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History & Biography
American Experience: The Great Transatlantic CableBy the middle of the 19th century, a network of telegraph poles was strung across America; Samuel Morse's invention made possible almost instantaneous communication between cities across the continent but messages to London were still being sent the old-fashioned way, aboard sailing ships that could take weeks to reach their destination. Though the need for a transatlantic cable was obvious, the physical challenges to laying one were enormous. The project would require making a 2000 mile long cable and laying it three miles beneath the Atlantic. Cyrus Field, an energetic, young New Yorker, committed himself to the task. It took twelve years of cajoling and massaging investors, abortive attempts to lay the cable, and millions of wasted dollars before Field and his team of engineers finally succeeded. On July 27, 1866, when the wire was finally in place, Field sent back the first message to Europe: "Thank God," he wrote, "the cable is laid." The physical link to Europe is still in use today.
60 minutes
American Experience: Jesse James The story of Jesse James remains one of America's most cherished myths... and one of its most wrong-headed. Jesse James, so the legend goes, was a Western outlaw, though, in fact, he never went west; America's own Robin Hood, though he robbed from the poor as well as the rich, and kept it all for himself; and a gunfighter whose victims, in reality, were almost always unarmed. Less heroic than brutal, James was in fact a product, from first to last, of the American Civil War; a Confederate partisan of expansive ambition, unbending politics and surprising cunning, who gladly helped invent his own valiant legend. A member of a vicious band of Missouri guerrillas during the war, James sought redemption afterwards. But as this American Experience production reveals, year by year, he rode further from it, redeeming instead the great and glorious memory of the Old South. In a life steeped in prolific violence and bloodshed, he met what was perhaps the most fitting end; like so many of his own victims, James himself was an unarmed man, shot in the back.
60 minutes
American Experience: John & Abigail Adams
Relying on the correspondence between the second president and his wife, this joint biography sheds light on the characters of two remarkable people and the tumultuous times through which they lived. In addition to a window onto the revolutionary era, John and Abigail's story provides an intimate look inside a marriage of true companions, for whom life included the great events of history, but also laughter, affection, and family tragedy.
120 minutes
American Experience: Annie Oakley - 60' - In 1926, just a few months before her death, Will Rogers described Annie Oakley as "the greatest woman rifle shot the world has ever produced." As the star attraction of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, she thrilled audiences around the world with her daring shooting feats. Her act helped fuel turn-of-the-century nostalgia for the vanished, mythical world of the American West. Over time she became an American legend -- the loud, brassy, cocksure shooter celebrated in the musical "Annie Get Your Gun." But that legend had little to do with the real Annie Oakley. Although famous as a Western sharpshooter, Oakley lived her entire life east of the Mississippi. A champion in a man's sport, she forever changed ideas about the abilities of women, yet she opposed female suffrage. Her fame and fortune came from her skill with guns, yet she was a Quaker. This probing American Experience production examines the dramatic life of a uniquely American icon whose complex character manifested many of the paradoxes of the nation.
60 minutes.
Theater
Directed by Ric Burns, Eugene O'Neill tells the haunting story of the life and work of America's greatest and only Nobel Prize-winning playwright. Theater professionals including Tony Kushner and Sidney Lumet, discuss the harrowing family dramas and personal upheavals that shaped O'Neill, and that he struggled to give form to in his art. More than a biography of the greatest literary genius the American theater has produced, this American Experience production is a moving meditation on loss and redemption, family and memory, the cost of being an artist, and the inescapability of the past. It is also a penetrating exploration of the masterpieces O'Neill created only at the very end of his career -- "The Iceman Cometh" and "Long Day's Journey Into Night" among them -- brought to life in mesmerizing scenes performed especially for the production by some of the most gifted actors working in theater today, including Al Pacino, Christopher Plummer, Liam Neeson, and Vanessa Redgrave.
Broadcast Premiere March 27, 2006. 112 minutes.
