American Experience, Vol. 1: Season 22 Selections

This film interweaves the personal accounts of polio survivors with the story of an ardent crusader who tirelessly fought on their behalf while scientists raced to eradicate this dreaded disease. The Polio Crusade features interviews with historians, scientists, polio survivors, and the only surviving scientist from the core research team that developed the Salk vaccine, Julius Youngner.

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and legacy are inextricably linked to America’s most famous top-secret initiative - the Manhattan Project. But after World War II, this brilliant and intense scientist fell from the innermost circles of American science, and at the height of the Red Scare, the veil of suspicion fell over Oppenheimer. This biography presents a complex and revealing portrait of one of America’s most influential scientists.

He has been portrayed in countless movies and television shows by some of Hollywood's greatest actors, including Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart and, more recently, Kevin Costner, but these popular fictions belie the complexities and flaws of a man whose life is a lens on politics, justice and economic opportunity on the American frontier. As a young man, Wyatt Earp was a caricature of the Western lawman, spending his days drinking in saloons, gambling, visiting brothels and gaining notoriety as the legendary gunman in the shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. Shortly after his death in 1929, distressed Americans down on their luck transformed Wyatt Earp into a folk hero: a central figure in the American narrative of how the West was won, a man who took control of his own destiny.

This is the story of an assassin, James Earl Ray, his target, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the seething, turbulent forces in American society that led these two men to their violent and tragic collision in Memphis in April 1968. The film will explore the wildly disparate, yet fatefully entwined stories of Ray and King to create a complex, engaging and thought-provoking portrait of America in the crisis-laden year of 1968.