Ken Burns

Traces the evolution of scientific genetics, focusing on how it is used to identify treatments for various types of genetic diseases.

"From one of our most treasured filmmakers, a pictorial history of America-a stunning and moving collection of Ken Burns's favorite photographs"--

What we remember, what we've forgotten, and what we never knew about America's least understood war, revealed in a riveting, richly illustrated volume based on the major ten-part PBS documentary series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Historian Geoffrey C. Ward and filmmaker Ken Burns, the authors of the acclaimed and best-selling The Civil War, Jazz, The War, and Baseball, present an intimate history of the Vietnam War. All the major milestones...

Until the arrival of European and American settlers in the late nineteenth century, the southern Plains of the United States were predominantly grasslands, the home and hunting grounds of many Native American tribes and the range of untold millions of bison. It was seldom used for farming. Bitterly cold winters, hot summers, high winds and especially low, unreliable precipitation made it unsuitable for standard agriculture. But at the start of the...

In the 1960s, jazz becomes divided into “schools”—Dixieland, swing, bop, hard bop, cool, modal, free, avant-garde. The question of what is jazz and what isn’t rages, dividing audiences, dividing musicians, dividing generations.

As rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll erode jazz’ audience further, the music nonetheless enjoys a time of great creativity. Free-jazz challenges all the jazz conventions, provoking a debate about the genre’s definition that continues to this day.

Los Angeles steals its water supply, millions of Mexicans migrate north, and Hollywood begins to shape the West and the nation's image of it. Homesteaders and fortune-seekers still arrived, even though much of the best land had already been claimed. And the frenzy over what was left touched off human stampedes, while whole towns opened for business overnight. But for the first inhabitants of the West, it seemed that a way of life that had lasted for...

Louis Armstrong arrives in New York from Chicago where, during a brief stay with the Fletcher Henderson band, he amazes his fellow musicians and teaches the city to swing. Follow musicians Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Sidney Bechet, Ethel Waters and Duke Ellington, who begins his incomparable career as the pre-eminent composer in jazz history.

Jazz is born in the unique musical and social cauldron of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century, emerging from such genres as ragtime, marching bands, work songs, spirituals, European classical music, funeral parade music and the blues.