American Experience - Season 1

An account of the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the subsequent effort to rebuild. (imdb)

It starts with a live radio broadcast from the Bikini Atoll a few days before it is annihilated by a nuclear test. Shows great footage from these times and tells the story of the US Navy Sailors who were exposed to radioactive fallout. One interviewed sailor suffered grotesquely swollen limbs and he is shown being interviewed with enormous left arm and hand.

Writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans revisit the Alabama tenant system depicted in their 1936 book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men". (imdb)

The story of Father Charles Coughlin who, during the Depression, used the radio to protest against what he saw as society's ills. (imdb)

The story of Emeline Bachelder, an early 19th-century New Englander who married a younger man - only to discover that he was the son she had give up when she was fourteen. (imdb)