The Media Library of Genesee Valley BOCES

Reconstruction was fitfully under way in 1867. New state constitutions were drafted, black freedmen voted and were elected to southern legislatures, and white southerners struggled to regain control of their land in the new South. Secret societies meant to intimidate blacks into subservience developed across the South, causing President Grant to declare marshal law in South Carolina. A more sweeping civil rights bill was passed but was never fully enforced

Looks at some of the issues surrounding the reconstruction period after the Civil War ended in the South. Looks at how the government dealt with the thousands of slaves freed through the Emancipation Proclamation, the formation of the Radical Republican faction that fought for African American rights, and the 1866 Civil Rights Act

Encompasses the months between D-Day in June 1944 and VE Day in May 1945. Among the many scenes captured in color footage are the seizure of a German U-boat carrying Enigma code machines; the Allied assault on the beaches at Normandy; the jubilant welcome of GIs after the liberation of Paris; freed American POWs burning their prison; the first Jewish Sabbath service conducted at the just-liberated Dachau concentration camp; and VE Day celebrations following Germany's surrender; the war in the Pacific; Kamikaze attacks; Okinawa; Hiroshima; surrender of Japan

Opening with some of the earliest color motion picture images ever filmed - of a victory parade in Paris at the end of World War I - the first episode takes viewers from the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II through the Nazi invasion of Poland that triggered the joint British and French declaration of war on Germany to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway

Uses archival footage to document the true story of a fourteen-year-old black boy who, in 1955, whistled at a white woman in Money, Mississippi. Within three days of the incident, he was brutally murdered. Although two white men were charged with the crime, they were acquitted by an all-white male jury. Till's death is considered a spark which helped ignite the civil rights movement - the Montgomery bus boycott began three months after the murder. Program gives viewers a clear picture of life in the Jim Crow South

Although she is one of America's earliest heroines, little is truly known about Sacagawea. Sacagawea and her husband were hired as interpreters for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The Corps headed west through the treacherous mountains toward the Columbia River and then on to the Pacific. After returning East with Captain Clark, nothing more is known of her life and she passed into legend

On June 22, 1938, 70,000 fans crammed into Yankee Stadium to watch the rematch between heavyweight Joe Louis and his German opponent Max Schmeling. More than a rematch, this fight was filled with symbolic significance, both as a harbinger of the civil rights movement and a prelude to World War II

Part 2 follows King and the civil rights demonstrators on a march from Selma to Montgomery where they were beaten by police. Also covers President's Johnson's signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles, the initiation of the term "black power," and his assassination

Chronicles the last five years of Dr. Martin Luther King JR.'s life. The episode examines the events that led up to his arrest and incarceration in Birmingham, Alabama; the August 1963 march on Washington where he gave his famous "I Have A Dream" speech; the bombing of a Montgomery, Alabama church; signing of the Civil Rights Act

Follows American infantryman, captured during the Battle of the Bulge and sent to a Nazi labor camp where many of them died. This story, until now one that remained untold, was made by award-winning filmmaker Charles Guggenheim