Documentaries

Our ten award-winning documentaries explore the central role of working women and men in U.S. history. These accessible and exciting programs have withstood the test of time and continue to engage students in middle school through college level classes. Each documentary has a downloadable Viewer’s Guide that is written for student readers. It introduces the main topics, events, and composite characters that help to dramatize the historical themes in many of the programs.

All programs are approximately 30 minutes long and available to stream online.

The six documentaries in Series One are our earliest productions originating as slide-tape shows:

History: The Big H (1984)
Tea Party Etiquette (1984)
Daughters of Free Men (1985)
Doing As They Can: Slave Life in the American South (1985)
Five Points: New York’s Irish Working Class in the 1850s (1983)
Dr. Toer’s Amazing Magic Lantern Show: A Different View of Emancipation (1986)

“These documentaries capture the drama and richness of American history while raising crucial questions about how we study and understand the past. These programs present history that resonates with issues and events today.”
—Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University

The four programs in Series Two were completed later on film and video formats:

1877: The Grand Army of Starvation (1986)
Savage Acts: Wars, Fairs, and Empire 1898-1904 (1995)
Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl: Immigrant Women in the Turn-of-the-Century City (1993)
Up South: African American Migration in the Era of the Great War (1996) (also available with Spanish subtitles)

The Ford Foundation provided funding for both series.