Dayton Duncan
Explore the history of a uniquely American art form: country music. From its deep and tangled roots in ballads, blues and hymns performed in small settings, to its worldwide popularity, learn how country music evolved over the course of the 20th century, as it eventually emerged to become America’s music.
Interstellar chronicles the adventures of a group of explorers who make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an interstellar voyage.
Burns’ Yosemite: A Gathering of Spirit, a documentary film produced to honor the 150th anniversary of the landmark act signed by Abraham Lincoln. This act preserved Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias.
Chronicles the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history, in which the frenzied wheat boom of the Great Plow-Up, followed by a decade-long drought during the 1930s nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation.
Filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature's most spectacular locales – from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska - “The National Parks: America's Best Idea” is nonetheless a story of people: people from every conceivable background – rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists and entrepreneurs; people who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy.
In the spring of 1903, on a whim and a fifty-dollar bet, Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson set off from San Francisco in a 20-horsepower Winton touring car hoping to become the first person to cross the United States in the new-fangled "horseless carriage." Most people doubted that the automobile had much of a future. Jackson's trip would prove them wrong.
Largely considered to be the greatest American author, Mark Twain is celebrated in this exhaustive documentary by filmmaker Ken Burns.
Scientist, inventor, writer of enduring epigrams of homespun wisdom, creator of America’s first subscription library and one of its most prestigious universities, Benjamin Franklin was (with the possible exception of Thomas Jefferson) the nation’s most complex and compelling Founding Father—and certainly its wittiest. During his 84 years, he rose from being a lowly printer’s apprentice to become a central figure in the American story; a man who could guide his fellow colonists in declaring their independence and crafting their Constitution, charm all of Paris as one of our first diplomats, and yet stay true to his guiding principle—a “dislike of everything that tended to debase the spirit of the common people.”
