Public Broadcasting Service (U.S.)

What happened when early humans ventured out of Africa and into Asia? Where did they go and whom did they meet along the way? The latest evidence suggests they left far earlier than previously thought and interbred with other types of ancient human such as Homo erectus, Neanderthals and also the Denisovans, whose existence was established only five years ago when geneticists extracted DNA from a tiny fragment of finger bone. Because these ancient...

Diseases that were largely eradicated in the United States a generation ago-including whooping cough, measles, mumps-are returning, in part because nervous parents are skipping their children's shots. This NOVA special takes viewers around the world to track epidemics, explore the science behind vaccinations, and shed light on the risks of opting out. Highlighting real cases and placing them in historical context, the program traces outbreaks of communicable...

Civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall's triumph in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to desegregate America's public schools completed the final leg of an heroic journey to end legal segregation. For 20 years, during wartime and the Depression, Marshall had traveled hundreds of thousands of miles through the Jim Crow South of the United States, fighting segregation case by case, establishing precedent after precedent, all...

Separate and Unequal - Sixty years after the Supreme Court declared separate schools for black and white children unconstitutional, FRONTLINE examines a case in Louisiana that illustrates the growing race and class divide in American schools and the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. The East Baton Rouge Parish School District was forced to desegregate its schools in 1981 after a 25-year legal fight. But now, frustrated over the district's many...

This film examines Coney Island, a peninsula district southwest of Brooklyn, New York City. It housed three historical amusement parks and became an entertainment destination that drew in much of America in the early 1900s. Bringing together raunchy entertainment, sideshows of all varieties, futuristic inventions, and culturally diverse people, Coney Island encompassed a transition into the modern world.

FRONTLINE investigates how the NRA uses its unrivaled political power to stop gun regulation in America. With first-hand accounts of school killings in Newtown and Columbine, and the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, Gunned Down examines why despite the national trauma over gun violence Washington hasn't acted.

FRONTLINE and ProPublica investigate American-born terrorist David Coleman Headley, who played a key role in planning the deadly 2008 siege on Mumbai. In this film, Thomas Jennings and Sebastian Rotella update and expand upon their collaborative 2011 documentary, A Perfect Terrorist, to include new revelations that international intelligence agencies had technology in place to spy on one of the Mumbai masterminds, but failed to detect and stop the...

In 1931, two white women stepped from a box car in Paint Rock, Alabama to make a shocking accusation: they had been raped by nine black teenagers on the train. So began one of the most significant legal fights of the twentieth century. The trial of the nine falsely accused teens would draw North and South into their sharpest conflict since the Civil War, yield two momentous Supreme Court decisions and give birth to the Civil Rights Movement. In addition...

Correspondent Martin Smith goes inside Syria to report from government-controlled areas as war rages. With on-the-ground reporting and firsthand accounts from Syrians caught in the crisis, the film shines new light on the ongoing conflict.

Why wasn't the Ebola outbreak stopped? When the largest Ebola outbreak on record began to devastate West Africa, why did it take so long for the world to respond? This film tells the vivid, inside story of how and why the Ebola outbreak in West Africa wasn't stopped before it was too late, drawing on revelatory and candid admissions of failure from key government and public health officials, including the President of Liberia, the Director of the...