The BEST episodes written by David Grubin

#1 - FDR (3): The Grandest Job in the World (1933-1940)

American Experience - Season 7 - Episode 3

In episode three, the subject is FDR's leadership of America during the Great Depression. The nation turned to this son of great wealth for a host of social programs that promised a New Deal for the common man.

#2 - LBJ (2)

American Experience - Season 4 - Episode 2

Lyndon Johnson's ascension to the Presidency and the controversial events of his tenure such as the Great Society and the Vietnam War are chronicled here.

#3 - LBJ (1)

American Experience - Season 4 - Episode 1

LBJ's career started in 1938 when he was elected a congressman, one of the youngest ever. He was elected to the Senate in 1948 under a cloud of suspicion. LBJ won by only 87 votes. In 1954, when the Democrats took over the Senate, LBJ became the youngest majority leader ever at age 46. In 1957, LBJ engineered passage of the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction, but the bill had too many compromises and no teeth. By 1960, LBJ felt he was ready for the presidency, but John Kennedy got there first and then picked LBJ as his vice president.

#4 - Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided (1): Ambition

American Experience - Season 13 - Episode 7

The story of the Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln's childhoods and their courtship is told.

#5 - Tesla

American Experience - Season 29 - Episode 1

A profile of Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), the genius engineer who developed a way to distribute electricity over vast distances; and who envisioned a world linked by wireless technology.

#6 - RFK

American Experience - Season 17 - Episode 1

After an assassin's bullet took his brother's life, Robert F. Kennedy was bereft, not only of someone he loved, but of a role that had given meaning to his life. He had devoted himself to his glamorous brother John, suppressing his own ambitions for the sake of the Kennedy name. JFK's death plunged him into unremitting pain and grief, and left him struggling to find his own voice. In his suffering he began to empathize with impoverished Americans and others who were marginalized or disenfranchised — African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans. Just as he began to discover his own identity and move beyond the shadow of his brother, he, too, was assassinated.

#7 - America 1900 (3): A Great Civilized Power

American Experience - Season 11 - Episode 3

#8 - Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided (5): The Frightful War

American Experience - Season 13 - Episode 11

While criticism of Abraham Lincoln increases during the Civil War, Mary Lincoln plunges into debt.

#9 - America 1900 (2): Change Is in the Air

American Experience - Season 11 - Episode 2

#10 - The Busing Battleground

American Experience - Season 35 - Episode 7

On September 12, 1974, police were stationed outside schools across Boston as Black and white students were bused for the first time between neighborhoods to comply with a federal court desegregation order. The cross-town busing was met with shocking violence, much of it directed at children: angry white protestors threw rocks at school buses carrying Black children and hurled racial epithets at the students as they walked into their new schools. The chaos and racial unrest would escalate and continue for years. Using eyewitness accounts, oral histories and news footage that hasn’t been seen in decades, The Busing Battleground pulls back the curtain on the volatile effort to end school segregation, detailing the decades-long struggle for educational equity that preceded the crisis.

#11 - Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space

American Experience - Season 35 - Episode 2

Raised in the small all-Black Florida town of Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston studied at Howard University before arriving in New York in 1925. She would soon become a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, best remembered for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. But even as she gained renown in the Harlem literary circles, Hurston was also discovering anthropology at Barnard College with the renowned Franz Boas. She would make several trips to the American South and the Caribbean, documenting the lives of rural Black people and collecting their stories. She studied her own people, an unusual practice at the time, and during her lifetime became known as the foremost authority on Black folklore. Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space is an in-depth biography of the influential author whose groundbreaking anthropological work would challenge assumptions about race, gender and cultural superiority that had long defined the field in the 19th century.

#12 - The Great Air Race of 1924

American Experience - Season 2 - Episode 1

Early American aviators try to cross the planet with primitive planes of limited range and under harsh conditions.

#13 - The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer

American Experience - Season 21 - Episode 1

The career of America's most famous and controversial nuclear physicist and his fall from grace during the Cold War.

#14 - Truman (1)

American Experience - Season 10 - Episode 1

#15 - FDR (1): The Center of the World (1882-1921)

American Experience - Season 7 - Episode 1

This first episode looks at the early life of FDR. Born into a wealthy family, there was little about his youth that would suggest the giant of history that he would become. His entry into state politics and a significant meeting with a woman named Eleanor would change his life and the course of a nation.

#16 - T.R.: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt (1): The Long Campaign

American Experience - Season 9 - Episode 1

#17 - America 1900 (1): Spirit of the Age

American Experience - Season 11 - Episode 1

#18 - America 1900 (4): Anything Seemed Possible

American Experience - Season 11 - Episode 4

#19 - Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided (3): Shattered

American Experience - Season 13 - Episode 9

The Lincolns arrive in Washington with Abraham's ability to lead in question.

#20 - T.R.: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt (4): Black Care

American Experience - Season 9 - Episode 4

#21 - Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided (6): Blind with Weeping

American Experience - Season 13 - Episode 12

Focuses on the battle of Gettysburg, the surrender at Appomattox and Lincoln's assassination.

#22 - Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided (4): The Dearest of All Things

American Experience - Season 13 - Episode 10

Mary struggles with personal grief, as Abraham Lincoln becomes consumed with the nation's tragedy.

#23 - Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided (2): We Are Elected

American Experience - Season 13 - Episode 8

Sheds light on the Lincoln marriage during Abraham's time in Congress and his run for president.

#24 - FDR (4): The Juggler (1940-1945)

American Experience - Season 7 - Episode 4

In this last episode, the story turns to the war years. The days leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II were turbulent ones in America. FDR's strong leadership charted America's course, as the newly emerging world power took on the responsibilities of the war in Europe. Meanwhile, back in America, the New Deal was still a work in progress.

#25 - FDR (2): Fear Itself (1922-1933)

American Experience - Season 7 - Episode 2

In this second episode, the subject is FDR's courageous fight with polio. With his wife Eleanor Roosevelt at his side, FDR, wins the Democratic nomination for president. He takes office at the beginning of the Great Depression. Exhorting the nation to keep the faith, FDR utters his famous words: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

#26 - T.R.: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt (3): The Good Fight

American Experience - Season 9 - Episode 3

#27 - T.R.: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt (2): The Bully Pulpit

American Experience - Season 9 - Episode 2

#28 - Truman (2)

American Experience - Season 10 - Episode 2

#29 - The Buddha

PBS Specials - Season 2010 - Episode 7

This documentary for PBS by award-winning filmmaker David Grubin and narrated by Richard Gere, tells the story of the Buddha’s life, a journey especially relevant to our own bewildering times of violent change and spiritual confusion. It features the work of some of the world’s greatest artists and sculptors, who across two millennia, have depicted the Buddha’s life in art rich in beauty and complexity. Hear insights into the ancient narrative by contemporary Buddhists, including Pulitzer Prize winning poet W.S. Merwin and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Join the conversation and learn more about meditation, the history of Buddhism, and how to incorporate the Buddha’s teachings on compassion and mindfulness into daily life.

#30 - Marie Antoinette

PBS Specials - Season 2006 - Episode 10

She has been portrayed on film by some of the most famous actresses of their times, from Norma Shearer to Kirsten Dunst, and her name is now synonymous with privilege and excess. But who was the real Marie Antoinette? This film goes beyond the infamous, yet apocryphal quote, ‘Let them eat cake’, that has been used for centuries to damn the seemingly frivolous queen of France. Instead viewers are introduced to a tender-hearted, complex woman, whose life began in splendour, yet ended under the guillotine’s blade. History has often blamed Marie Antoinette for the French Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror. Her story is, undoubtedly, tied up with one of extravagance, inequality and bloody revolution, but could the wife of Louis XVI in fact have been a scapegoat? This film, featuring input from luminaries such as Simon Schama, traces her journey from her childhood in Austria, to her troubled marriage and life in the extraordinary Palace of Versailles, and ultimately, to her final hours in a squalid prison cell. Could the time have come for a reassessment of one of history’s most famous women?