The BEST episodes of American Experience season 19

#1 - Eyes on the Prize (2): Fighting Back (1957-1962)

Season 19 - Episode 2 - Aired 10/2/2006

States' rights loyalists and federal authorities collide in the 1957 battle to integrate Little Rock's Central High School, and again in James Meredith's 1962 challenge to segregation at the University of Mississippi. Both times, a Southern governor squares off with a U.S. president, violence erupts -- and integration is carried out.

#2 - Eyes on the Prize (3): Ain't Scared of Your Jails (1960-1961)

Season 19 - Episode 3 - Aired 10/9/2006

Black college students take a leadership role in the civil rights movement as lunch counter sit-ins spread across the South. "Freedom Riders" also try to desegregate interstate buses, but they are brutally attacked as they travel.

#3 - The Gold Rush

Season 19 - Episode 9 - Aired 11/6/2006

The story of gold in California and the migration, immigration, and economy that remained after the riches were gone.

#4 - The Great Fever

Season 19 - Episode 8 - Aired 10/30/2006

Walter Reed travels to Cuba to investigate the radical theory that mosquitoes spread deadly Yellow Fever.

#5 - Eyes on the Prize (4): No Easy Walk (1961-1963)

Season 19 - Episode 4 - Aired 10/9/2006

The civil rights movement discovers the power of mass demonstrations as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerges as its most visible leader. Some demonstrations succeed; others fail. But the triumphant March on Washington, D.C., under King's leadership, shows a mounting national support for civil rights. President John F. Kennedy proposes the Civil Rights Act.

#6 - Sister Aimee

Season 19 - Episode 13 - Aired 4/2/2007

The story of the career of the extremely influential evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

#7 - The Living Weapon

Season 19 - Episode 11 - Aired 2/5/2007

The history and ramifications of biological weapons and the stand the United States took in ending further research.

#8 - The Berlin Airlift

Season 19 - Episode 10 - Aired 1/29/2007

It could have been the start of World War III. Instead, it became the largest humanitarian campaign the world had ever seen. On June 24, 1948, one of the first major crises of the Cold War occurred when the Soviet Union blocked railroad and street access to West Berlin. For nearly a year two million civilians and twenty thousand allied soldiers in the city's western sector were fed and fueled entirely from the air. Former German soldiers built airfields and repaired engines for the enemies they had been shooting out of the sky just three years before. British and American pilots, so recently delivering death, were now angels of mercy, supplying coal and flour, coffee and chocolate to the beleaguered city. Through lavish re-enactments and the personal stories of those who lived through the airlift, this American Experience production provides a dramatic and striking portrait of the first battle of the Cold War.

#9 - Eyes on the Prize (5): Mississippi: Is This America? (1963-1964)

Season 19 - Episode 5 - Aired 10/16/2006

Mississippi's grass-roots civil rights movement becomes an American concern when college students travel south to help register black voters and three activists are murdered. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenges the regular Mississippi delegation at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City.

#10 - Eyes on the Prize (6): Bridge to Freedom (1965)

Season 19 - Episode 6 - Aired 10/16/2006

A decade of lessons is applied in the climactic and bloody march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. A major victory is won when the federal Voting Rights Bill passes, but civil rights leaders know they have new challenges ahead.

#11 - Alexander Hamilton

Season 19 - Episode 18 - Aired 5/14/2007

A profile of the aristocratic founding father, his efforts to bring federal economic reforms to the fledgling country, and how his aloof personality led to opposition and tragedy.

#12 - The Mormons (2): Church and State

Season 19 - Episode 17 - Aired 5/1/2007

#13 - The Mormons (1): History

Season 19 - Episode 16 - Aired 4/30/2007

A story of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - its beginnings in 1830, the migration of its persecuted members, and its role and influence in the modern world.

#14 - Summer of Love

Season 19 - Episode 15 - Aired 4/23/2007

A chronicle of Haight Ashbury in the summer of 1967 and the peak of American youth counterculture.

#15 - Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple

Season 19 - Episode 14 - Aired 4/9/2007

The details behind the beginnings and end of Peoples Temple headed by Jim Jones, including the tragic suicides of many of its members in the jungles of Guyana.

#16 - New Orleans

Season 19 - Episode 12 - Aired 2/12/2007

The historical, social, and geographic factors that shaped one of America's most uniquely individual cities.

#17 - Test Tube Babies

Season 19 - Episode 7 - Aired 10/23/2006

Science enables advances in reproduction and the establishment of a new medical industry, but often not one as successful as people imagine.

#18 - Eyes on the Prize (1): Awakenings (1954-1956)

Season 19 - Episode 1 - Aired 10/2/2006

Individual acts of courage inspire black Southerners to fight for their rights: Mose Wright testifies against the white men who murdered young Emmett Till, and Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.