A shy, if driven man, Robert Kennedy "wasn't built for the spotlight, he was built for the wings," says journalist Jack Newfield. While John Kennedy was alive, that's where Bobby stayed -- making certain that JFK remained in the spotlight.

The dramatic story of the country's first subway.

A riveting account of the event that helped give rise to the modern American militia movement.

McCarthy chronicles the rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator whose zealous anti-communist crusade would test the limits of American decency and democracy.

Explore the life of 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, who tried to solve world hunger. He rescued India from a severe famine and led the "Green Revolution," estimated to have saved one billion lives. But his work later faced criticism.

The latest in our award-winning series of presidential biographies, this film looks at the life and presidency of George W. Bush, from his unorthodox road to the presidency to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the myriad of challenges he faced over his two terms, from the war in Iraq to the 2008 financial crisis.

George W. Bush, part two continues through Bush’s second term, as the president confronts the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina and the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.

She set out to save a species...us. An intimate portrait of the woman whose groundbreaking books revolutionized our relationship to the natural world.

Part 1 of 3. President Woodrow Wilson vowed to keep the U.S. out of World War I after hostilities erupted in Europe in August 1914. It was a promise he kept until 1917, when the Germans resumed "unrestricted submarine warfare"— a policy it had started and then stopped in 1915 — and began sinking U.S. ships. An intercepted telegram also showed Germany trying to convince Japan and Mexico to declare war on America.

An account of an incident at a Titan II missile complex in Damascus, Ark., in 1980 that almost caused the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying a nuclear warhead 600 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The near-calamity was kicked off when a socket fell from the wrench of an airman performing maintenance in a Titan II silo and punctured the missile, releasing a stream of highly explosive rocket fuel.

Anderson Hatfield and Randolph McCoy, the patriarchs of the legendary feud, were entrepreneurs seeking to climb up from hardship after fierce economic competition and rapid technological change had turned their lives upside down. When members of both families took their grievances to court, their dispute escalated into a war between two families and a struggle between two states. The Feud reveals more than an isolated story of mountain lust and violence between “hillbillies” — the Hatfield - McCoy feud was a microcosm of the tensions inherent in the nation’s rapid industrialization after the Civil War.

Polio at age 39, president at age 50. Explore the public and private life of a determined man who steered the United States through two monumental crises: the Depression and World War II. FDR served as president longer than any other, and his legacy still shapes our understanding of the role of government and the presidency. A film by award winning filmmaker David Grubin. This first episode looks at the early life of FDR. Born into a wealthy family, there was little about his youth that would suggest the giant of history that he would become. His entry into state politics and a significant meeting with a woman named Eleanor would change his life and the course of a nation.

Part 1 and 2 of a six-part chronicle of the Abraham Lincoln-Mary Todd relationship begins with their childhoods and courtship. He, of course, was born into poverty; she, however, grew up in luxury, the daughter of a Kentucky banker and slave owner. (Several of her brothers would die fighting for the South in the Civil War.) While he was something of a rube when they met, she was the opposite, polished and refined. Yet they shared something in common: a love of politics. The marriage of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln proves to be a tempestuous affair accented by her temper, his depression and their political ambitions. Included: his elections to the U.S. House of Representatives and, later, the presidency.

In August, 1969, half a million people from all walks of life and every corner of the country converged on a small dairy farm in upstate New York. They came to hear the concert of their lives, but most experienced something far more profound: a moment that would change them and the country forever, and define a cultural revolution.

The Country and the City, 1609-1825: New York, notes narrator David Ogden Stiers, "was a business proposition from the very start," when Henry Hudson, exploring for the Dutch East India Company, sailed into its harbor. Part 1 also focuses on New Yorker Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary; and Gov. DeWitt Clinton, who built the Erie Canal. "All America," says Stiers, "now met in New York."

A profile of quintessentially American composer Stephen Foster features interviews with historian Fath Ruffins, biographer Ken Emerson, musicologists Josephine Wright and Dale Cockrell, and modern-day musicians influenced by Foster's work.

Filmmaker Ric Burns adds a poignant postscript to his series "New York: A Documentary Film" with this chronicle of the World Trade Center's rise and fall. Burns recounts Sept. 11 wrenchingly, but he devotes more than half the film to the Center's rise. This isn't a pretty story: It's one of economic, political, architectural and engineering labyrinths. The result was a critical and commercial flop, though historian Kenneth Jackson says: "It's more important to history now that it's gone."

"Citizen King," a reverential chronicle of the final five years of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, employs eyewitnesses to the history King made to recall it. Among them: Coretta Scott King, former representative William Gray, author David Halberstam, civil-rights veterans Joseph Lowery, Roger Wilkins and Taylor Branch, long-time political figure Andrew Young, former senator Harris Wofford, former attorney general Ramsey Clark and theologian James Cone.

In this second episode, the subject is FDR's courageous fight with polio. With his wife Eleanor Roosevelt at his side, FDR, wins the Democratic nomination for president. He takes office at the beginning of the Great Depression. Exhorting the nation to keep the faith, FDR utters his famous words: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

"Order and Disorder: 1825-1865" recalls a period of tremendous growth and ferment. Most of the new arrivals were Irish immigrants (100,000 by 1842—and that was before the potato famine), and the subsequent overcrowding led to the construction of Central Park (1857-58). But that didn't quell the ferment, which exploded in 1863 with the racially charged draft riots. "It was the largest incident of civil disorder in U.S. history," notes historian Mike Wallace.

"Sunshine and Shadow: 1865-1898" During the Gilded Age, New York "was home to the greatest concentration of wealth in human history," says narrator David Ogden Stiers. And, he adds, "the greatest concentration of poverty." This episode surveys that dichotomy, from Fifth Avenue mansions to slums documented by Jacob Riis in "How the Other Half Lives." Also recalled: the fall of William H. "Boss" Tweed ("he took a fall for the system," claims Pete Hamill).

What drove a company of American soldiers — ordinary young men from around the country — to commit the worst atrocity in American military history? American Experience focuses on the 1968 My Lai massacre, its subsequent cover-up, and the heroic efforts of the soldiers who broke ranks to try to halt the atrocities and then bring them to light.

In 1969 off the California coast, a US Navy crane carefully lowered a massive tubular structure into the waters. It was an audacious feat of engineering — a pressurized underwater habitat, designed for an elite group of divers to spend days or even months at a stretch living and working on the ocean floor.Sealab tells the little-known story of the daring program that tested the limits of human endurance and revolutionized undersea exploration.

Part 1: Revisit the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, when 52 Americans were held hostage in Tehran, through stories of those whose ordeal riveted the world.

For 40 years, a new religion called spiritualism affected the nation as no other ever had. Abraham Lincoln, P.T. Barnum, Frederick Douglass, senators, and scientists argued over the discoveries of the spirit world as revealed through mediums. Congress debated whether to provide $40,000 to research the feasibility of using the new wireless technology to reach the other world. But by 1880, as one spectacular fraud after another was revealed, the movement began to fade.