Movies: American history

Chronicles the powerful friendship between two young Black teenagers navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida....

In 1863, Amsterdam Vallon returns to the Five Points of America to seek vengeance against the psychotic gangland kingpin, Bill the Butcher, who murdered his father years earlier. With an eager pickpocket by his side and a whole new army, Vallon fight...

Robert Gould Shaw leads the US Civil War's first all-black volunteer company, fighting prejudices of both his own Union army and the Confederates....

Larry Flynt is the hedonistically obnoxious, but indomitable, publisher of Hustler magazine. The film recounts his struggle to make an honest living publishing his girlie magazine and how it changes into a battle to protect the freedom of speech for ...

Two women, black and white, in 1955 Montgomery Alabama, must decide what they are going to do in response to the famous bus boycott led by Martin Luther King....

A cheap, powerful drug emerges during a recession, igniting a moral panic fueled by racism. Explore the complex history of crack in the 1980s....

When the government opens up the Oklahoma territory for settlement, restless Yancey Cravat claims a plot of the free land for himself and moves his family there from Wichita. A newspaperman, lawyer, and just about everything else, Cravat soon becomes...

Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the world....

By the end of his illustrious career, Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves may well have been the preeminent lawman of the Old West. He brought upwards of 3,000 outlaws to justice and served in law enforcement for 32 years during Reconstruction after the ...

In 30 years of a deeply committed career and 50 roles, Denzel Washington, double-Oscar winner, placed the figure of the Black man in all its complexity at the heart of the American paradoxes: from Black activist, rebel soldier to gangster torn betwee...

A made-for-TV dramatization of George Washington's perilous gamble of crossing the Delaware River and attacking the British forces at Trenton....

A 40-day, 40-night road trip to the Trinity Site—where the first atomic bomb was detonated in the summer of 1945—covering many other atomic destinations and driving deep into the natural and social history of the American southwest....

Porky Pig balks at learning the Pledge of Allegiance until Uncle Sam appears to him in a dream and gives him a lesson in American history....

The first American space station Skylab is found in pieces scattered in Western Australia. Putting these pieces back together and re-tracing the Skylab program back to its very conception reveals the cornerstone of human space exploration....

The History Channel marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11 with a new groundbreaking documentary about the biggest manhunt in human history. This documentary draws on interviews and stories told in the Museum's special exhibition of the same name, and fe...

Did you know that the first cowboys were black? Using magnificent archives and testimonies from historians, Cécile Denjean restores justice to African-Americans in the story of the conquest of the West....

Comes one hundred years from the two-day Tulsa Massacre in 1921 that led to the murder of as many as 300 Black people and left as many as 10,000 homeless and displaced....

The first major uprising against police brutality, harassment, and societal oppression was not at Stonewall in 1969, but at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco three years earlier. Those who stood up were trans women and gay men. Now, nearly 40 year...

Documentary about Marilyn Monroe: 1962: America loses its blonde icon. Marilyn Monroe dies under mysterious circumstances. How did she die? The police report states: probable suicide. But there are many things that point to murder: a corpse draped to...

This documentary celebrates the Black cultural renaissance that existed in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, OK, and investigates the 100-year-old race massacre that left an indelible, though hidden stain on American history....