45 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 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
Camp Peary held 3,000 Nazi POWs in 1943, then became the CIA training facility known as The Farm
Service Merchandise was the largest jewelry retailer in the United States before it closed
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.
In 1953, Hooker Chemical sold the Love Canal site to the Niagara Falls school board for one dollar. The deed of sale contained a written warning about twenty-one thousand tons of buried toxic chemicals. The school board read the deed, accepted the dollar, and built an elementary school on the site anyway. Four hundred children enrolled in September 1955. Nobody told the parents about the warning in the deed.
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
Two months before the explosion, a company inspection found metal embrittlement in the exact tank that failed. The engineering report documented the danger in writing. The company chose increased monitoring over repairs. The cheaper steel saved four hundred thousand dollars. One hundred and thirty neighbors paid the difference with their lives. The executives were never charged.
In 1876, a ring of counterfeiters broke into Lincolns tomb and nearly made off with his body to hold it for ransom in exchange for a master engraver jailed for making fake fifty-dollar bills.
The first air conditioner was designed in 1902 to control humidity in a printing plant, not to cool people. Human comfort was an afterthought that changed civilization.
Polaroid filed for bankruptcy twice and was bought and sold by private equity firms who stripped it for parts, yet the brand was so powerful it kept coming back from the dead.
The Bath School disaster of 1927 killed 44 people including 38 children and remains the deadliest school attack in American history.
PG&E was convicted of 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the Camp Fire. The company paid fines. Zero executives were charged.
George de Mestral spent fourteen years turning a burdock burr stuck to his dog's fur into a patented invention. Every fashion house rejected it as too ugly. Then NASA used it on the Apollo missions and the International Space Station. Today, over ten thousand Velcro strips hold the ISS together.
London Bridge was shipped stone by stone from England to Lake Havasu City, Arizona in 1968.
Children played in blue asbestos tailings like snow. Three million tonnes remain in the gorge, uncovered and unsecured.
The congressional committee confirmed the plot was real, verified every detail of Butler's testimony, and recommended prosecution. No one was ever arrested. The key witness died of pneumonia two weeks after the committee's findings.
The school board canceled their gas contract to save money and tapped into a raw, leaking pipeline instead. The gas was odorless — nobody could smell the danger. On March 18, 1937, a teacher turned on an electric sander. One spark. 295 students and teachers were killed. Adolf Hitler sent a condolence telegram. Today, natural gas has a smell because of New London. The chemical is called mercaptan.
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.
In 1959, Hashima Island had a population density of 83,000 people per square kilometer — the highest ever recorded on Earth. 5,259 people lived on a concrete island smaller than a city block, nine times denser than Manhattan. During WWII, Mitsubishi brought conscripted Korean civilians and Chinese POWs as forced laborers in the undersea coal mines. On April 20, 1974, the last residents boarded a ferry and never came back. The population is now zero.
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.
While Bear Stearns was collapsing, CEO Jimmy Cayne was at a bridge tournament in Detroit, unreachable by phone
In 1906, U.S. Steel bought 9,000 acres of Lake Michigan sand dunes and built an entire city in 905 days. By 1960, 178,000 people lived there. By 2020, only 69,000 remained. City Methodist Church, which cost a million dollars to build and seated 3,500, was abandoned in 1997. Trees now grow through its roof.
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.
Ford banned alcohol, required workers to eat American food, and mandated square dancing and poetry readings. The Brazilian workers revolted in December 1930, smashing equipment, overturning cars, and chasing American managers into the jungle with machetes. Ford never visited Fordlandia. Not once.
Before 1928, a scratch from a rose thorn could kill you. Then a scientist left a window open, went on vacation, and came back to find mold that would save 200 million lives.
From 1951 to 1963, Las Vegas hotels organized rooftop viewing parties with atomic cocktails and telescopes so tourists could watch nuclear bomb tests detonated just 65 miles away.
Eddie Lampert forced Sears divisions to compete against each other for resources, destroying the cooperation that made the company work
Russell Bliss was paid three cents a gallon to haul away chemical waste. He mixed it with motor oil and sprayed it on roads, parking lots, and horse arenas across Missouri. Dioxin levels were 300 times the safe limit.
The Calutron Girls of Oak Ridge were young women who enriched uranium without knowing what they were doing. They were chosen because they followed instructions precisely without asking questions.
In 1960, Richard James abandoned his wife Betty, their six children ages two through eighteen, and the company to join a religious cult in Bolivia. He donated the company's money to the organization and sent his wife accusatory letters demanding she repent. Betty rebuilt James Industries from nothing and ran it for nearly forty years, turning the Slinky into an American icon.
Percy Spencer was orphaned before the age of two. He never graduated from grammar school. He taught himself trigonometry, calculus, chemistry, physics, and metallurgy from library textbooks. By the time he accidentally invented the microwave, he held one hundred fifty patents. The man who changed every kitchen in America never set foot in a college classroom.
Pan Am pioneered the Boeing 707, the Boeing 747, computerized reservations, and the concept of economy class. Then deregulation turned every innovation into a commodity.
On February fourteenth, nineteen eighty-one, a twelve year old boy named Todd Domboski was walking through his grandmother's backyard when the ground opened beneath his feet. The sinkhole was four feet wide and one hundred fifty feet deep, filled with carbon monoxide and steam from the fire below. His fourteen year old cousin Eric Wolfgang grabbed his arms and pulled him out.
At its peak, 94% of Americans lived within 5 miles of a Radio Shack
The Rankin family beacon in Ripley guided 2,000 enslaved people to freedom across the Ohio River
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
Steve Sasson built the first digital camera at Kodak in 1975 and his bosses told him to keep it quiet
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