The BEST episodes of PBS Specials season 2012

#1 - Cave People of the Himalaya

Season 2012 - Episode 4 - Aired 2/15/2012

Cave People of the Himalaya is a documentary of and by scientists analyzing the anatomy and DNA of human remains, as well as researching evidence to better understand the mosaic of cultures connected through the region's trade routes.

#2 - Saving the Titanic

Season 2012 - Episode 9 - Aired 4/1/2012

Saving the Titanic tells the untold story of the self-sacrifice and bravery of the ship’s engineers, stokers and firemen in the face of impending death.

#3 - Islamic Art: Mirror of the Invisible World

Season 2012 - Episode 18 - Aired 7/6/2012

Travel to nine countries and across 1,400 years of cultural history to explore the astonishing artistic and architectural riches of Islam. With the insights and commentary of leading art scholars from around the world, the film delves into the art of religious life in Islamic culture and into the secret world inside the palaces of the elite. From the extraordinary array of metalwork, textiles, paintings and architecture that illuminate the culture, filmmaker Rob Gardner sheds light on the shared histories of western and Islamic societies, revealing more continuity than division. Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon narrates.

#4 - Valles Caldera - The Science

Season 2012 - Episode 22 - Aired 10/4/2012

The Valles Caldera offers crucial insights into water and land management, plate tectonics and climate change shedding new light on important issues facing not just the region but also the world.

#5 - Cuban Missile Crisis: Three Men Go to War

Season 2012 - Episode 23 - Aired 10/23/2012

Explore the inside story of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — the world on the brink of nuclear holocaust. Two years in the making, "Cuban Missile Crisis - Three Men Go To War" reveals how three human beings grappled with the most dangerous two weeks in human history, when countless events outside their control threatened to ignite a nuclear holocaust that could have ended human civilization.

#6 - Jake Shimabukuro: Life On Four Strings

Season 2012 - Episode 6 - Aired 3/1/2012

This intimate documentary gives viewers a singular glimpse into Jake Shimabukuro, ukulele virtuoso, but also Jake, the young boy who grew up in a modest apartment to a single mother and unsuspectingly rose to international stardom.

#7 - Violin Masters: Two Gentlemen of Cremona

Season 2012 - Episode 12 - Aired 4/30/2012

During the late 17th and early 18th centuries, two violinmakers from the same small town were making the most sought-after violins ever created. Everyone has heard of Antonio Stradivari, but few know the name Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù. Through interviews with historians, experts, luthiers, and virtuosos, this documentary tells the story of these two masters of violinmaking and their instruments.

#8 - First Freedom: The Fight for Religious Liberty

Season 2012 - Episode 25 - Aired 12/14/2012

First Freedom: The Fight for Religious Liberty is the story of how the most basic of human freedoms - freedom of conscience - was codified for the first time in human history as an inalienable human right protected by law.

#9 - Missile to Moon

Season 2012 - Episode 7 - Aired 3/27/2012

Missile to Moon, a new production from APT's award-winning documentary team, tells the story of Wernher von Braun and Alabama's significant contribution to the exploration of space. The program will track the evolution of Huntsville from the "Watercress Capital of the World" to "Rocket City, USA," Wernher von Braun's journey from German Rocket Engineer to American Hero, and the role this unlikely combination played in thrusting the United States into the forefront of the Space Age.

#10 - Glacier Park Remembered

Season 2012 - Episode 15 - Aired 6/13/2012

It is hard to imagine what was more memorable in Glacier Park a century ago: the breath taking scenery, or the adventure. Travel in time with us as we follow the adventures of our counterparts 100 years ago through rare, restored film, museum pictures, and historical memorabilia. See how eastern city slickers were lured to North central Montana by a glitzy promotional campaign promoted by the Great Northern Railroad.

#11 - Hunting the Edge of Space: The Ever-Expanding Universe

Season 2012 - Episode 17 - Aired 6/27/2012

In “The Ever-Expanding Universe,” Hour 2 of the two-part special “Hunting the Edge of Space,” NOVA investigates a battery of high-tech telescopes that is joining the Hubble Space Telescope on its quest to unlock the secrets of our universe, a cosmos almost incomprehensible in its size, age, and violence. Far beyond our solar system, we are now discovering exoplanets orbiting other suns, and beyond our galaxy, another hundred billion galaxies, such as Andromeda, Sombrero, and Whirlpool, each harboring hundreds of billions of stars. We've detected supermassive black holes, spinning violently at the very centers of galaxies, including our own. We've witnessed supernovas: exploding stars, millions of light-years away, spewing out superheated gas at 600,000 miles per hour. And deep inside clouds of gas and dust, billowing trillions of miles high, we can glimpse new stars being born. Now, the latest telescopes are revealing the invisible mysteries of space that we are only just beginning to understand: dark matter, the hidden scaffolding our entire cosmos is built on; and dark energy, a powerful and invisible force that is pushing our universe apart.

#12 - Hunting the Edge of Space: The Mystery of the Milky Way

Season 2012 - Episode 16 - Aired 6/20/2012

"The Mystery of the Milky Way," chronicles the history of telescopes, from Galileo's refractor to Newton's reflector and beyond. It looks at key discoveries, such as those made by William Herschel and his sister Caroline, including the discovery of the planet Uranus. Hour 1 also looks at recent missions: the voyage of the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn, the Kepler telescope's search for planets beyond our solar system, and the Herschel Space Observatory's examination of the Milky Way, which is so large that it would take 100,000 years traveling at the speed of light to cross from one edge to the other.

#13 - Anthem

Season 2012 - Episode 27 - Aired 12/19/2012

Anthem tells the story behind Francis Scott Key's creation of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and explores the role of music and patriotism during The War of 1812. Featuring musical performances and interviews with historians and music experts from the United States and Great Britain, this one-hour documentary delves into the people, songs and events that influenced Key to write what would become the National Anthem of the United States of America.

#14 - Apollo 17: The Untold Story of the Last Men on the Moon

Season 2012 - Episode 5 - Aired 2/16/2012

Apollo 17, the final moon landing occurred in December 1972 only two years after Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. Public and political interest in Apollo had dwindled, but this mission accomplished more than any previous mission in exploring the geology of the moon.

#15 - Breakfast Special 2: Revenge of the Omelets

Season 2012 - Episode 28 - Aired 12/25/2012

Mmm, smell the bacon! Order the grits with red-eye gravy! Get the lobster hash! Try the veggie omelet! It’s time for Breakfast Special 2: Revenge of the Omelets, another celebration of getting up and going out for a memorable morning meal. There’s a diner in Connecticut, homemade biscuits in North Carolina, breakfast burritos and big pancakes in Pittsburgh. We find seaside specialties in New Hampshire, duck breast in Philadelphia, and salmon cakes in Detroit. On the Big Island of Hawaii, we sample loco moco, Portuguese donuts and scrumptious variations on all of the above! Cooks, servers, coffee drinkers and regulars at the counter all share their love and loyalty for our most important meal.

#16 - Blenko Glass: Behind The Scenes

Season 2012 - Episode 24 - Aired 12/12/2012

Journey to the hills of Milton, West Virginia, into the heat of Blenko Glassworks and see first-hand how Blenko handmade glass is created, from start to finish. Each step in the Blenko glass-making process is accomplished by human hand, eyes, and he arts, not by impersonal machines. Each piece is unique and so are the artisans and members of the Blenko family who continue this proud, 100 year tradition. Blenko Glass Company has been a family owned and operated company since 1893. They have been located in Milton, West Virginia since 1921.

#17 - Secrets of the Manor House

Season 2012 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/22/2012

Exactly 100 years ago, the world of the British manor house was at its height. It was a life of luxury and indolence for a wealthy few supported by the labor of hundreds of servants toiling ceaselessly "below stairs" to make the lives of their lords and ladies run as smoothly as possible. It is a world that has provided a majestic backdrop to a range of movies and popular costume dramas to this day, including PBS' Downton Abbey. But what was really going on behind these stately walls? Secrets of the Manor House looks beyond the fiction to the truth of what life was like in these British houses of yesteryear. They were communities where two separate worlds existed side by side: the poor worked as domestic servants, while the nation’s wealthiest families enjoyed a lifestyle of luxury, and aristocrats ruled over their servants as they had done for a thousand years.

#18 - Boom! Behind the Bakken

Season 2012 - Episode 13 - Aired 5/12/2012

Because of advanced new technology, a second oil boom has hit Western North Dakota and Eastern Montana. This Bakken formation has impacted more than just the oil industries. Towns around the Bakken oil formation are experience sudden growth in population. This program features those besieged by these new changes as well as those who are capitalizing on the oil boom. RV’s and man camps dot the sides of the roads that connect one town to another. New residents of these once small-towns battle for a place to call home. Some locals are able to capitalize off the one thing that brings all these different people together. Oil. Businesses are hiring and towns are bursting at the seams. This is the Boom, Behind the Bakken. Produced by Student Journalists of the University of Montana.

#19 - Titanic Belfast: Birthplace of a Legend

Season 2012 - Episode 11 - Aired 4/14/2012

#20 - Into Deepest Space: The Birth of the ALMA Observatory

Season 2012 - Episode 21 - Aired 9/28/2012

"Into Deep Space" traces the engineering, construction, and scientific discoveries of the most powerful observatory on Earth - the ALMA telescope in the Chilean Andes. The Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA, Spanish for "soul") is an array of radio telescopes in the Atacama desert of northern Chile. ALMA is an international partnership between Europe, the United States, Canada, East Asia and the Republic of Chile. ALMA will be a single telescope of revolutionary design, composed initially of 66 high precision antennas located on the Chajnantor plateau at 5000 meters altitude in northern Chile. Breathtaking footage features dramatic aerials of the ALMA site and live coverage of the it's first large scale observation.

#21 - Bones of Turkana

Season 2012 - Episode 14 - Aired 5/16/2012

#22 - Frank Lloyd Wright's Boynton House: The Next Hundred Years

Season 2012 - Episode 19 - Aired 9/20/2012

This beautifully shot documentary spotlights the restoration of Boynton House – the Frank Lloyd Wright house located on East Boulevard in Rochester, New York. Owners Fran Cosentino and Jane Parker share how they acquired Frank Lloyd Wright’s Boynton House, and how they worked to restore it to its original beauty using materials and processes that Wright himself intended.

#23 - Titanic with Len Goodman

Season 2012 - Episode 10 - Aired 4/10/2012

To mark the centenary of the tragedy, Titanic with Len Goodman explores the ship's enduring legacy and uncovers how for victims' families, and for the survivors, the sinking was just the beginning of the story. Generations later, these stories are still unfolding as we meet the modern day descendants of the shipbuilders, passengers and crew to learn how, 100 years after the sinking, Titanic's legacy lives on.

#24 - The Iranian Americans

Season 2012 - Episode 26 - Aired 12/18/2012

Filmed around the United States, The Iranian Americans chronicles the underreported history of a group of immigrants finding refuge, overcoming adversity and ultimately creating new lives in the United States. With Iran in the news virtually every day, many Americans have little knowledge of the story of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who live here in the US.

#25 - Money and Medicine

Season 2012 - Episode 20 - Aired 9/24/2012

Money & Medicine investigates the dangers the nation faces from runaway health care spending as well as the dangers patients face from over-diagnosis and over-treatment. In addition to illuminating the waste and overtreatment that pervade our medical system, Money & Medicine explores promising ways to reduce health care expenditures and improve the overall quality of medical care.