Michelle Ferrari

For 191 years the U.S. Supreme Court was populated only by men. When Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O'Connor as the first female justice in 1981, the announcement dominated the news. A pioneer who both reflected and shaped an era, in her 25 years as justice she was the swing vote in cases about some of the 20th century's most controversial issues-including race, gender and reproductive rights.

When Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962, the book became a phenomenon. A passionate and eloquent warning about the long-term dangers of pesticides, the book unleashed an extraordinary national debate and was greeted by vigorous attacks from the chemical industry. But it would also inspire President John F. Kennedy to launch the first-ever investigation into the public health effects of pesticides — an investigation that would...

When Black neighborhoods across America erupted in violence during the summer of 1967, President Johnson appointed a commission to determine what happened, why it happened and what could be done to keep it from happening again. The bi-partisan commission’s final report offered a shockingly unvarnished assessment of American race relations that would doom its finding to political oblivion.

In the early twentieth century, the average American medicine cabinet was a would-be poisoner's treasure chest. There was radioactive radium in health tonics, thallium in depilatory creams, and morphine in teething medicine and potassium cyanide in cleaning supplies. While the tools of the murderer's trade multiplied as the pace of industrial innovation increased, the scientific knowledge (and the political will) to detect and prevent the crimes lagged...

One hundred years after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, it tells the dramatic culmination story of the hard-fought campaign waged by American women for the right to vote, a transformative cultural and political movement that resulted in the largest expansion of voting rights in US history.

Often called the mother of the modern environmental movement, Rachel Carson rocked the world in 1962 with her book Silent Spring, which warned the American public of the impact of pesticides on the environment and unleashed an extraordinary national debate about science and safety. At the center of that firestorm stood Ms. Carson, a strong, intensely private woman who balanced her love of the natural world and passion for writing with personal strife....

What began as a broadcast performance of H.G. Wells' fantasy, The War of the Worlds, turned into one of the biggest mass hysteria events in U.S. history. American Experience examines the elements that together created this frenzy, including our longtime fascination with life on Mars; the emergence of radio as a powerful new medium; and the creative wunderkind Orson Welles, the twenty-three-year-old director of the drama and mischief-maker supreme....

By the time he died in 1931, Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most famous men in the world. The holder of more patents than any other inventor in history, Edison had achieved glory as the genius behind such revolutionary inventions as sound recording, motion pictures, and electric light. Born on the threshold of America's burgeoning industrial empire, Edison's curiosity led him to its cutting edge.

Presents the story of the eugenics movement in the U.S., tracing its evolution from a force for human progress through the study of genetics to an anti-humanistic campaign for state-sponsored sterilization and the closing of the country's borders to peoples believed by some to be genetically inferior.