27 documentaries from this era
On March 10, 1957, the gates of The Dalles Dam closed on the Columbia River. Within hours the rising water covered Celilo Falls, where Native people had fished from wooden platforms for eleven thousand years, and tribal members stood on the banks weeping as the oldest continuously used fishing site in North America went silent.
Robert E. Lee's entire battle plan for the Confederate invasion of the North, Special Order 191, was found by a Union soldier lying in a Maryland field wrapped around three cigars, days before Antietam became the bloodiest single day in American military history.
In the winter of 1811, an earthquake so powerful it made the Mississippi River run backwards struck the Missouri bootheel, rang church bells in Boston, and created Reelfoot Lake. The New Madrid fault line is still active today, and millions of people live inside its danger zone without knowing it.
In the 1880s, workers excavating the grounds of the Indiana Statehouse unearthed hundreds of ancient Mound Builder human remains -- a prehistoric burial ground beneath the seat of state government -- and construction simply continued over most of it.
Rocky Flats manufactured plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons 16 miles from downtown Denver for 37 years — most residents had no idea
The first intercollegiate football game was played in New Brunswick, NJ in 1869 — 25 years before the sport had formal rules
Camp Peary held 3,000 Nazi POWs in 1943, then became the CIA training facility known as The Farm
In 1919 a 25-foot wave of molasses moving 35 mph killed 21 people and injured 150 more in Boston's North End
On August 18, 1920, the Tennessee state legislature was one vote short of ratifying the 19th Amendment. Representative Harry T. Burn of Niota wore a red rose on his lapel — the anti-suffrage color. Then he voted yes. He later explained that his mother had written him a letter the night before that ended: "Don't forget to be a good boy." That single vote gave twenty-six million American women the right to vote.
On April 27, 1865, the SS Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River killing over 1,800 people — more Americans than the Titanic. It happened four days after John Wilkes Booth was shot, while every newspaper was still covering Lincoln's funeral. The story was buried so completely that no national day of mourning was ever declared, no federal investigation ever concluded, and most Americans have never heard of it.
On December 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers made four powered flights at Kill Devil Hills. The famous 12-second first flight covered only 120 feet. The fourth and final flight of the day lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet — nearly seven times longer. North Carolina never puts that on the license plate.
On April 27, 1938, the town of Enfield held a farewell ball — at midnight, as the town legally ceased to exist, residents danced until dawn
John Stith Pemberton never knew what he had made. He died in August 1888, two months after selling the last of his rights to Coca-Cola. The product he invented is now consumed one point nine billion times every single day.
The Bath School disaster of 1927 killed 44 people including 38 children and remains the deadliest school attack in American history.
London Bridge was shipped stone by stone from England to Lake Havasu City, Arizona in 1968.
Charles Goodyear died $200,000 in debt. He never earned a fortune from vulcanized rubber. Thomas Hancock in England reverse-engineered his process and filed a British patent first. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, founded 38 years after his death, was named in his honor but had no connection to his family. The man who made modern transportation possible died broke.
On April 12, 1945, FDR collapsed while sitting for a portrait at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. His last words were 'I have a terrific headache.' What happened next was kept secret for hours while the entire course of World War Two hung in the balance.
After the storm, the bodies were too numerous to bury. Workers loaded them onto barges and dumped them in the Gulf. But the tide brought them back. Every morning for weeks, the dead washed back onto the beaches. The city built funeral pyres on every corner that burned for weeks.
On May 27, 1962, the Centralia volunteer fire department set a trash fire that ignited an exposed coal seam. The fire spread through underground mines beneath the town. Over sixty years later, it still burns today. The federal government spent over $42 million relocating residents. By 2010, only ten remained of the original fourteen hundred.
American democracy didn't emerge from a vacuum -- Benjamin Franklin studied Iroquois governance at the 1754 Albany Congress, and the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace influenced core Constitutional concepts including federalism and impeachment.
The Rankin family beacon in Ripley guided 2,000 enslaved people to freedom across the Ohio River
Napoleon sold half of America for 3 cents per acre in the Louisiana Purchase
American businessmen and 162 Marines illegally overthrew Hawaii's queen in 1893
California's state flag features the grizzly bear, which has been extinct in the state since the 1920s
Repo 105 accounting hid $50 billion in toxic debt from investors and regulators
Texas housed 50,000 Nazi POWs who were treated well while Black American soldiers faced segregation
NASA ran a classified nuclear rocket program in Florida that could reach Mars in months