American Experience Season 2

Right now you can watch American Experience Season 2 on and — and it earns the access it was given. Across 1 season, the show has had time to find its rhythm and keep it. 48 viewers have already rated it on TMDB — the kind of consensus that does not happen by accident. The storytelling serves the subject rather than the other way around. Available now — press play and find out why people keep recommending it.

Part of the current wave of titles people are actually watching, American Experience Season 2 earns its spot. What makes American Experience Season 2 work is a willingness to sit with complexity instead of resolving it neatly. Season 2 of American Experience includes 16 episodes. It aired from October 1989 to January 1990. Episodes include "The Great Air Race of 1924", "Demon Rum", "A Family Gathering". It was aired in 1989. The restraint in American Experience Season 2 is what makes it trustworthy — it does not need to editorialise to make its point. There is real craft here, even in the moments that do not fully land.

For viewers who want their entertainment to leave them with something, American Experience Season 2 delivers on both counts. It rewards viewers regardless of what else is in their watch history. The complete run is available and best experienced without too much prior knowledge of where it goes. The subject drives every choice here, not the other way around. The kind of production you finish and immediately want to read more about.

🎬 American Experience Season 2 — Episode Guide

The Great Air Race of 1924

1989-10-03

The first around-the-world air race, sponsored by the Army Air Service to prove that the airplane had a commercial future, was the ultimate test of man and machine. Four pilots took off in single-engine, open-cockpit planes; 175 days later, two remaining pilots would land where they'd begun, in Seat...

Demon Rum

1989-10-10

Prohibition's effect on Detroit, Michigan, the first major American city to "go dry," where smuggling liquor across the Canadian border became the second largest indusry in town. A humorous, wild tale related by residents who lived through this national experiment which lasted from 1920 to 1933.

A Family Gathering

1989-10-17

Lise Yasui explores three generations of her Japanese-American family - from their immigration to Oregon in the early 1900s through their imprisonment in internment camps during World War Two.

The Great War: 1918

1989-10-24

All lingering 19th-century notions of the romance of battle were replaced by the terrible reality of 20th-century mechanized warfare. At Verdun, the French lost 300,000 men; at the Somme, the English lost one million. Against this setting, America reluctantly sent its boys to fight. The wrenching an...

Wildcatter: A Story of Texas Oil

1989-10-31

The tale of mavericks whose risk-taking, sweat and dreams changed an American industry. Starting with Spindletop, the first Texas gusher in 1902, rare archival film and interviews with pioneering oilmen are set against a contemporary story of a modern "wildcatter," gambling to find his fortune in ye...

Forever Baseball

1989-11-07

There is hardly a city, town or village without a baseball diamond. More than a game, baseball is a tradition, rite of passage, an enduring passion, a code for understanding the culture. A wry, philosophical essay on what makes baseball the great American pastime.

Mr. Sears' Catalogue

1989-11-14

They started selling watches. Then Richard Sears and Alva Curtis Roebuck started a revolution -- a "wish book" that made life on the farm a little easier and put consumer goods within reach of every American. A story of entrepreneurial triumph as well as an affectionate portrait of America from the ...

Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven

1989-11-21

A stunning film portrait of Yosemite National Park. The film's narration is taken from using the 1851 diary of the first expedition of soldiers into the sacred valley home of the Ahwahnechee tribe and introduces today's hikers and campers, to whom Yosemite is a true shrine.

Adam Clayton Powell

1989-11-28

Affluent, handsome, light-skinned and blond, he could pass for white. But his message about "economics and jobs" would make him one of the most charismatic black leaders in the 20th century. A U.S. Representative for 25 years, he pushed through social legislation, but his relish for money and fast l...

E10

Journey to America

1989-12-05

A tribute to the twelve million people who emigrated to the U.S. between 1890 and 1920. A recapturing of the journey through Europe to seaport towns, to the arrival in New York Harbor, and into the early months of settlement from urban ghettos out into the prairies. Letters, diaries and oral intervi...

E11

Ballad of a Mountain Man

1989-12-12

Bascom Lamar Lunsford was a pioneer folklorist who in the 1920s began a campaign to preserve mountain music and dance. He dignified what was known as "hillbilly music." Knocking on doors of local banjo pickers and fiddlers, listening to their songs, he amassed an extraordinary repertoire, recorded f...

E12

Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice

1989-12-19

Born into slavery, she became a journalist and newspaper owner in Memphis, and was radicalized following the lynching of three friends. Her crusade against lynching led to death threats, but she bravely continued for the rest of her life to call for an end to sexism and racism.

E13

Orphans of the Storm

1989-12-26

In the summer of 1940, as the German Luftwaffe began its assault on England, 10,000 British children were sent on a perilous sea voyage to safe havens in the United States. There, they forged life-long relationships with their "adopted" families, relationships that changes lives and attitudes on bot...

E14

Forbidden City, USA

1990-01-02

Before WWII, San Francisco's Chinatown was a separate world, closed to outsiders, ruled by rigid homeland customs. But in the 1930s, second generation Chinese Americans defied cultural tradition to pursue their passion for American music and dance. They started careers as "Chinese Fred Astaires" and...

E15

Battle for Wilderness

1990-01-09

The first major battle for wilderness preservation erupted over the building of Hetch Hetchy Dam in Yosemite National Park in 1906. On the one side were the purists who argued that wildlands were to be left as God made them; on the other, those who believed in the wise management of natural resource...

E16

Roots of Resistance: The Story of the Underground Railroad

1990-01-16

Men and women, black and white, risked their lives to carve an elaborate network of escape routes out of slavery in the mid 1800s -- trails and backroads, safehouses, river crossings and night trains leading as far north as Canada. Disguises, secret rendezvous and special codes were used to guard th...

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