Public Broadcasting Service (U.S.)

Relive Orson Welles' infamous radio dramatization 75 years after the mass hysteria event it spawned. The film examines the elements that made America ripe for the hoax: America's longtime fascination with life on Mars; the emergence of radio as a powerful new medium; the shocking Hindenburg explosion of 1937; and Welles himself, the 23-year-old wunderkind director of the drama and mischief-maker supreme.

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...

Each year, an estimated 2 million people in the U.S. are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria-and at least 23,000 die. As the crisis deepens, FRONTLINE correspondent David E. Hoffman turns his attention to the American farm, a sector that comprises an estimated 70 percent of all antibiotics sold. Hoffman travels the country to investigate new research out of Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Texas focusing on how antibiotics on the farm might be contributing...

Journey into the six decade reign of one of the world's most influential women. Follow Queen Elizabeth II's remarkable life, from her youth-when few expected she'd ever wear the crown-to her uncle Edward VIII's stunning abdication, and her father's subsequent coronation as King George VI. Witness her experiences during World War II, her own sudden ascension to the throne, and her eventful reign of more than 60 years. She defines the role of a modern...

What will it mean when most of us can afford to have the information in our DNA-all three billion chemical letters of it-read, stored, and available for analysis? This NOVA program reveals that we stand on the verge of such a revolution.

Fifty years ago, film crews for the Allied Expeditionary Force entered Nazi concentration camps to find atrocities beyond their imagination. Kept in a vault at London's Imperial War Museum since 1945, the film shows tragic images of the genocide including scenes of gas chambers, experimentation labs and the haunted, starving survivors. Some footage was filmed moments before the camps where liberated, as Nazi soldiers hurried to cover evidence.

World-famous scientist Stephen Hawking sets three ordinary people a series of fun challenges to show them how to think like a genius. Can they work out why they exist at all? Is it destiny or pure chance?

Martin Smith draws on in-depth interviews with Iraqi politicians and American policymakers and military leaders to explore and explain how the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) became a major force so quickly. What does it mean for the U.S. to be back in Iraq, fighting a new war on terror, less than three years after American troops pulled out of the country? Smith delivers a revelatory look at how ISIS grew out of the disaffection of Iraqi Sunnis...

By the time he died in 1931, Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most famous men in the world. The holder of more patents than any other inventor in history, Edison had achieved glory as the genius behind such revolutionary inventions as sound recording, motion pictures, and electric light. Edison explores the complex alchemy that accounts for the celebrity of America's most famous inventor, offering new perspectives on the man and his milieu, and illuminating...

NOVA reveals the minute-by-minute story of the Fukushima nuclear crisis-the one you know about...and the one you likely don't. With unprecedented access inside both Fukushima nuclear power plants, NOVA speaks with workers who were there during the harrowing crisis that began as a natural a disaster but was made worse by human beings. But why did the worst happen at one plant-and another that faced nearly identical challenges emerged unscathed? It...