From PBS - Inspired by Timothy Egan's best-selling book, The Big Burn is the dramatic story of an unimaginable wildfire that swept across the Northern Rockies in the summer of 1910. The fire devoured more than three million acres in 36 hours, confronting the fledgling U.S. Forest Service with a catastrophe that would define the agency and the nation's fire policy for the rest o...
Breathing new life into the traditional civics lesson, Peter Sagal, host of NPR's "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me," travels across the country on a Harley Davidson to find out where the U.S. Constitution lives, how it works and how it doesn't ... how it unites us as a nation and how it has nearly torn us apart. Sagal introduces some major constitutional debates today and talks wi...
Panama Canal features a fascinating cast of characters ranging from the indomitable Theodore Roosevelt, who saw the Canal as the embodiment of American might and ingenuity, to Colonel William Gorgas, an army doctor who instituted a revolutionary public health campaign that all but eradicated Yellow Fever, to the visionary engineers who solved the seemingly impossible problem of...
On June 25-26, 1876, General George Armstrong Custer and 261 members of his Seventh Cavalry were killed by Cheyenne and Lakota warriors, along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. Eleven days later, the news flashed across telegraph wires. Americans, still celebrating the nation's 100th birthday, greeted the news with stunned disbelief. How could Custer, the Boy Gener...