Movies: American history

With a mission of collecting, preserving and making accessible the materials of human culture, the New York Public Library plays a vital role in the cultural life of the Big Apple. This film provides a multifaceted portrait of the institution. Viewer...

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

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....

In early 1860s New York, Irish immigrant Amsterdam Vallon is released from prison and returns to the Five Points, seeking revenge against his father's killer, William Cutting, a powerful anti-immigrant gang leader. He knows that revenge can only be a...

Black Is the Color highlights key moments in the history of Black visual art, from Edmonds Lewis’s 1867 sculpture Forever Free, to the work of contemporary artists such as Whitfield Lovell, Kerry James Marshall, Ellen Gallagher, and Jean-Michel Basqu...

This is based on a true story. Solomon Northrop is a black man in the mid 19th century before slavery was abolished. He's a born free man who works as a carpenter and is also a part time musician. One day he is approached by some men who want him to ...

Journeys through some of the most significant events in America's rise to power, reliving the improbabilities that demonstrate what the Founders always believed: that events unfolded according to a master plan....

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....

Green Flake, a southern slave, joins Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints as a child. Later on in his life he is sent to pave the way to what is now the Salt Lake Valley and his faith sustains him....

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

The inside story of Biden’s rise to the presidency, and the personal and political forces that shaped him and led to his dramatic decision to step aside....

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 ...

Celebrate the 150th anniversary of the short-lived but far-reaching American Institution The Pony Express by following a historical re-enactment along the original trail from Sacramento California to Saint Joseph Missouri....

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...

The story of a family of Quakers in Indiana in 1862. Their religious sect is strongly opposed to violence and war. It's not easy for them to meet the rules of their religion in everyday life but when Southern troops pass the area they are in real tro...

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....

Controversy erupts over a New-Deal-era mural of the namesake of San Francisco’s George Washington High School. The thirteen-panel artwork "The Life of Washington" by Victor Arnautoff offers a view of the Founding Father both celebratory and critical,...

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...

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....

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....