Ric Burns

In episode five, the African-American experience, the birth of the new media industries and the incredible array of human and cultural energies converge, ending with construction of the world's tallest building.

Trapped in the Sierra Nevadas during the bitter winter of 1846, nearly 90 members of the Donner and Reed families longed for California's "Promised Land." But an untried shortcut became a death warrant for half of them victims of madness, death, and cannibalism. The program re-creates the Donner Party's journey from family journals, newspaper accounts, and interviews with historians and descendants.

Explores the settlement and growth of New York City, from its founding in 1624 by the Dutch to the skyscraper wars and the building of the Empire State Building to the 1990s.

Now the spotlight shines on the growth, glamour and grief of New York during America's giddy postwar Gilded Age. Exploring the incomparable wealth of the robber barons and the unabashed corruption of political leaders, such as Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, the episode examines the era when the expansion of wealth and poverty -- and the schism between them -- built to a crescendo. The program ends as the city itself dramatically expands its boundaries,...

The series begins by identifying the key themes that shaped New York's history: commerce and capitalism, diversity and democracy, transformation and creativity. The episode charts the development of the city founded by the Dutch as a purely commercial enterprise, first as New Amsterdam, a freewheeling enclave of trade and opportunity; then as the British New York, a colony fueled by slavery which was bestowed as a birthday gift upon the Duke of York...

In exploring the social, economic and physical forces that swept through the city in the post-war period, Episode Seven examines the great African-American migration and Puerto Rican immigration of the '40s, '50s, and '60s; the beginnings of white flight and suburbanization; and the massive physical changes wrought by highways and urban renewal -- all of which were directed, to a surprising degree, by one man: Robert Moses. The film comes to a climax...

Already established as America's premier port, New York City swelled into the nation's greatest industrial metropolis as a massive wave of German and Irish immigration turned the city into one of the world's most complex urban environments, bringing with it a host of new social problems. Episode Two reveals how the city's artists, innovators and leaders, from poet Walt Whitman to Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (the designers of Central Park)...

Chronicles the history of New York from its founding in 1624 to its growing role as an important economic center in the contemporary world, focusing on the commercial, cultural, and demographic forces that shaped the city's culture, image, and politics.

An elegant, lyrical and compelling portrait of the greatest and most complex of cities. This definitive series chronicles the history of New York from its founding in 1624 as a Dutch trading post to its continuing pre-eminence as the cultural and economic capital of the world.

With the coming of the Civil War, and the staggering casualties it ushered in, death entered the experience of the American people as it never had before — permanently altering the character of the republic and the psyche of the American people. Contending with death on an unprecedented scale posed challenges for which there were no ready answers when the war began. Americans worked to improvise new solutions, new institutions, and new ways of coping...