking forward to retirement, but when Germany invades Poland on September 2, 1939, everything changes. Although the United States is poorly prepared for conflict, and a majority of his countrymen resist involvement, the President is determined to help the Allies by building up the army and bolstering the production...

“Time after time, Congress and the people in the East saw the West as a safety valve, a place where you could go and escape the problems of where you were, it was part of the whole myth of the West. You could escape and be free. Well, we thought we could escape whatever national tensions and unresolved problems we had, but it came back you know, like a big wind from the prairie, bigger and bigger each time.- Dayton Duncan. The United States had...

They called themselves the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, but because of their ecstatic dancing, the world called them Shakers. Though they were celibate, they are the most enduring religious experiment in American history. They believed in pacifism, natural health and hygiene, and for more than 200 years insisted that their followers should strive for simplicity and perfection in everything they did. The Shakers put their...