History Channel America: The Story of US History has earned some inspiring look at how self-determination and innovation made America. Now, a special introduction from the President of United States. Good evening. Over two hundred years ago, the world waited and watched to see if an unlikely experiment called America would succeed. It has. Not because the success was certain, or because it was easy, but because generations of Americans dedicated their lives and the sacred honor to a cause greater than themselves. This has been especially true in moments of great trial, when a ragtag group of patriots overthrew an empire to secure the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, when an Illinois rail splitter proved for all time that the government of, by and for the people would endure, when marchers' brave beatings on the Alabama bridge in the name of equality, freedom and justice for all. Moments like these remind us that our American stories have never been inevitable, those made possible by ordinary people, who kept moral compass pointed straight and true, when the way seemed treacherous, when the climb seemed steep, when the future seemed uncertain, people who were recognized as the fundamental part of our American character. We can remake ourselves, and our nation to fit our larger dreams. Tonight, thorough the series, I hope you'd be inspired by these extraordinary men and women, and think about how this generation will write the next chapter in our great American story. Thank you, and enjoy the show. We are a land of many nations. We are New World explorers. We are the huddled masses. Yearning to breathe freedom, we'll risk it all. We have the courage to dream the impossible, and make it the truth. We stand our ground. Charge headlong towards our destiny. Adventurers sail across an ocean to start a new life. A nation is born, which becomes the envy of the world. But in search of freedom, friends become foes, and these new Americans, will wage a war against the world's greatest military power. We are pioneers and trailblazers. We fight for freedom. We transform our dreams into the truth. Our struggles will become a nation. Episode One Rebels Shiploads of businessmen and true believers are crossing the Atlantic Ocean to create a new world. May 1610. 120 years after Columbus, it's still a perilous journey. One ship, The Deliverance, carries a cargo that will change America forever. All hands over here. Onboard is John Rolfe, a 24-year-old English farmer. Ambitious, self-reliant, visionary. A born entrepreneur. What takes us six hours today by plane was then a voyage of more than two months. Seven of the early adventurers out of every ten will be dead within a year.

Land ahoy! But the risks are worth it. North America is the ultimate land of opportunity: A continent of vast untapped wealth, starting with the most valuable resource of all --- land. What will be home to more than 300 million people lies under a blanket of forest covering nearly half the land. More than 50 billion trees. Further west, 9 million square miles of vast American wilderness. 60 million bison roam the plains. And underground, there are rumors of gems, silver and the largest seams of gold in the world. The settlers expect nothing less than El Dorado. But what Rolfe finds at the English settlement of Jamestown, is hell on Earth. More than 500 settlers made the journey before Rolfe. “Hello?” “Hello?” Barely 60 remain. It's called "The Starving Time". Having fed on horses and other animals, we ate boots, shoes, and any other leather we came across. “Somebody, help!” Three months before Rolfe arrives, a man is burned at the stake for killing his pregnant wife and planning to eat her.

The English arrive unprepared for this new world and unwilling to perform manual labor. Instead of livestock, they've brought chemical tests for gold that they never find. And this is not their land. They build Jamestown in the middle of a Native American empire. 60 starving settlers among 20,000 of the Powhatan Nation, armed with bows and arrows that are up to nine times faster to reload and fire than an English musket. They're soon enemies. Only one in ten of the original settlers is left. John Rolfe didn't come to plunder and leave like the others. He's got his own plan.

There's money in tobacco, and England is addicted. He's arrived with a supply of South American tobacco seeds, but growing it is limited to the Spanish colonies. The Spanish control the worldwide trade. Selling tobacco seeds to foreigners is punishable by death. But John Rolfe has got his hands on some. No one knows how. And in the warm, humid climate and fertile soil around the Chesapeake Bay, Rolfe's tobacco crop flourishes. The first large harvest produced by these seeds is worth more than a million dollars in today's money. The great strength of America is our people. If you wanna know what it is the defining strength of America, it is our people, our immigrant tradition, our bringing in cultures from all over the world. I know what goes into making success. And when somebody's really successful, it's rarely luck. It's talent, it's brain power, it's lots of other things.

Rolfe marries the daughter of the king of the Powhatan Empire. Her name becomes legend: Pocahontas. In England, Rolfe makes her a celebrity when her face is put on a portrait that sells all over London, advertising life in the New World. Shakespeare mentions the colony. England's rich invest money here. All of London knows about this land of plenty. Within two years, tobacco grows in every garden. From a living hell, Jamestown is America's first boomtown. Two years later, nearly 1,000 more settlers arrive, including 19 from West Africa. Slaves. But some go on to own their own land in Virginia. 12 years after the founding of Jamestown, Africans were playing a shaping role in the creation of the colonies. That's pretty incredible. 30 years later, there are over 20,000 settlers in Virginia. America is founded on tobacco. For the next century and a half, it's the continent's largest export.

Ten years after Rolfe arrives in Jamestown, another group of English settlers lands in North America. They come ashore on a deserted beach 450 miles up the coast from Jamestown, and call the place Plymouth, after the English port they sailed from. These are a different breed of settler, a group of religious dissidents with faith at the center of their lives. They made the dangerous Atlantic crossing, seeking religious freedom in the New World.

24-year-old apprentice printer Edward Winslow arrives with a group of religious sectarians on a boat called the Mayflower. By April 1621, their settlement is taking shape. The Mayflower returns to England. The Pilgrims are on their own in an unknown land. A great hope and inward zeal we had of laying some great foundation for the propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ, in those remote parts of the world. They're 19 families. Goats, chickens, pigs and dogs. They have spinning wheels, chairs, books, guns. And no way home. If you create this environment as a land of opportunity, then you're gonna attract those type of people who wanna take that risk, who have-- wanna take that gamble and who believe in a better life.

They were heading for the Hudson River, but they've landed 200 miles further north at the beginning of winter. They have arrived in the middle of a mini ice age, temperatures 2 degrees colder than today. Winters are longer, growing seasons shorter. The soil is poor. Little grows. Food supplies run low. In the first three months, more than half the Pilgrims die. William Bradford is the governor of a community soon in desperate trouble. It pleased God to visit us with death daily. Disease was everywhere. The living were scarcely able to bury the dead. They died sometimes two or three a day. Of 100 and odd persons, scarce 50 remained. At times, only six are fit enough to continue building their shelters. Susanna White's husband dies that first winter. Edward Winslow's wife perishes a month after. Within weeks, White and Winslow marry. They'll have five children. Today more than 10% of all Americans can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower. For a time, Plymouth provides the sanctuary they sought. “Edward! Edward! Edward, please go and look over there!” But like Jamestown, there were others here first. April 1621. The Pilgrims have been in the New World for five months. Barely half survive the first winter.

But they're not the first Europeans to arrive on this coast. Five years before, European ships brought light-skinned people and plague. Almost nine out of ten of the local people are wiped out. The Pokanoket people don't need enemies. They make peace with the Pilgrims. They teach the English how to grow crops in sandy soil, using fish for fertilizer. But they want something in return. They have a common enemy--a rival tribe.

And the English have powerful weapons. The Pilgrims aren't soldiers. But in the New World, they have to fight to survive. On August 14, 1621, Pilgrims and Pokanoket, shoulder to shoulder, will launch a surprise attack that will seal their future in this new land. It was resolved to send 14 men, well-armed, and to fall upon them in the night. The captain gave charge: Let none pass out. The rival tribe doesn't know what hit them. Surrounded, they have no answer for English firepower. Pokanoket and Pilgrims find common ground...and a chance to survive. Two unlikely allies. A partnership all too rare in North America.

We have found the Indian very faithful in their covenant of peace with us. They are people without any religion or knowledge of any God, yet very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted... and just. Their victory brings a period of peace to the colony. Their friendship is celebrated in a feast. In time, it will become known as Thanksgiving.

One of the main themes in the founding of America was a place to do business, a place to expand your horizons, a place to live a life of your own, practice your own religion. Those are the basic themes that brought people to these shores to colonize. It's the start of a period of prosperity, that will transform North America. From Jamestown and Plymouth, their descendants grow across the landscape. As more and more people cross the Atlantic--thousands, tens of thousands, people with different backgrounds, different reasons for being here...America becomes the place for everybody from everywhere.

Rolling the dice, coming together to create 13 colonies. From Jamestown, agriculture spreads across the South, dirt farms transform into sprawling plantations. Irish, Germans, and Swedes push back the frontier. The Dutch bring commerce to a small island at the mouth of the Hudson River. In time, it will be named New York. The colonists are 2 inches taller, and far healthier, than those they left behind in Europe. The Puritans average eight children, and they are twice as likely to survive to adulthood. They are 20% richer and pay only 1/4 of the taxes of those in England. Many still think of themselves as British, but each generation grows further from its roots. Nowhere more so than Boston.

May 9, 1768. Seven generations after John Rolfe's first tobacco harvest, the British want a bigger piece of the action. A British customs official springs a surprise raid on The Liberty, a ship belonging to John Hancock, one of the richest men in Boston. But Hancock's crew has other ideas. They're carrying 100 casks of imported wine and don't want to pay duty. It's a radical act of rebellion against taxes imposed by a king 3,000 miles away. To the British, they're just common smugglers. This mall skirmish changes everything. The British seize Hancock's ship, triggering riots that sweep through Boston. We didn't wanna pay taxes to a king and to a parliament where we didn't have a voice, and we didn't have any representation. We have a natural resentment toward government, which was how we were born. The king sends 4,000 redcoats to Boston to enforce his laws. Boston was a city of commerce, culture, civilization, and revolution, unfolding right before the eyes of the colonists and the eyes of the British.

October 1768. British soldiers clamp down on Boston, a port crucial to the British Empire...and a hub of global trade andcommerce. Its dockyards are some of the busiest in the world, producing 200 ships a year from America's vast timber reserves. 1/3 of all British shipping is built in the colonies. Timber fuels the global economy...much like oil does today. Across New England, marks identify the tallest, strongest trees selected by the crown for British ships. England has lost most of its forests. It wants American wood. In Boston, there's one redcoat for every four citizens. It's a city under occupation. Paul Revere is a silversmith and one of Boston's prominent businessmen...an unlikely subversive. They formed and marched with insolent parade, drums beating, fifes playing, and colors flying, each soldier having received 16 rounds of powder and ball.

He is an upper-middle-class figure, someone who has risen through his own efforts, his own talent. He represents what we have created on our own with very little help from our cousins across the Atlantic. But when revolution comes to North America...Revere will beat the center of it.

Boston and the 13 colonies are an economic powerhouse, critical to Britain. Nearly 40% of everything exported from Britain, makes its way to America. The fishing fleet ships thousands of tons of salted cod to the Caribbean. Returns with sugar andmolasses...raw material for rum. Taxed by the British after every exchange. In Africa, rum is the currency used to purchase the most profitable cargo of all...African slaves.

Between 1700 and 1800, more than 1/4 of a million Africans are brought to the American colonies. More slaves than all those who came of their own free will. Most wind up on large plantations in the South. But they're also critical to the economy of the North. 10% of Boston's population is black. Boston is a melting pot, and tension is building.

Nobody likes invaders in their homes. To have people here, foreigners on your soil, is something-- is a great incentive for people to fight. March 5, 1770. After three days of unrest, an angry mob roams the streets. Hundreds of men who lost their jobs and blame the British gather on King Street and face off against eight redcoats with orders not to fire. What's about to happen will change America forever. A 17-year-old wig maker's apprentice, Edward Garrick, lights the fuse.

This is how wars start. Come on, let's have it! Private Hugh Montgomery is hit with a club. An African-American, Crispus Attucks, dies instantly. Everybody, run! When the smoke clears, four more are dead. How Boston reacts will change the course of history. Silversmith and political radical Paul Revere captures the moment British soldiers kill five colonists in the streets of Boston.

His engraving will fuel the fires of revolution as outrage spreads across the 13 colonies. Unhappy Boston see thy sons deplore, thy hallowed walks besmeared with guiltless gore, whilst faithless Preston and his savage bands, with murderous rancor, stretch their bloody hands. The most formidable army in the world firing on an unarmed crowd. An explosive image with a title that says it all: "The Bloody Massacre." There was the old joke, "You give me a picture, I'll give you a war." Those who wanted to stir things up and to make a statement and maybe even lead a revolution, it made them able to rally others to their side.

News spreads fast. The colonists are avid readers, a legacy from the first Bible-reading Puritans in Plymouth. Boston has the first weekly newspaper. There are now more than 40 papers across the colonies. And the new postmaster general, Benjamin Franklin...has introduced a revolutionary postal-delivery system. Night riders cut the delivery time in half. The communications network connecting the colonies is one of the best in the world. And the British have no idea. They hope the news can be contained. Before news reaches England, most of America knows about the Boston Massacre. It's a very American spirit of an idea, this idea that everybody should have access to knowledge. It's very much like that pioneering idea, everybody should be able to make their way in the world. A printer in Connecticut can read the exact same story as a farmer in North Carolina.

December 1773. "The Boston Gazette" breaks another story, that will fan the flames of rebellion. The rising tide of anger and resentment forces England's hand. They repeal all taxes...except one, on tea. It's not enough. In one of the most famous acts of resistance in American history, Rebels dump over $1 million worth of tea in Boston Harbor. When someone comes along and smacks us, we don't turn the other cheek. That's not who we are. Move it! The British respond by shutting down Boston Harbor...one of America's busiest, wealthiest ports. Come on, lad. Hundreds lose their jobs. The British mean to strangle any resistance from the rebellious colony of Massachusetts. America is about to change forever. Tensions escalate far beyond Boston. Settlers are pushing west. Many have their eyes set on new land west of the Appalachians. But to protect Native. American lands, England has banned settlements, along a boundary called the Proclamation Line. Hundreds are evicted from their homes on the frontier.

September 5, 1774. We want liberty...Incensed at the British actions, 56 delegates from across the colonies gather at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. It's the first step on the road to American democracy. Among them are John Adams, Patrick Henry, and a gentleman landowner from Virginia named George Washington. At a time when our lordly masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprivation of American freedom, it seems highly necessary that something should be done to maintain liberty. Across New England, people prepare to defend themselves. Smuggled arms are collected and stashed in secret hideaways. But while many expect conflict, most delegates in Philadelphia want peace with Britain. A military action would make a wound that would never be healed. That's good, we don't have all day, let's go, come on. The First Continental Congress resolves that a British attack on any one colony will be regarded as an attack on all of them. What emerges at Philadelphia is solidarity. The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Englanders, and New Yorkers are no more. I'm not a Virginian. I am an American. The future of the 13 American colonies hangs in the balance.

Spring 1775. Near Concord, Massachusetts. Get in here, get those weapons stacked up. We haven't got all day. Local gunsmith Isaac Davis puts the town militia through basic training. The American patriots knew that they were doing the right thing. You're starting the birth of a nation. You had to really believe in what you were doing. You've gotta keep this clean here, sir. If you keep that clean, it'll save your life. If war comes, this will be America's first line of defense. A volunteer home guard with weapons paid for by local citizens. Gentlemen, it's looking good, it's looking good. Let's have some breakfast and move out. They're farmers, blacksmiths, and store owners. A fighting force of ordinary Americans. The militiamen of any of the colonies were made up of just its citizens. It was a citizen-based protection unit. And some of them had some skills, but some of them were just the carpenters. Some of them were just the mason or the blacksmith. I mean, these were the guys that--they had something at stake to protect their colony. So they started to form together, just trying to help protect each other. Every town across the colonies has its own militia, but now they're preparing to defend themselves against the British Army. Better than yesterday, better than yesterday. For six generations across Massachusetts, men are expected to serve as militiamen. In Massachusetts, 1/3 of all men between 16 and 50 are ready to bear arms at a minute's notice. Excellent, good shot. We keep this up, we're gonna give those redcoats a scare, all right? The British will not stand for any armed resistance.

April 19, 1775. After midnight, 900 redcoats leave their barracks in Boston for Lexington and Concord, about 20 miles away. Their orders: Arrest the rebel leaders and seize their weapons. News of the British attack also reaches Paul Revere. His midnight ride will alert local militias. Revere rides ahead of the British troops. His warning spreads from town to town, across the New England countryside. Paul Revere reaches Lexington... in time to spread the word. The British are coming. We need to warn the militia. Get 'em together. Come on! By five in the morning, 60 militiamen line up. They're commanded by a farmer, John Parker. They're faced off against hundreds of well-armed and highly experienced British soldiers. What happens next will transform the world forever.

Sunrise, April 19, 1775. On one side 60 men, poorly armed and barely trained. On the other, hundreds of the most powerful army in the world. Men who have only been active for a handful of months, An army that in the past 20 years has fought on five continents and defeated everything in its path. For these Rebels, the fight is for nothing less than freedom itself. These guys were revolutionaries, they were scallywags, they were rebels, some of them were gentlemen farmers, some of them were overeducated, some of them were undereducated. It really was the birth of a nation. The Lexington Militia gathers on the village common. Dairy farmers and shopkeepers. But also among them are free African-Americans and slaves.

It is a unique experience that African-Americans have had in the military in America. African-Americans fought for the country, even before it was a country. African-Americans like Prince Estabrook. Give me training. You give me a weapon, and I can perform as well as you can. Then there's no power on Earth that's gonna hold me down forever. Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon. But if we mean to have war, let it begin here. Captain John Parker once fought on the side of the British. 1/4 of the men standing at his side are related to him. No one knows who fires the first shot at Lexington...but it's the shot heard 'round the world. I mean, the redcoats, that's intimidating, the way they move, the way they march, the way they execute on that open space. I imagine, on some level, for the guy who works the printing press, this is overwhelming beyond anything you could possibly articulate in words.

Fire! Prince Estabrook is hit in the first volley. No army in the world can stand toe-to-toe with the British, let alone a ragtag militia. Fire! The British fired up to four times the rate of the militia. Within minutes of the first shots fired at Lexington, eight Patriots are dead, ten wounded. The American Revolution has begun. The redcoats reach Concord at 9:00 in the morning. Acting on a tipoff from colonists loyal to the crown, they raid the militia's arms stash. But the Rebels have got there first...hiding almost everything.

That's good, we don't have all day, let's go, come on. They continue to search for weapons, giving the Patriots more time to spread the word. The militia gathers just outside the town of Concord. By late morning, more than 1,000 have arrived from the surrounding villages. Their plan, to defend their towns against the British. Let's go! The British soldiers left their barracks 15 hours ago. And now they face a 20-mile march back to Boston. The Shattered lives...an occupied city...blood in the streets of Boston...and now Lexington. A people unified in the fight against tyranny. Now the Patriots have their chance. Gunsmith and militia leader Isaac Davis takes a bullet through the heart. The Patriots seize the upper hand and intend to make the British soldiers pay. They shadow the redcoats' march, firing on them the entire way. A third are killed or wounded. Seven generations after the first settlers left England, in search of prosperity and freedom, their descendants will have to fight for these rights. Standing in their way is the might of the world's greatest military superpower. And they're not about to give up their colonies lightly.

A ragtag bunch of rebels faces the greatest military superpower of the day. It's a war they never should have won. This is the secret history of how they did it---daring, leadership, new ways of fighting and true American grit.

Episode Two Revolution New York City. Gateway to North America. Today the financial capital of the world. Population: Eight Million people. In 1776, this is a city of just 20,000. It will soon become the battleground for the biggest land invasion in American history.

Three miles from Wall Street, where 23rd Street crosses Lexington Avenue today the Rebels dig in to defend New York at Kips Bay. Commander of the Rebel Army is General George Washington. He has already driven the British out of Boston. A surprise victory against superior forces. But they'll be back.

The hour is fast approaching on which the honor and success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding country depend. Joseph Plumb Martin enlisted in the Rebel forces at 15 inspired to fight under Washington's command. A farm boy, he joins thousands of untrained volunteers. Our Revolutionary Army was quite something. It was-- in a nation that wasn't really a nation yet, just starting out, and we took on the greatest superpower of the time. Washington's ragtag troops are about to face the best-equipped and most powerful fighting force in the world.

June 29th. 45 British warships mass off Staten Island. Bearing down on New York City, the ultimate war machine of its day, the British ship-of-the-line. Each ship is made from over 2,000 century-old trees. Each carries hundreds more soldiers to the fight against the colonies. And each is armed with up to 64 heavy cannons capable of hurling a 24- pound cannonball at the speed of sound, delivering it to targets over a mile away. One ship-of-the-line costs the equivalent of a modern aircraft carrier. Another 350 British ships are racing across the Atlantic to join them. The British want to terrify the Rebels into submission. Instead, they inspire them to resist. On July 2nd, there's a crisis meeting in Philadelphia. 50 delegates elected to the Continental Congress from the 13 colonies hold an emergency session. They include radicals like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. What they're debating is nothing less than high treason--total independence from Britain. The penalty is death. We are in the midst of a revolution, the most complete in the history of the world. It's the birth of American democracy. We have to expect a great expanse of blood to obtain it. Some don't believe the Rebels stand a chance. We are about to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper. But the doubters are outnumbered nearly five to one.

On July 4, 1776, the delegates ratify a document that will change the world, the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Now think about that. They're saying that your rights come not from the king, not from the government, your rights come from God and furthermore, they can't be taken away from you. They're unalienable. Every group: blacks, women, gays--everybody looks to the Declaration as a way of saying we are Americans, too. So the Declaration is the American creed. that among these are "Life"，"Liberty" and "the pursuit of Happiness." You cannot help but be stirred when you read those words. And you feel the excitement of being on the cusp of something so profound. We can be free. Now soldiers like Plumb Martin have something worth fighting for.

On July 12th, two British warships open fire on New York City. It must have been quite a shock because New York, up to that point, was pretty quiet city. It was a business city. So you had significant support for the Rebels but also significant support for the people who were still loyal to the king. A month later, Joseph Reed, secretary to George Washington, tracks the British fleet massing off New York. Over 400 ships, the largest British Naval task force until D-day. 32,000 British troops prepare to storm Manhattan Island. They outnumber Patriot forces two to one. Just five of the biggest British ships carry more firepower than all the Patriot guns in the city. Reed is awed by the sight. When I look down and see the prodigious fleet they have collected, I cannot help being astonished that a people should come 3,000 miles at such risk, trouble and expense to rob, plunder and destroy another people because they will not lay their lives and fortune at their feet. It's the biggest attack on New York City until September 11, 2001. But the Rebels will stand and fight. The difference for me was that the British Army was fighting for a king and the Americans were fighting for their lives.

Plumb Martin is one of 500 men standing guard at Kips Bay. Have a look. The first thing that saluted our eyes was all four ships at anchor within musket shot of us. "The Phoenix". I could read her name as distinctly as though I was directly underneath her stern.Pull out your gun! The assault begins.

September 1776. New York is under fire. In one hour...2,500 British cannonballs smash the Rebel defenses at Kips Bay. 4,000 British troops storm Manhattan. Tough and battle-hardened, a British redcoat has six times more combat experience than a Patriot Army recruit. Get back in your lines! Washington watches his army collapse. Hold the line, men! They retreat along an ancient Native American path that will later be known as Broadway.

September 20th. New York, now in British hands, burns. No one knows who starts the fire... but over two days it destroys a quarter of the city. It gives you a sense of the people who wanted to be free, how much they were willing to endure. The city being burned, the city being occupied. Gives you a sense of how much they wanted freedom. More than 3,000 Patriot POWs are thrown into prison ships in New York Harbor. The most notorious is the HMS Jersey, nicknamed "Hell." One prisoner, Robert Sheffield, escaped to tell the tale. The air was so foul that at times a lamp could not be kept burning, by reason of which the bodies were not missed until they had been dead ten days. Nine in ten prisoners die. There is a memorial over in Brooklyn to those that died on British prison ships in New York Harbor. Thousands of Americans. Over the course of the war, 12,000 Patriot POWs will die in the prison ships, three times more than are killed in battle.

The loss of New York is Washington's first defeat as commander in chief. The overwhelming British force crushes the Rebel Army. Washington's only hope now rests hundreds of miles inland, with men the British know nothing about. A new type of soldier with new weapons...and new rules of war. Let's go kill us some redcoats.

By June, a new British Army of 8,000 men heads south from loyalist Canada. Its objective: Kill off the American Revolution once and for all. They're led by General John Burgoyne. An aristocrat, politician, and art lover, he's also one of the best cavalry officers in the British military. Burgoyne pushes south, following the Hudson River. His army is like a mobile city. The redcoats are accompanied by 2,000 servants, wives, and mistresses. 200 supply wagons carry 84 tons of powder and shot, as well as silver and porcelain tableware for the officers' meals. Burgoyne's plan is simple. He's traveling from St. John's in Canada 170 miles south to Saratoga, deep in the interior of the New York Colony. Then, he'll link up with the victorious British Army in New York City, cutting the colonies into two parts. But the American frontier becomes the British Army's worst enemy. The problem is they're in what we might call a counter insurgency kind of campaign, where their passage through the land and the offense that they give to farmers creates enemies wherever they go.

Now Washington unleashes revolutionary new tactics and a totally new type of soldier. Men who learned their skills on the frontier. So this army came together--an army of militia, an army of woodsmen, an army of sharpshooters, and we didn't play by the rules. British redcoats are trained for open battlefields. Now they face Rebel sharpshooters hidden in dense cover. Leading them, Daniel Morgan. Hard drinker, gambler, brawler. And now the colonel of an elite corps of 500 riflemen. He was a self-made man and he was a-- although not educated at a great school--was a smart guy, was a tough guy, and was ready and willing to step up when the time called. He was the perfect guy to show up at the perfect time.

Burgoyne's route takes him through dense forest over five times larger than all of England. Trees once intended to build British ships...now become Rebel roadblocks. The British are sitting ducks. Their advance slows to just a mile a day. The march south becomes a six-week nightmare. The sharpshooters know the land...and have technology on their side. Morgan's men are armed with American long rifles. They're light weight, with a slender barrel at least 40 inches long and fire a 50-caliber shot a half-inch wide. Based on a German hunting weapon, the guns have a unique American innovation...grooves inside the barrel that spin the shot, stabilizing it, giving it deadly accuracy. Armed with this rifle, Patriot marksman can hit a target 250 yards away, more than three times the average distance of a modern FBI sniper shot, and twice the range of the British muskets. The tide of the war is about to change.

Morgan's plan: First take out Burgoyne's Native American scouts. 400 have allied themselves with the British to preserve their ancestral lands. But Morgan and his men now use traditional Native American tactics against them. They attack using speed, stealth, and surprise. After months of guerrilla warfare, all the scouts are dead or desert behind enemy lines. Any knowledge the redcoats had of the terrain goes with them. The Rebels are rewriting the rules of war, and they're about to do it again.

1777.The American War of Independence is in its second year. New York and many parts of the colonies are in British hands. The Rebels have been driven into the wilderness. But the fight back has begun. Patriot sharpshooters target a British Army under General John Burgoyne. They've already picked off Burgoyne's Native American guides. Now the two armies meet near Saratoga.

Here the Rebels break the rules of 18th-century warfare and start targeting British officers. The plan: Leave the foot soldiers leaderless. Your officers tended to be your most educated guy. They understood the communications line, they understood exactly what the orders were. They were the source of trying to get something done on a battle space. In Britain's 53rd regiment, all but one of its 11 officers are killed or wounded. The tactic of assassinating officers appalls the British. On the defensive, the British regroup under General Simon Fraser. He brings fresh spirit to the beleaguered British Army. Daniel Morgan, commander of the sharpshooters, acts fast. Shimmy on up that tree and take out the redcoat on his high horse. His best shooter is an illiterate frontiersman from Ireland, Tim Murphy. This shot will turn the tide of the war. The first shot misses. This left. The second skims his horse. Too high! Reload! Come on, take him out! The third hits home. You could argue that whoever fired the bullet that took out Simon Fraser did as much as any Founding Father to establish American independence. Without leadership, the British lose 1,000 men. Twice as many as the Patriots.

On October 17, 1777, General Burgoyne surrenders. It's a turning point. The victory persuades Britain's greatest rival, France, to join the war on America's side. Now the French Navy will force the British to fight a war on two fronts, land and sea. But first, Washington must face his greatest challenge as leader. He makes his winter camp in Pennsylvania at a place called Valley Forge. In freezing temperatures, the Rebels build 900 huts in just 40 days. Each houses a dozen men. He has an army of 14,000 men and no houses, and the Continental Congress has failed to provide him with resources, and by will power, by courage, by leadership, by cajoling, he has to hold the army together in the middle of a terrible winter. Joseph Plumb Martin, veteran of The Battle of New York, is at Valley Forge. It's a desolate place. We are now in a truly forlorn condition. No clothing, no provisions and as disheartened as can be. Our prospect is indeed dreary.

All right, soldier. This is gonna hurt a bit, all right? You just grit your teeth. Surgeon Albigence Waldo watches Washington's army head toward crisis. The army, which has been surprisingly healthy, now begins to grow sickly from the fatigues they have suffered from this campaign. If we don't keep this clean, you're gonna be right back in here. 1/5 of the soldiers have no shoes. With little clean water, dysentery spreads through the camp. Within weeks, 2,000 men are sick and they run out of meat. Down to their last 25 barrels of flour, the men survive on "fire cake" a mixture of flour and water.

The Rebel Army is a melting pot. As many as 60% of recruits are convicts, freed slaves and immigrants. But Washington's leadership inspires unruly men to stay in line. What he had was a confidence that if you want freedom, this is what it's gonna take. It's gonna take sacrifice, it's gonna take blood. It's gonna take cold winters at Valley Forge.

It's gonna take losses. General Washington, he was a great general, to be able to up lift his army during Valley Forge during that winter and still be able to fight. I wish I would have been there, I wish I could have fought for him because I damn sure would have. But Washington's army soon faces an enemy far more lethal than the British. Smallpox.

The revolution breaks out during the worst smallpox epidemic in US history. The deadly airborne virus spreads through the British prison ships. Isolated from the disease for generations, the American colonists have little resistance to it and there's no cure. Victims break out in blisters and sores. The virus spreads through the blood, invading healthy cells, which it kills, producing more of the virus in the process. Four in ten victims die. once smallpox arrives at Valley Forge, it spreads through the cramped huts like wildfire. Washington survived smallpox as a child. Now he decides to take a gamble...with one of the most daring experiments in US military history. Surgeons have learned about inoculation from African slaves. They harvest pus from a smallpox victim...and smear the live virus into cuts on the skin of a healthy patient. The inoculation spreads the infection, but at a slower rate. A week after exposure, the victim's white blood cells create antibodies. These attack and kill the virus that causes smallpox before the disease can spread. But it's a dangerous race against time. To survive, the patient's immune system has to work faster than the virus, or it will run out of control. One in 50 of those inoculated will die. But Washington's gamble pays off. New cases of smallpox fall from several thousand to just a few dozen. But to win the war against the British, Washington turns to an unlikely hero who will transform his ragtag militia into a formidable fighting machine.

1778. George Washington's Patriot Army survives a hard winter and an outbreak of smallpox at Valley Forge. Now Washington introduces a new recruit who will change the course of the war. Baron von Steuben is an ex-Prussian Army officer, an elite soldier whose career is said to have been ruined by his homosexuality. But Washington makes him one of the most powerful men in his command. Washington was a genius in taking people in who didn't seem like they could achieve great things, but under him, they rose to the challenge, they rose to the occasion. And that's what great leaders do.

Von Steuben's task: Reinvent the demoralized Patriot Army so they can take on the British in a close fight. Our arms are in horrible condition, covered with rust. Our men are literally naked, some to the fullest extent of the word. Von Steuben starts by drilling discipline into Washington's ragtag recruits. The men are unlike any he has ever trained before. The genius of this nation is not in the least to be compared with that of the Prussians or Austrians or French. You say to your soldier, "Do this," And he does it. But here, I am obliged to say, "This is the reason why you ought to do that," And then he does it. Von Steuben brings order, discipline and hygiene to Valley Forge. He moves latrines away from living quarters, rebuilds the kitchens on the opposite side of the camp, and organizes housing according to regiments and companies. His biggest contribution, he writes a manual on military training, with methods that are still in use today.

Faster! Von Steuben's drills European battle tactics into an elite corps of 100 men. Up, soldier! Move! Each will train 100 more. He also teaches them a new and deadly weapon...the bayonet. Bayonet fighting will prove pivotal in the battles ahead. Bayonets allow rifles to double as spears, making close hand-to-hand combat possible without reloading. But it's not just new weapons and skills Von Steuben gives the Patriots, it's a new attitude. You know, we can talk about weapons and how certain weapons change the face of warfare, which is absolutely true, but the greatest weapon that you can ever have is right up here. Men like Plumb Martin leave Valley Forge highly skilled killers. While they retrain, another secret war has been raging in British-occupied New York.

Here, a network of spies has been busy passing information to the Rebels. Their leader is George Washington himself. A man who's come down to us in history as someone who is incapable of telling a lie, succeeds as a commander in no small measure because of his capacity for deception.

A British general will later claim that Washington did not outfight his enemies, but out-spy them. Now his French allies come under deadly threat, and only his secret army of spies can save them from disaster.

In New York, an estimated 20% of the population is still loyal to the British. Food costs are up 8%. One young woman in five is a prostitute. To the British, New York merchant Robert Townsend is a loyalist. A member of the loyalist militia, he writes for the loyalist press. But to Washington's spy network, his code name is "Culper Jr.," a fact that was only discovered in 1939. Culper's gang will change the course of the war.

By July 1781, New York is buzzing with rumor. A French fleet has been sighted off Rhode Island. News leaks out that the British plan to send warships from New York for a surprise attack. Culper must get word to Washington to somehow stop the British fleet. The spies use invisible ink. An advanced formula unknown to the British, the ink is made from gallic acid. It can only be revealed by brushing the paper in liquid iron sulfate.

The next link in the chain is Austin Roe, a tavern owner from Long Island. His contact, Abraham Woodhull, picks up the message and buries it at a secret drop. Another agent, Ann Smith Strong, then uses her laundry as a secret code. It signals a sailor who picks up the message and takes it to Washington. Washington moves troops towards New York, threatening the city, forcing the British fleet to stay put in New York Harbor. The French fleet sails out of danger. It will play a critical role in the next stage of the war. Now, with a spy network and a modern army backed by French naval power, Washington is ready for a final showdown. Come on!

October 1781. Six years into a war the British thought would last six months, the American Revolution comes to a head at Yorktown, Virginia. In trenches around the fortified city, Plumb Martin, now a sergeant, waits with 8,000 other Patriot soldiers for the signal to attack. Washington's army has reinvented itself...with sharpshooters...Left! with training, discipline and new weapons...and with a spy network that has saved the French fleet, giving the Rebels dominance at sea. What remains of the British Army is under siege in Yorktown. Trapped in the city, the redcoats wait for reinforcements, but back in Britain, the war is unpopular and costing far too much money. This is a case of hanging on in the face of the-- the British actions long enough to where the British literally would grow weary of this and realize that it was endless.

This is Washington's chance to end the war with one decisive blow. He committed to this idea of being able to stand on your own. See, America is a dream, and the only way to go get that dream is to show up and bring your very best to that moment and not stop until you bring that dream into existence.

Plumb Martin will be one of the first over the top. Godspeed. How are you doing, my friend? Good, how are you? I better check it out. Behind Yorktown's defenses, 9,000 battle-hardened British troops are waiting. They're protected by a series of outlying cannon forts called redoubts. By October 14th, just two remain. If they're captured and their guns turned on Yorktown, the British will be forced to surrender.

How's it look up there? It's time. All the batteries in our line lay silent. We lay anxiously waiting for the signal...Patriots race 100 yards to the British lines under fire and a hail of hand grenades. Come on! Come on! A force of 400 break through and storm the British fort. Fighting in close combat with bayonets, they beat the redcoats back. Immediately after the fighting had ceased, I went out to see what had become of my wounded friend. He was dead. 34 of Martin's comrades lie dead or wounded...but they've breached Yorktown's defenses. Two days later, the British surrender and begin negotiations for peace. For the past six years, leadership...training, weapons and intelligence have been vital. The Rebels have achieved the impossible. The United States is the only country to win independence from the British in war.

On April 30, 1789, Washington is inaugurated first president of the United States of America under the new constitution. But liberty comes at a price. Over 25,000 men have lost their lives in the battle for independence...but a new nation is born. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty...and the pursuit of Happiness.

A new country heads west, with new heroes and a new enemy...the American wilderness. The pioneers face incredible hardship...but their battles forge the American character and build the new American nation. We are pioneers...and trailblazers. We fight... for freedom. We transform our dreams into the truth. Our struggles... will become a nation.

Episode Three Westward 300 million years BC. A meteorite the size of Central Park hurtles towards Earth. With the force of 100,000 atomic bombs, it smashes into the Appalachian Mountains. The Cumberland Gap. When America passes through this gateway and conquers what lies beyond, a colony will become a continent. I think Americans have always been-- have been pioneers. We're a nation of adventurers and explorers. We are always moving forward and we're always dealing with problems, not ignoring them.

1775. Land west of the Cumberland Gap belongs to a patchwork of foreign superpowers: Britain, France, Spain. The rest occupied by hundreds of Native American tribes. 3,000 miles of fertile land. Millions of acres for anyone who can conquer it. Riches, too. Thousands of tons of gold and silver. But this land is also brutal wilderness. Conquering it requires extraordinary people.

March 1775. Daniel Boone: woodsman, hunter, freedom fighter, explorer...dreamer. Okay, men, keep clearing. Cut it through, we're coming through here. Boone and his 30 men slash through the Cumberland Gap...on a mission to tap the riches. Cut it through, we're coming through here. Before us lay the finest body of land in the world, with which little exertion we can call our own. One day thousands will desire this land, and we will be rich. But Boone's journey into the western wilderness is also a journey into the American Soul. The frontier is a crucible, where America will define itself and forge its true character. The King of England has outlawed any Western expansion, illegal settlers rounded up and punished. Boone's already fought the British back East. Now he's defying them again. Daniel Boone was that first great action hero for America. America wanted to see itself that way, I think. They wanted to see themselves as fiercely independent, very capable and...and willing to go places most human beings wouldn't have gone.

Come on, men, this way. Boone and his men take no supplies. Come on, come on! Survival conjured from the land. Bear grease: insect repellent Wasp larvae: Food. Come on, come on! Boone records in his journal. We are exposed daily to peril and death amongst savages and wild beasts. But nature satisfies all we need. Few experience the happiness we feel here in the howling wilderness. But for the Shawnee, this is not wilderness. It is home. And they will defend it...at all costs. Good work, John, good work. These areas that seemed like wilderness to the American weren't wilderness to these American-Indian people. That was just their lands. Daniel Boone and the Shawnee have history. Only the year before, they kidnapped his eldest son, James...And tortured him to death.

On the 25th of March, 1775, Boone crosses into Shawnee territory. In the mountains for eight days...People were able to survive on this... with nothing to eat. Go, go! Go, go, run! Rifles, get 'em, come on! Ambushed, Boone must flee. His friend, Captain Twitty, and his slave Sam are both scalped and slaughtered. But Boone pushes on further west. Well, I think more than anything, the American character is perseverance. They persevered, they fought, it wasn't easy against great odds, but they had persevered. Boone's friend and companion Felix Walker writes: He conducted the company through the wilderness with such bravery. Indeed, he appeared void fear with too little caution for the enterprise. 50 of Boone's men die settling in Kentucky.

But within 20 years, 200,000 Americans pour in behind them. We were a burgeoning society. Sunddenly we realized whoa, the owner's manual says, this is all ours, keep going west. Land hunger becomes a fever Even for the government.

1803, 27 years after independence the single biggest real estate deal in history. President Tomas Jefferson buys the vast Louisiana territory from Napoleon. Half a billion acres for 3 cents an acre. Just as the America will one day go to the moon, now a mission into this unknown. Lewis and Clark wanted to see what's on the other side. Given a mountain we want to climb it. We hold those ventures of the past and great admiration.

May 1804, a presidential aid and a junior army officer set out on a mapping expedition. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's journey is about to become one of the most epic tales of survival in American history.

The Rockies: unknown, mythical. Even woolly mammoth are fabled to roam here. Treacherous, too. No one expects the Rockies to be 90 separate mountain ranges, 3,000 miles long. They're caught in a death trap. After two weeks, starvation sets in. They eat any plants they can find. Next, they eat their horses. The expedition is given up as dead. But they survive, and they owe their survival to a 16-year-old Native American girl. Sacagawea of the Shoshone Nation guides them, finds wild food, and saves their precious million-word journals from an overturned canoe.

In 1805, William Clark notes in his journal: Ocean in view! Oh! The joy! They are the first New Americans to reach the Pacific Ocean over land. Lewis and Clark's remarkable expedition discovers 300 species of wildlife, transforming science and agriculture. But their journals record an even greater discovery, one that will forge a whole new breed of American hero.

America. East and West. The pioneering spirit of Americans has busted the continent wide-open. Lewis and Clark's heroic expedition through the Rockies uncovers a route to the West's most valuable commodity...beaver. Their pelts, frontier hard currency. Traded by Native Americans for guns, knives, salt. And they're a high-fashion luxury for the rich. They've been hunted nearly to extinction in Europe. Here they're everywhere. Millions of them. The freezing Rocky Mountain water makes the beaver pelts thicker, warmer, more expensive than other fur. New iron traps from New York foundries make catching them easier. Baited with the beaver's own scent glands, they're drawn to their death.

October 1823. 300 eager trappers roam the Rockies, searching for their fortune. One in five won't make it out alive. Trapping's harsh, hungry work. 6,000 calories a day are needed to survive the extreme conditions--three times what we eat today.

Jedediah Smith is the greatest hunter of all. 24 years old. He walks up to 1,000 miles in the Rockies each year. Traps 600 pelts in a season--three years' pay back East. Smith is a devout Christian. Doesn't drink, doesn't smoke. Bible and gun are constant companion. He's smart, works with the Native Americans. The Crow show him ancient shortcuts, sell him horses, nurse his sick men back to health. Wilderness survival. For millennia, the tribes of North America have adapted themselves to live in any condition, from arid plains to harsh mountain pass. Jed Smith uses their knowledge and his skill to open up the West for vast fur-trapping profits. He'll die a rich man. But today he's not the hunter. He's the hunted. Jed Smith's friend James Clyman writes: The grizzly did not hesitate, springing on the captain, breaking his ribs and cutting his head. This gave us a lesson on the character of the grizzly, which we did not forget. The grizzly bear is the most deadly frontier beast. 100,000 of these terrifying killers are on the prowl. Up to ten feet tall, 1,000 pounds, they don't fear man...yet. Today there are fewer than 2,000 grizzlies in the Rockies. Halfway to death, Jed Smith's right-hand man, James Clyman, stitches his scalp and ear back to his head. I put in my needle, stitching it through and through and over and over, laying the lacerated parts together as nice as I could. There is an amazing sense of confidence as part of that American spirit that doesn't... even think about failing.

Jed Smith pushes on. This is the new character of America: frontier grit, rugged individualism, survival. And something else survives, too. The trails he forges become settler paths, wagon trains, roads and today Interstate 15. And Americans follow the new tracks west in a tidal wave of hope.

May 1846. Thousands of men, women and children. Riding, walking, pushing. They're heading for a new life 2,000 miles away. It was a land of opportunity. You can make of yourself what you want. You're only held back by your own desires. Germans, Belgians, French. Catholics, Presbyterians, Mormons. One of the world's great mass migrations begins. The pioneer spirit has moved on. In this colossal migration to Oregon and California, America will finally define its character. It's the American dream, then as now, the people want an already good life to get better. They can walk ten miles a day for up to six months straight. Some go through ten pairs of boots each. Half are children. On route, one in five of the women are pregnant. But these aren't America's poor. Families sell farms, save for five years to join the exodus, risking it all. I think if there is one episode that encapsulates the American spirit, I think it is probably the Move West.

Whip those mules and horses and cross those rivers and cross over those mountains to the unknown and say, "I'm leaving everything behind. "I'm leaving everything that I know behind to reinvent myself." A wagon and oxen cost minimum $5,000 in today's money. But it buys a complete life-support machine. The wagons carry a precious cargo, 1,000 pounds of supplies and a grubstake for your journey, your entire new life in the West. The pioneering spirit is ingenious. Essential drinking water captured from rain on the wagon canvas. Even the oxen's dung is fuel for fires. And like today, there are tolls. Native Americans charge $10 for road and $100 for river crossings, in modern money. But the greatest toll of all...human lives. In all, 20,000 Americans will die reaching the West. Ten graves for every mile. But one story of suffering and death will show just how far the pioneers will go to conquer the West.

June 1846. A wagon train heads west. Its leader is George Donner. Good luck. Good, now push! Push! His wife, Tamsen Donner, is a school teacher. Yes, okay. But on the trail, women must turn their hands to anything. The Donner Party are halfway across the blistering Wyoming Prairie, miles from the nearest doctor, with barely any water. Good, yes. Okay. I think the women who came across America in the early days, must've been made up of the strongest fiber possible. “It's unimaginable.” Good. Yes.

The new American's mother and father are Philippine and Ludwig Keseberg. They christen their son Louis. The journey is tough... but the going's good. Tamsen Donner writes in her journal: I could never believe we could have traveled so far with so little difficulty. Indeed if we do not experience anything worse, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started. But as leader of the wagon train, Tamsen's husband, George Donner, is aware there's one final obstacle to their journey. The Sierra Nevada. Peaks up to 14,000 feet. Fail to clear the mountain passes before the first snow falls and the consequences are terrifying.

But as the Donner Party approaches Utah, George Donner makes a fateful decision, leading a splinter group off from the main party. He's read one of the many new trail guidebooks, showing a shortcut that claims to shave two weeks off the journey time. Hastings Cutoff is said to be a saving of 400 miles. We are informed it is a fine, level road with plenty of water and grass. But Donner's information is wrong. In fact, the "Shortcut" adds 100 miles to the journey. High in the Sierra Nevada, the Donner Party enters the Truckee Pass. They're only 30 miles from the California plains. But supplies are dangerously low, and traveling through the mountains is taking its toll. A broken axle. The Donner Party stops to make repairs. But that night... 5 feet of snow falls. Soon the drifts are 60 feet deep. The Donner Party will be stranded for five months. In just three weeks, they've eaten all their food. Then they kill their pack animals. Next, they eat charred bones, twigs, bark, leaves, dirt... and worse. Even the wind held its breath as the suggestion was made that were one to die, the rest might live. Cannibalism.

Christmas 1846. They eat their first human. Bodies are cut up, flesh labeled, so people don't eat their own kin. Four rescue parties bring out some survivors. The very last finds Philippine's husband Ludwig, alone. He is surrounded by bones, entrails, and a 2-gallon kettle of human blood. George Donner's body is found, skull split open, his brain removed. Tamsen Donner's body is never found. The pass is renamed the "Donner Pass," testament to the hardship of the pioneers' push west. Today it's the Lincoln Highway. Thousands drive this road every year. But beneath the bones of the Donner Party, the Sierra Nevada conceals a seam of gold. Largest the world has yet seen. Gold fever is about to change the West, and the American character yet again.

March 1836. Texas, the Alamo. The American nation is expanding, growing stronger, bigger. But there's something else out there even bigger, even stronger: Mexico--a superpower. A colossal empire stretching from Oregon to Guatemala. But Texas is disputed territory. The Mexican government has invited American settlers in, but are soon overwhelmed by the flood of pioneers. Americans, by the thousands, were coming into Texas and they were not abiding to the agreements to come in as settlers. And once they out number-- by 1835 Mexicans ten to one in that area, of course the Americans are thinking about independence. The Alamo is where Mexico tries to stem the flood. The shots that killed Davy Crockett and his fellow settlers echoed across America. The women and children are spared, sent back to send the Mexican message, "Don't come." But America hears something else. "Remember the Alamo." A turning point. America will now wage war to go West. Texas is won, California fought and bought. The same month California becomes American, it becomes the nation's greatest prize. Volcanic magma. Over millions of years, in a fault zone beneath the Sierra Nevada, cooling and pressure create quartz. And within the quartz, gold. The seam is one of the densest on the planet. Rocks erode and the riches are released.

1848. Carpenter James Marshall finds a 3-ounce nugget in the California river. Two months' pay in his hand, but billions of dollars beneath his feet. News of Marshall's discovery spreads to every corner of the world. In California, you can taste the American dream: get rich quick. Within a year, 100,000 desperate amateur prospectors flood the Sierra foothills. It was the American dream distilled to its essence. Take yourself and go out and try and make a success of it. A Chinese prospector's 100-ounce strike in the Yuba River. $26,000 made by a single Irishman in just four days. A $200,000 super seam mined by 12 Mexicans at Bear Valley. In the port of San Francisco, a plot of land worth $16 before the gold strike now changes hands for $45,000. In two years, the population of California explodes from 15,000 to 100,000. Now, hand-panning is replaced by lines of sluice boxes desperately combing for anything the first prospectors missed. And the price of living rocket. Picks, pans, shovels go from a few cents to $10 a piece. Breakfast costs ten times what it does back East. But still the people come. 200 abandoned ships in San Francisco harbor, the crews deserting, rushing for the hills. He's traveled 6,000 miles. He's spent all his money. Now he travels by foot.

Belgian Jean-Nicolas Perlot writes: We crossed 200 miles of wilderness full of Indians, bears, panthers, wildcats, snakes of every kind. The first thing he finds isn't gold. It's graves. 200 of them. Prospectors cut off by rains in the foothills, starved to death. Approaching, we realized animals of some kind had dug up the bodies. I read a note attached to one of the graves. "God has willed that civilization should begin in this place, With this duty which a man owes to his kind. Bury the dead."

Perlot does find gold, but never in the quantities that he'd dreamed. As the gold fields are picked clean, tensions rise, times get tougher. After just five years, the Gold Rush is over. I think that there is that Western mentality of prospecting-- try and fail, try and fail, and the fact that you tried is worthy in and of itself. Of 300,000 who rush to find gold, less than one out of 100 struck it rich. But fortunes were made by the merchants and landowners who supplied the miners. From dirt and dreams came the great cities of California. Both the West and the American character that built it are settled. Now this new powerhouse will face another revolution.

October 1818. A nine-year-old boy comforts his mother as she lies on her deathbed. Milk sickness kills thousands of pioneers every year. The cause: White Snakeroot eaten by cattle, the deadly poison passed in milk to humans. At 18, the boy becomes a man, but he has been working like a man for years, battling for existence in this harsh environment. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up. I had an ax in my hand from my eighth to my 20th year. This is the life of American settler stock. The young man's grandfather followed Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road into Kentucky. His father pushed further into the primeval forests of Indiana. Settler families of ten or more live in log cabins built from scratch. Single roomed, basic. The trailer homes of the day. The wilderness provides everything. They make their own rakes, forks, shovels, build their own furniture. And they bury their dead. In bad years, malaria kills one in eight of the settlers. Life expectancy is half of what it is today. But from adversity comes strength. This settler's name is Abraham.

If you work hard, you can do anything you wanna do. The possibilities are endless. To me, that was the American dream, as a kid. Lincoln's family and thousands like theirs have settled the West in four generations. President Thomas Jefferson thought it would take 1,000. The forests are cleared: five acres a family, a year. In 1800, 23 million acres of Indiana is wilderness. In 60 years, it's tamed, flat, fertile farmland. But there is more than forest to clear. It's always been one of the deep flaws of the American imagination, that they can't imagine a future for American-Indian people as Americans. American-Indian people have to imagine that for themselves, and that's the hard part. Keep walking.

1830. Frontier president Andrew Jackson declares a new policy, a policy that America will maintain for more than 100 years. The forced relocation of American tribal people onto reservations. You, keep moving! After years of Supreme Court battles, the bill passes Congress by a single vote. Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, all forced off their nations by the point of a bayonet. An episode in the conquest of the West that even some of the soldiers taking part find shameful. US Army Private John G. Burnett writes: The sufferings of the Cherokee were awful. The trail of the exiles was a trail of death. They slept in the wagons and on the ground without fire. I saw as many as 20 die in a single night of pneumonia, cold exposure. Move along.

The march of 1,000 miles becomes the Trail of Tears. It's a shameful act in American history and it's, in its own way, sort of an iconic act because it really symbolizes what happened to the Native Americans. The West is open for business, but key to the transformation of the region is a river 2,000 miles in length, fed by rainfall from 31 states. Running from Minnesota to New Orleans, the Mighty Mississippi. It's a lifeline connecting the West to the outside world. If roads exist, they're muddy tracks. This is the only trade artery, the interstate, that allows the pioneers and settlers to sell the produce they've sweated over. A huge amount of goods are shipped out, but they're shipped out in the most nickel-and-dime way. A farmer will build a flatboat, fill it up with hogs, sassafras root, ginseng root, tobacco whatever it is you grow--put it on the flatboat, use the power of the Mississippi to drift you down to sell them along the riverbank.

Aged 19, Abraham Lincoln makes his first trip down the Mississippi, poling his simple raft. The current is too strong to return upstream. The primitive flatboats are simply sold as lumber in New Orleans. Farmers have to walk the 800 miles home and begin again. But on that first journey, Lincoln sees the future. A new invention which will transform the Mississippi, the Midwest, and America.

The steamboat was the 19th century's time machine, just as surely as the airplane was the 20th century's time machine. It shrunk distance. By shrinking distance, it enabled commerce. Even upstream, steamboats can travel 50 miles a day, eight times faster, eight times the cargo of a raft. But they're deadly. Over half the early models explode, maiming and killing hundreds. But their number triples every decade. They make the Midwest America's economic powerhouse. Within 20 years, St. Louis alone swells from a few hundred to a population of 16,000. Over four generations, America has grown from a 100-mile-wide strip of colonies on the Eastern Seaboard to a continental powerhouse.

America is exploding across the continent. The economy is booming. Cotton in the South... industry in the North. But the new nation is divided. In the land where all men are created equal... 4 million black Americans live as slaves. And it's tearing the nation apart. We are pioneers... and trailblazers. We fight... for freedom. We transform our dreams into the truth. Our struggles... will become a nation.

Episode Four Division

1825. All over the world, the modern era is being born. It's the Industrial Revolution. America is racing to catch up. In upstate New York, a man-made river is cutting through the wilderness. The Erie Canal is the biggest construction project in the Western world in the last 4,000 years. Over 300 miles long, dug entirely by hand, and America lacks a single qualified engineer. The United States of America isn't about to let nature stand in its way.

I think of the spirit of America being imagination combined with tenacity. There's a strong work ethic, a wonderful freedom of creation, combined with the mental muscle and physical labor. So to me, it represents the best of the human spirit. But the land doesn't always cooperate. A wall of solid limestone 60 feet high. Just 30 miles from the finish line, Lake Erie. The canal will change everything, linking the Atlantic Ocean to the whole middle of America. It changes where people live, and why, and turns the North into a global economic powerhouse. The man behind the canal is New York's gung-ho governor, Dewitt Clinton.

Born to wealth, he won't take no for an answer. He wants to be president. Instead, he runs New York for 20 years. America was blessed with many inspirational leaders, and I think Dewitt Clinton had a real sense of how important new York could be for America. Clinton's vision: to make New York rich. Politically, the canal is a huge gamble. It's savaged in the press as dangerous and too expensive. They call it "Clinton's big ditch." But it will change New York forever.

It is a work more stupendous, more magnificent, and more beneficial than has hither to been achieved by the human race. Entrepreneurship is about doing things when you don't know what it's gonna look like, you don't know what it's gonna be made of, you just have this instinct that you can do it and it'll work. Those guys had visions and did it. 50,000 men. 11 million cubic yards of rock. Enough to fill the Rose Bowl 26,000 times. Crews are filled with Irish immigrants. David Gilroy makes five times what he can earn back home, but it's hazardous work. They're literally moving mountains, and there's only one way through-- gunpowder. A highly combustible mix of nitrate, charcoal and sulfur. The wrong proportions can be lethal. There's only one job that's more dangerous than lighting the fuse... going back to relight it.

To cope, workers drink. Whiskey calms the nerves-- and clouds the brain. An English tourist can't believe they're mixing alcohol and explosives. The Irish laborers grew so reckless of life, that at the signal for blasting, they would just hold their shovels over their heads. I think when you're brought up in America, you're brought up on the history of hard work. There are so many immigrants that have died to build this country. That's in our bloodstream, that's in our DNA as Americans. We don't want their lives to go in vain. Because of that, we usually work harder than anybody else. Eight years of digging. Nearly a thousand lives lost. $7 million, more than 100 million today. The Erie Canal opens in 1825, a miracle of engineering, connecting East and Midwest. It's an instant economic superhighway. $15 million of goods a year flow along the canal. Villages along the canal boom into dynamic cities-- Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester.

Goods crash in price, up to 95%. A frontier that had to be self-sufficient can now buy anything they want. Prosperity is on the move. New York City becomes a boomtown. Wall Street takes off as a global financial center. The city quadruples in size... and surpasses New Orleans as the nation's number-one port. There's so much money around, the word "Millionaire" is invented in 1840. The Erie Canal still shapes New York today. 80% of the upstate population still lives within 25 miles of it. Hundreds of miles to the south, a small plant is creating another economic boom. Cotton. But this one will eventually tear the nation apart. Cotton is native to tropical regions, making the Southern states of the US a perfect breeding ground. The valued part is the soft fiber which grows tightly around the shrub's sticky seeds. There are 30 species worldwide. Growing it is no problem, but processing the fiber before it can be spun into cloth is labor-intensive. Especially, separating the seeds. For years, it could only be done by hand. One pound took an entire day.

A simple patent filed on March 4, 1794, changes all that. The cotton gin. It automates the process and deeply divides the country. The cotton gin transformed not only America, but the world. The concept of mass production using a machine just exploded everywhere. One man can now process 50 times more cotton. Output skyrockets all over the South. In 1830, America is producing half the world's cotton. By 1850, it's nearly 3/4. Called white gold, cotton supports a new lavish lifestyle in the South. By 1850, there are more millionaires per capita in Natchez, Mississippi, than anywhere else on Earth. The richest man in town owns 40,000 acres, nearly three times the size of Manhattan Island.

The South is thriving on the backs of humans owning other humans. It's called slavery. The North is implicated in the South's success. The industrial North is profiting from Southern cotton, but turns a blind eye to slavery. Many of them slave owners themselves, the Founding Fathers assumed slavery would soon disappear. Slavery has already been abolished for 20 years in Britain and is outlawed across most of Europe. But with the cotton explosion, slavery becomes critical to the Southern economy. Each slave is now 50 times more profitable. A slave who sold for $300 before the cotton gin goes for nearly 2,000 by 1860. People don't really realize this, but slavery was actually on the decline in the South prior to the invention of the cotton gin, but then once the cotton gin made it so practical to grow cotton, all of a sudden, every farmer in the South wanted to plant as much cotton as possible. But overproduction is destroying the land. Cotton heads west in search of fertile soil, bringing slavery with it. But antislavery forces in the North want to keep the frontier free. The stage is set for the first battles in the war over slavery.

Cotton is changing the way Americans live. In time, it will blow the nation apart. For the South, cotton is a gold mine. Now the North wants a piece of the action. It's a partnership that makes everyone rich, based on a new machine, the power loom. Raw cotton comes in, finished cloth goes out. All under one roof. The modern factory is born. Lowell, Massachusetts, is called the city of spindles, a textiles boomtown. Population explodes from 200 in 1820 to nearly 20,000 in just 15 years. More than a third of the town works in the mills. 85% are single women between 15 and 25.

Harriet Robinson is ten. When her father dies, she goes to work at the mill. I can see myself now, racing down the alley, between the spinning frames, carrying in front of me a bobbin box bigger than I was. Women earn money for the first time. Harriet's wages help support her family. Industrialization is changing everyone's lives. All the mill girls make good use of their money. The mortgage is lifted from the homestead, the farmhouse is painted. Mill girls help maintain widowed mothers and drunken or invalid fathers. We were paid $2 a week. Oh, how proud I was when it came to my turn to stand up on the bobbin-box. When women really joined the workforce in the cotton mills and the thread factories, I think it gave women an opportunity to get out, be serious about being bread winners. And it changed the whole fabric of America.

The mills also revolutionize how Americans dress. Mass production of cheap cotton fabrics spawns America's clothing industry. Previously, most families made their own clothes. Now, people buy ready-to-wear. Eastern fashions replace buckskin. By 1850, men's clothing is the largest manufacturing industry in New York City. For me, what makes me proudest to be an American is that American spirit of productivity, optimism, this idea that the world doesn't have to be doom and gloom, that we can use technology to make our lives better. Fashion isn't the only innovation to come out of the mills. Technology developed here will lead straight to Silicon Valley. Looms pioneer punch cards to produce patterned fabric. Each hole in the card tells the loom to use a different-colored thread, a yes-no decision. It's binary code, the basis of all modern computers. The birth of the computer and Internet began in cotton mills with these looms. You know, in every major development, I think, in the history of America, technology has been at the center of it.

Despite 12-hour shifts, the factories offer a new world of opportunity for women. They are reading more, talking more, educating themselves. Yeah, reading books on factory time was against the rules, but we hid books in apron pockets and waste baskets. Sometimes we pasted poems on our looms to memorize. And for the first time in America, their voices are heard.

October 1836. Women from the Lowell Mills gather after work and organize. Their protest against wage cuts is one of the first strikes in US history. And they will win. The mill boss is back down. A generation of young women go on to become teachers, writers and even college graduates. Harriet Robinson will become a leading suffragette, and testify before Congress. They're the first wave in a movement that results in women getting the vote. Their secret meetings at night are only possible with the light from lamps powered by an extraordinary creature. Whale oil opened up the night, and like so many really transformative technological innovations, it expanded human freedom. It created a way for people to get more, do more and achieve more. Crude oil won't be discovered for another 20 years. Until then, America runs on whale oil.

The whaling industry helped invent part of the Industrial Revolution and the classic American workaholic work-round- the-clock kind of environment, where if you have more light to keep you going in those dark winter days, you could get more done, you could make more money, and you could kind of drive the economy forward.

Whales are among the largest creatures to ever live on Earth. Up to 180 tons and more than 100 feet long. A single whale can produce up to 3,000 gallons of oil. Even today, whale oil is used by NASA. The Hubble space telescope runs on it.

Whaling is one of the North's biggest industries, bringing in $11 million a year. But the human cost is also high. Half of all ships will eventually be lost at sea. Few men are willing to take the risk. But it's an opportunity for African- Americans. 20,000 freemen and escaped slaves take to the seas. John Thompson is a runaway from Maryland. I have a family in Philadelphia. But fearing to remain there any longer, I thought I would go on a whaling voyage where I stood least chance of being arrested by slave hunters.

The equal opportunity offered in whaling is ahead of its time. Here, a colored man is only known and looked upon as a man and is promoted in rank according to his ability and skill to perform the same duties as a white man. The whaling industry offered an ex-slave like John Thompson the possibility of socialand economic fluidity, mobility and acceptance in a way. Even in the North, that was not possible for black people otherwise.

The man on the lookout cried out, "There she blows!" There were four whales in sight, not more than 3/4 of a mile distant. It takes hours to kill them. They use state-of-the-art harpoons invented by runaway slave Lewis Temple. The whale can only be killed by lancing him under the fin, which is a work of much skill and practice. A monster, terrible in his fury, able to shiver the boat in atoms by one stroke of his tail. And yet even the dangers at sea are preferable to the horror of life as a slave. Punishment is savage for those who risk escape, but some will do anything to be free.

1841, New Orleans. Ground zero for the slave trade. It's auction day. The day every slave fears the most. In the first half of the 19th century, over half a million slaves are sold at auction. It's a business worth $2 billion to the Southern economy. Since the cotton boom, the value of slaves has skyrocketed. Now men cost $1,000. Women, 800. Children, 500.

Solomon Northup, an educated freeman from the North, was kidnapped into slavery. You, come over here. He would make us hold up our heads, walk us briskly back and forth, while customers would feel our hands and arms and bodies, make us open up our mouths and show our teeth, precisely as a jockey examines a horse, which he is about to barter for or purchase. Scars upon a slave's back were considered evidence of a rebellious or unruly spirit, and hurt his sale. Take your top off. 90% of all African-Americans are slaves, 4 million men, women and children.

We had based this country on everyone having inalienable rights to freedom and equality, and yet we created a system of abject persecution. Slaves are fattened for auction, like livestock. Dark-skinned men are bought for the fields, light-skinned women for the house. Traders lie about their ages, even dye a slave's gray hairs. For the plantation owners, it was like just going to your local supermarket to get sugar or flour. They had become so desensitized to the humanity of the slave that they did not see them as human beings. Buyers demand the most fertile slaves for breeding. The most expensive are light-skinned teenage virgins. Rape is common. Eliza's from a state plantation. She's being sold, with her two children, Emily and Randall. In Louisiana, it's illegal for children under 11 to be taken from their parents. Boy, come over here. It happens all the time. Show me your teeth.

You know, 140 years is not a really long time in the context of history. So it's hard for me to believe that blacks didn't have any rights here, they weren't treated as human beings, they were treated like animals, essentially.

Sir, please! Over half the sales at auction will tear a family apart. If you've ever been eight, to think of being separated from your mother and your father and sold and you'll never see them again. The horror of that, the poignancy of all of that, and yet that's the kind of thing that happened across the South up until the end of slavery. Okay, my final offer, I'll give you 1,000 for that man, 900 for that man. That woman there, $700. Please, buy my child! Sir! Sir! I have seen mothers kissing for the last time the faces of their dead offspring, but never have I seen such an exhibition of intense grief as when Eliza was parted from her child.

Three miles outside Baltimore heading North. A slave on the run. The risk of capture is high. At most, 1,000 a year are successful. Ears cut off; achilles tendons slashed; branding; all are common punishments if caught. Frederick Douglass has failed twice, but won't let that stop him. Men like Douglass are the South's worst nightmare. He has a better chance than most of passing as a freeman. Unlike 80% of slaves, he can read and write. Even in the 21st century, we're only three or four generations away from people that not only could not get paid for their labor, it was against the law for them to read and write, it was against the law for them to marry, it was against the law for them to name their children after themselves.

Ladies and gentlemen, please. Long way to go. Ticket. Black Americans must carry documents proving they're free, or who they belong to. Frederick Douglass has papers borrowed from a friend. Ticket. They won't hold up to careful examination. My whole future depended on the decision of this conductor. Someone get this chicken. This moment of time was one of the most anxious I ever experienced. Had he looked closely at the paper, he could not have failed to discover that it called for a very different-looking person from myself.

Frederick Douglass makes it to New York City--and freedom, and becomes a leading figure in the anti slavery movement. He'll write a best-selling autobiography. He'll meet and debate with Lincoln in the White House. At a time when slaves are barely regarded as people, he will become an icon, a celebrity, the best-known African-American in America.

The best hope for escaped slaves is the legendary Underground Railroad and the tireless efforts of Harriet Tubman. An escaped slave herself, she risks her life returning South again and again to guide others to freedom. A masterful escape artist, Tubman will do anything to avoid capture, even keeping babies quiet with opium.

That's a good boy. Harriet Tubman is the Moses of our people. She was a wanted woman, she was a hated woman, reviled by the white South. Just imagine you've gotten out of slavery, you've escaped, and yet you come back, you have the courage and the care about other people to come back into a hell. The South puts a $40,000 reward on her head, but nothing stops her. Come on, you all! Come on! Move or die.

Tubman is one of America's first civil-rights activists. In the same month she dies, Rosa Parks is born. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman threaten everything the South stands for. Tens of thousands of slave owners had to deal with, for the first time, the fact that these people are going to rebel. She was far more effective as the symbol that they feared than the few hundred that she saved. Nearly 60,000 slaves will escape, up to a $50 million loss to their owners, but it symbolizes much more. Now the South has a fight on its hands, and they're prepared to do whatever it takes to preserve their way of life. The fight for the soul of a nation is just getting started.

Midway through the 19th century, America is entering the modern world. In 20 years, there'll be Levi's Jeans, chewing gum and hot dogs. But the nation is split, being torn apart at the seams dividing North and South. Slavery became not simply a political issue, not simply an economic issue, but a moral issue as well. It became the issue that defined North and South in the 1850s.

September 1850. The Fugitive Slave Law brings the brutality of Southern Slavery to the North. Now, no African- American is safe, anywhere. Gentlemen, you've made a mistake. This is a place of business. I'm a tailor, these are my clients. I'm a freeman. I'm not a slave, gentlemen. The Fugitive Slave Law meant that if you were a slave and you managed to escape to the North, your master could come and get you, and you had no recourse. Not only that, if you were a free Negro, they still could sell you down the river. The search for runaway slaves had become a witch hunt. Any African-American can be condemned simply with an accusation. Even a freeman has no right to a trial by jury.

Federal magistrates get $10 to rule them slaves, five to set them free. Ordinary people are outraged by the new law. Abolitionist newspapers and literature spread like wildfire. Published in 1852,"Uncle Tom's Cabin" becomes the best- selling book of the century, after the Bible. A passionate antislavery novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, an unknown housewife from Connecticut. It mainly appeals to women who are becoming politicized for the first time.

Slavery is the burning issue of the day. As America expands across the continent, North and South face off over each new territory. Will it be slave-owning or free? The Northerners began to see that, wait a minute, they're not gonna keep slavery just in the South, they wanna take slavery West and to turn the country into a slave country. Americans from all over the country are flooding into the new territories on the frontier. Each becomes a battleground. Will it be slave-owning or free?

It comes to a head in Kansas. A peaceful protetest turns violent. Emotions run high. Towns are terrorized, stores robbed. Homesteads burned. North and South are polarized. Neither side will back down.

One man will stop at nothing to abolish slavery. John Brown. A folk hero in the North...a terrorist to the South. He thinks he's fighting a holy war. He believes himself to be God's chosen instrument. He will murder for his cause. John Brown is one of those controversial figures about whom almost anything you can say is true. He's a terrorist, in our modern terms. He's a revolutionary.

The divide between North and South is an open wound. Kansas bleeds for two years, more than 200 dead. America is on the road to war. Slavery is tearing the nation apart. America is built on a number of distinct fault lines, one, of course, was slavery and freedom, that was a fault line that had to be addressed. In the South, slavery is a way of life, even for non-slave owners. Antislavery forces in the North threaten their right to decide their fate. There is still, in some areas of America, a great pride in being Southern and holding true to the original Southern attitude. I think our clinging to the idea that slavery is a right and just a way of life, you know, it is a dark spot in our history. Anger in the South grows more passionate every day. The North claims the moral high ground, but they are getting rich off cotton, too.

Pretty much everybody agreed that a crisis was developing. Not everyone knew that, the crisis would include, in the end, the Civil War, but everyone understood that a showdown between the slave South and the free North was about to occur.

John Brown wants to light the fuse. October 1859. Passionate in his hatred of slavery, Brown prepares to take the fight into the heart of the South. His plan, to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the biggest collection of weapons in the South. 20,000 rifles, muskets and pistols, worth almost $7 million today. He wants to arm Southern slaves and lead a slave rebellion. He's fighting alongside his five sons, all of them willing to die for their cause. The arsenal is poorly defended. Breaking in is a pushover. But his raid is based on local slaves rising up and joining the fight. He needs a small army to carry off so many weapons. Without slave reinforcements, it's a suicide mission. Word gets out and local townsfolk attack the arsenal. Not a single slave joins Brown and his men. They are trapped and fighting for their lives.

I wanna free all Negroes in this state. I have possession of the United States armory, and if the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood.

Radical abolitionist John brown is trying to inspire a slave revolt. No slaves have joined him, and now he's trapped. At dawn, the US Marines arrive. They storm the arsenal under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown won't go down without a fight. The soldiers overwhelm them. The fight against slavery has only just begun. But John Brown's crusade is over. His sons are dead. His trial captivates the country. Charged as a criminal, he puts the institution of slavery on trial. America is fatally divided. Brown is convicted of treason and sentenced to death. A terrorist in the South, a martyr in the North. He's executed on December 2, 1859.

As the country prepares to elect a new president in 1860, many wonder if the nation can survive. I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.

Chicago, May 18, 1860. A backwoods congressman comes out of nowhere to grab the new Republican Party's nomination for President. Abe Lincoln's only claim to fame--he's lost two elections to the Senate. Personally, Lincoln hates slavery, but he is desperate to hold the country together. What I admire about Abraham Lincoln is that he had his beliefs and he stuck to his beliefs at a time when it was't popular to do so, especially when it was black, white and very cut-and-dry, he stuck to his beliefs.

November 6, 1860. Election Day. The stakes couldn't be higher. Abraham Lincoln will be elected president of a country hurtling towards war. The South rebels, convinced he'll abolish slavery. They threaten to leave the Union. The battle lines are drawn. The North is behind him.

For the South, Lincoln is the enemy. An editorial in an Atlanta paper "Let the consequences be what they may. Whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms with mangled bodies, the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln."

The South knew that Lincoln was gonna win, and it was just a matter of time, tick, tick, tick, before secession occurred. The South wants no part of a Union with Lincoln in the White House. But as he prepares to take office, the President- elect is still determined to avoid a civil war. Lincoln was not happy about slavery. He did not see that as congruent to "All men are created equal." And he had given a speech, before he ever became president, on why that was so important to him. And I think that was coming to a head, and when he got elected, that was the final straw for the South.

December 20, 1860.South Carolina secedes from the Union. The ten other slave states soon follow. Lincoln's victory makes war inevitable. He's prepared to fight to preserve the Union--and won't have to wait long.

In February 1861, a few weeks before his inauguration, the Confederate States of America are born. Lincoln's principal objective was to save the Union and then we'll deal with slavery, but before too long, he had to both save the Union and deal with slavery.

Abraham Lincoln receives his first death threats before ever taking office. He'll save every one, keeping a file in his desk labeled: "Assassination." On the journey to Washington, he'll wear a disguise, just to be safe. He'll do anything to avoid war, except allow slavery to expand. It is Lincoln who explains the case for freedom and says, "I'm not gonna attack slavery where it is, but I'm not gonna let it expand."

At his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln reluctantly pledges that states with slaves will be allowed to keep them, but it's too little, too late. A virtual state of war already exists. The South mobilizes an army of 800,000 men against a Union army of 2 and half Million.

Five weeks after Abraham Lincoln takes office, the first shots are fired in the War Between the States. It will spark a brutal and bloody civil war, the deadliest in American history. In the next four years, more lives will be lost than in all America's other wars put together.

The North against the South. Brother against brother. The Civil War is the bloodiest in American history. Victory will take far more than brute firepower on the battlefield. Technology, communications, logistics. It's what happens behind the front lines that will ultimately decides this battle for America's future. We are pioneers...and trailblazers. We fight for freedom. We transform our dreams into the truth. Our struggles will become a nation.

Episode Five Civil War

1862, the Civil War is at its height. North and South, locked in a bitter conflict for the future of America. A new kind of bullet has brought this war to a terrible deadlock, bringing death on a scale never previously seen in warfare. Here at a metal works in Springfield, Illinois, molten lead is beginning its journey, becoming a lethal instrument of destruction. The bullet known as the mini ball. This crude piece of lead is the primary reason for the unprecedented levels of slaughter in this war. Invented in France. It's an ounce in weight and a half inch across. One person can cast 3,000 mini balls an hour. Each one of these simple bullets can rip through a man's body in a fraction of a second. The mini ball is used by North and South alike. Demand for this killer bullet runs so high that an entire industry springs up supplying mini balls to the front line. In total, the North makes over half a billion mini balls, ready to be fired from the 2 million muskets supplied to its men.

In many ways, the Civil War was the first modern war because it was the first war that took place after the Industrial Revolution had begun to transform our country. It will take over 33 hours for a bullet in this box to travel the 800 plus miles to the battlefield ready to find its target. The new musket is much faster to reload than traditional weapons. Load the gun powder, ram down the bullet, and it's ready to fire. Imagine warfare where your ability to load a musket faster than the guy with the other musket would determine if you lived or die. Groove on the inside of the barrel, rifling, spin the ball towards its target. The improved accuracy and range are a deadly combination. One second -- everything's great and the next second, your buddy's head is gone or his arm is flying off. You don't want to know what a soft metal musket ball does when it enters the human body. On impact, the bullet flattens out. Bone shattered into splinters causing further damage to muscle and tissue. More often than not, the result of a direct hit is death.

But for all the mini balls technological edge, the army still uses traditional military tactics. What made it specifically tragic was modern technology meeting much more ancient tactics, so the death rates were truly appalling. The troops still face one another openly with lines across the battlefield. But the mini ball is accurate over a range of 600 yards. Easily spanning this distance. And it can be reloaded eight times faster than a traditional weapon. The effects are catastrophic. The kill rate increases dramatically compared to previously wars. Across the battlefield the results are carnage. Blood and death on a previously unseen scales. They killed each other in droves in lines and in piles. Soldier Alexander Hunter writes. One lay on his face with his body almost in two parts. Another was shot just as he was taking aim, one eye was still open while the other was closed, one arm extended in the position of holding his rifle which laid beside on the ground. The troops on both sides must live in the middle of this untold deafen suffering. Horatio Chapman, records his experience in his diary. The dead in some places were piled upon each other and the groans and moans of the wounded were truly saddening to hear. Some were just alive and gasping, but unconscious others were mortally wounded and were conscious of the fact that they could not live long.

By the time of the North's final victory, over 600,000 men on both sides are dead. Sum 2% of the entire US population. In current population terms, that's the equivalent of 6 million people. Almost half of the dead remain unidentified. The fear of dying forgot on the battlefield leave soldiers for the first time to begin painting their names and unions on their uniforms. These crude early versions of the dog tag will make it possible to identify their bodies after they are killed. For the first time, America's growing postal service, means soldiers can write to their loved ones from the front. With none of today's military censorship, it allows soldiers like Robert Stiles to relay the terrifying realities of life on the front line. The sights and smells that assailed us were simply indescribable. Corpse swollen to twice their original size. Some of them actually burst sunder with the pressure of foul gases and vapours. Fueling this carnage lies the deep political animosity that has led to this war. In the bitter conflict that has pitted as "brother against brother", the South has determined to defend its independence and the system of slavery. But the North will not allow it to leave the Union of States. We fought and lost hundreds of thousands of men on both sides fighting for what they believe is right. The unholy alliance of new weapons and outdated battle tactics, means the body count on an industrial scale. The war is locked in a bloody stalemate. Neither side can land a decisive blow. In this bitter war of attrition, victory will come to the last man standing.

August 1862, over a year into the war. General Robert E Lee's Confederate Army, is readying to launch a wide ranging assault ,against Union forces in Virginia. Highly motivated these men are fighting on their home turf, and are ready to die for Southern independence and traditions, and its rural way of life. Its prosperity is built around a simple crop-- cotton. Known as white gold, the South accounts for two thirds of the world's supply of cotton. And it brings extraordinary wealth to the Southern states. But its wealth built on the backs of slaves. Now Lincoln's victory at the ballot box threatens this traditional way of life, the slavery it is built on. Rather than submit to Northern rule, the South decides to fight. They want a separate nation.

General Robert E Lee takes command at the head of the newly formed army of Northern Virginia. Lee, a brilliant graduate of the elite West Point Academy is already a veteran of the Mexican War. Highly regarded for his effectiveness on the battlefield. Lee could intuit the battlefield in a way that almost resembles Rommel in World War II, or Patton, and as a result, he could sort of almost sense where the place would be to take the gamble and where to hit.

Manassas Virginia, 1862, confederate troops gather ahead of the second battle of Bull Run. Lee's forces are heavily outnumbered. But this Virginia woodland is home territory for these volunteer troops known like the back of their hand. Rigid training and strict discipline has turned them into a formidable fighting force. If you've been a betting man back then, you would have bet the South would have won. The South only had to hold its territory, the North had to come and take it away, the North had to be the occupying force which is far harder to do. At Bull Run, Lee easily demonstrates his force's superiority. In one engagement lasting just 10 minutes, the yankee 5th New York regiment loses more men than any other regimentduring the entire Civil War. All tolled, Lee's men kill over 1700 Union soldiers. Determination and local knowledge give the South their greatest victory in the war to date. But Lee and his commanders have underestimated the nature of this conflict... and of their opponent, President Abraham Lincoln. Because Lincoln is fighting a totally new kind of war, and the Southern adversaries just don't get it.

A packed train speeds on its way south, ready to replenish the Union Army with fresh troops and supplies. Lieutenant George Benedict writes home. We were stowed away in freight cars and started out of the city. The train took 600 other troops besides our regiment, and numbered 34 heavily loaded cars. The railroad, one of Lincoln's hidden weapons in this war. In one key operation ordered directly by the President 25,000 fresh troops were sent on a 1200-mile journey to the South. By road it would take over two months. By rail, it will take these men just seven days. Following its introduction in the 1830's, America's rail infrastructure has gradually spread its tentacles across the country. Lincoln realizes it can revolutionize the speed of troop deployments. He strikes a deal with the rail owners to put the North railroad network under government control. It turns the railroad into a weapon of war. Instead of armies being limited to the speed at which they can march, all of a sudden, you had armies being able to move to up to the front by rail. And more importantly, supplies. Supplies and troops pour out of the North toward the battle front. Some busy lines carry 800 tons of supplies a day, the equivalent of 80 railroad cars. In Lincoln's hands, the 24,000 miles of railroad tracks in the North becomes an arm of his war machine. But the South has a far smaller network. Just 9,000 miles at the start of the war and it remains under private control.

In the four years the war lasts, the North adds 4,000 miles of new track to it's network against just 400 miles in the South. This inability to coordinate rail supplies will prove disastrous for the South. Even though they're just 30 miles from their capital in Richmond. In the winter of 1863, poor rail links mean Southern troops in Virginia starve. For all their brilliance and determination in battle, the South simply lacked the logistics to deliver a decisive blow. And it isn't simply rail. Lincoln realizes that victory depends on mobilizing the entire industrial might of the North behind the war effort. Production of clothing in the North doubles during the conflict. Pitchfork manufacturers start making swords, while the number of patents doubles in the course of the war. Manufacturing, technology, infrastructure. It will change the face of America. For the first time in history, industry is put behind the war effort, an approach to conflict that America will exploit in the First and Second World Wars. It is the beginning of a new, integrated economy. It will be the hallmark of the modern age.

In a building just across the road from the White House is a small room. It will become Lincoln's nerve center in this war. And at its heart, a simple device that will transform how this war is fought and won: the telegraph. The invention of Morse Code in 1844 turns the telegraph into America's first tool of mass communication. Quickly encoded, the basic system of dots and dashes is ideal for brief messages. Like Twitter today, it needs just seconds to send them and transcribe them. Where messengers previously took days on horse back, over hundreds of miles and across every kind of terrain, now the country's 50,000 mile telegraph network means communication is almost instantaneous. As telegraph poles snake out alongside the railroad lines, this vast country begins to shrink. It will transform the nature of this war, as information and decisions can flow backwards and forwards, at lightning speed. It became kind of the early version of e-mail. Suddenly it was possible to get a message to somebody from St. Louis you know, to get a message to New York in a shockingly short amount of time.

Lincoln immediately realizes the telegraph's potential as a weapon of war. He insists on the installation of telegraph lines directly into the War Department. And he quickly acts to place all telegraph facilities in the Union under military control. The Telegraph Office becomes the central hub of Lincoln's war operation. His command and control center. He even takes to sleeping here at busy times. The Telegraph Office manager, David Homer Bates, describes how Lincoln obsesses over every scrap of news from the front: sometimes reading dispatches word by word as they are deciphered. Lincoln's habit was to go immediately to the drawer each time he came into our room, and read over the telegraphs beginning at the top until he came to the one he had seen on his previous visit. The North's telegraph network spreads its tentacles far and wide, sucking information back to Lincoln and his commanders in Washington. It gives him a vast strategic overview, providing him an unrivaled insight into his commanders' tactical thinking. Lincoln himself was able to stay on top of, literally, hour-by-hour developments in the course of individual battles. That had never happened before. To the irritation of his generals, it even allows him to issue his own direct orders, telling them how to fight. In one campaign, with General Lee's forces threatening Washington, Lincoln responds by telegraphing direct orders to his generals. The exposed position of General Banks makes his immediate relief a point of paramount importance. You are therefore directed by the President to move against Jackson at Harrisonburg. This movement must be made immediately. In the course of the war, Lincoln sends almost 1000 telegrams from the small office. But the South never grasps the potential of the telegraph in creating a centralized command and control system. It means Southern generals like Lee must plan their battles without that kind of strategic overview.

As the war continues, Lincoln brings down the hammer of his war machine. Industry. Lines of communication and supplies, manpower and firepower, are all marshaled to deliver a blow after blow to the Confederate Army. But the South, bolstered by the belief in the rightness of its cause doggedly refuses to give in. As a result, the death toll just keeps rising. At Antietam in 1862, 6,000 are killed. 17,000 wounded.

Over four times as many as during world War II's D-Day landings. The carnage will trigger a revolution in battlefield medicine. 3/4 of all operations conducted by army surgeons during the Civil War are amputations.

Letters from surgeon William Watson record what these battlefield ERs were like. Day before yesterday I performed 14 amputations without leaving the table. I do not exaggerate when I say I have performed at the least calculation, 50 amputations. There are so many severely wounded to the joints. There are so many operations yet to be performed. Surgeon Theodore Dimon describes the hideous wounds left by weapons like the Mini ball. The shattering, splintering, and splitting of a long bone by the impact of a Mini ball is both remarkable and frightening. An experienced surgeon can hack off a limb in just ten minutes. Ether and chloroform are used as anesthetics. If a bullet doesn't kill you, then infection can. Gangrene is the greatest killer. Deprived of oxygen, wounds become an ideal breeding ground for clostridium, a bacteria that releases a poisonous toxin destroying tissue. Death can follow quickly. Approximately 60,000 amputations are performed during the Civil War, more than in any other war America has fought in. Twice as many soldiers died from infected wounds and disease as on the battlefield

This unprecedented carnage forces a complete rethink of traditional battlefield medicine. Looking after the well-being of soldiers becomes as central to the war effort as the supply of guns and ammunition. Large numbers of women sign up as battlefield nurses. One of them is Clara Barton. Help me, please. A saw? Clara Barton is untrained and unpaid. When she starts, most nurses are men. It is a menial occupation. The remedies she proposes for the care of the wounded are simple, but revolutionary in their effect. They want food, clothing, shelter, medicines, and a few calm, practical persons to administer them. She insists the injured have a ready supply of clean bandages. First aid, the sorting of the wounded with the most serious cases first. The Civil War brings in a series of innovations that form the basis of battlefield medicine to this day. 20,000 women sign on as nurses during the war. Clara Barton herself goes on to found the American Red Cross. Standards of hygiene begin to dramatically improve with the discovery of bromine. This caustic chemical is effective against the bacteria that cause gangrene. As a result, nearly 3/4 of amputees survive surgery and gangrene becomes rare by the war's end.

With the war dragging on without a clear end in sight... Lincoln is increasingly forced to fight on a very different front- the war for public opinion. The spread of portable cameras means for the first time gory images of the battlefield can now reach every home. While these simple cameras ruled out dramatic action scenes, they're ideal for capturing the gruesome after math of battle. As many as 1500 photographers flood the battlefield. Their images are sold widely to members of the public for as little as 25 cents. It was war photography coming back from the Civil War that captured it in a way that made it real and made people recognize the really extraordinary unprecedented violence. America's growing newspaper mass media reproduces simple woodcuts of the images. More than 200 correspondents cover the war filing over 100 million words of copy. This deluge of information about the war ensures the grim reality of the conflict is seared into the public consciousness. Never again will politicians be able to fight wars without public support. The war means a soldier is five times more likely to die than a civilian.

Where families used to grieve for the dead at home, now men die on the battlefield. It forces a fundamental shift in the ritual surrounding death. Matt Botage dies on the battlefield in Virginia, yet his family in Boston can still say good- bye to their son killed 500 miles away. Even though it has taken a week for his body to travel from the battlefield, his father described how it is free from signs of decomposition. So the marks of closely contested battle was still upon the face, the features were placid as if he were sleeping. That's because of the new technique known as embalming. Chemicals like arsenic and zinc chloride are injected in the corpse to hold the natural process of decay. The business of death, the preservation of bodies turns undertakers into overnight millionaires. One undertaker boasts: I would be glad to prepare private soldiers. They were worth a $5 bill a piece. But Lord bless you, a colonel pays 100. And a brigadier general, 200. If you've got the money, all sorts of new techniques are available. Airtight coffins and embalming are most popular. And for the wealthiest, even elaborated refrigerated coffins packed with ice.

The war drags on. Lincoln is determined to end it, and abolish slavery. In September, 1862, he gives the South an ultimatum - rejoin the union. He threatens to forcibly liberate their slaves if they refuse. But the South, having tasted independence, does not want to rejoin a union where slavery would be at risk. They reject the ultimatum. Lincoln is in no mood to negotiate. If the South won't free their slaves, he will do it himself. For white Southerners, it was a confirmation that their thoughts about Lincoln all along that he was, in fact, somebody who was bent on destroying what they thought was the Southern way of life. In the North, in a sense it gave people a different understanding of what the war was about. On January 1st, 1863, Lincoln issues a proclamation abolishing slavery in the rebellious Southern states, Thanks to the telegraph, the news quickly spreads. On the 4th day of January, in the year of our Lord, 1863. Lincoln had totally grown to where he said not only should blacks not be slaves, they should be treated as equal citizens with full enfranchisement, right to vote and right to participate. All persons held as slaves shall be then, henceforth and forever free. In the wake of Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves, Black American soldiers rush to enlist for the Union. Almost 200,000 sign up by the end of the war. General James Blunt describes their skill as fighters. I never saw such fighting as was done by the negro regiment. They make better soldiers in every respect than any other troops I have ever had under my command. The Emancipation Proclamation changes the dynamics of the war. The Union army becomes a force for liberation, now fighting to end slavery. They understood that saving the union would give them some sense of freedom, some sense of dignity. It was the dignity that I'm a soldier. I'm not just a servant. I have a uniform. I have stripes. I am somebody.

Lincoln follows the Proclamation with his master stroke. His address in 1863, dedicating America's first national cemetery for soldiers at Gettysburg, is perhaps the single most famous piece of political rhetoric in history. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. That we here highly resolve that these deaths shall not have died in vain. That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth. It is an emotional thing to think about people sacrificing, giving their lives for an ideal. And it's Lincoln at his absolute best. The genius, the simplicity that conveys a great amount. It's spiritual in a way, it's a hymn to America, and it's the hymn to the possibilities and the great sacrifices to this country.

But in 1864, the war remains deadlocked. With an election looming, and a challenge coming from those who want to negotiate a peace with the South, Lincoln knows he needs to land a decisive blow. At some point somebody gets tired. Somebody blinks. Somebody makes a mistake. And when you're talking about war, that mistake, it's everything. Lincoln puts the North's entire industrial might behind one final push. The man who will lead the charge from Chattanooga to Atlanta, William Sherman. His orders: to stop for nothing. I would make this war as severe as possible and show no symptoms of tiring until the South begs for mercy. Advancing under the cover of night, Sherman's march is sustained by one of the greatest logistical operations yet seen in this conflict. Sherman knows he needs to throw everything he's got at the Confederate Army. While he uses his own supply lines to maximum effect, he destroys those of the South, ripping up their railroad and bending it beyond use. In one day, the North's supply lines replace 200,000 bullets. While the South is left scavenging on the battlefield for spent rounds, food, even old boots. Sherman calls it total war. A scorched earth approach becomes the trademark of modern warfare. Finally, with Atlanta under siege, Confederate forces set fire to their own munitions stores, before abandoning their city to the Union soldiers. Sherman's tactics of total war have won out. His victory helps secure Lincoln's election in the fall. With Atlanta in ruins, he just keeps going, now launching what will be his final assault: The March to the Sea. In a 19th century equivalent of Shock and Awe, 62,000 Union soldiers wreak a 60-mile-wide path of destruction across Georgia, from Atlanta to the coast of Savannah. Supply lines are cut. Villages are sacked and crops torched. Anything of military value is destroyed. Within six months, General Lee has tendered the Confederate Army's surrender. The rebellion is over. The South will have to submit to the Union and bring an end to slavery.

By the act of winning, the North both validated freedom and validated the industrial model. And so you have an American confidence. An American sense of achievement. An American willingness to go out around the world. For all the Confederacy's commitment, its inferior logistical infrastructure has been no match for the North's unstoppable war machine. Its industrial heartland, its growing network of railroads, its telegraph network, all bring victory to the North. Within a week, Lincoln lies dead from an assassin's bullet, but America has pulled back from the brink. The nation is once again united. And out of that unity now goes a modern industrialized economy that will reach right across this great continent. The Civil War is over. Survivors head out across the frontier. A vast wilderness separates East and West. Veterans become railway men, cowboys... settlers. Conquering nature, they'll unite the continent. Their mission: to tame the Wild West.

Episode Six Heartland 1865. The Great Plains, Where 30 million buffalo roam, Vast, untouched, a wilderness dividing America. Crossing the continent takes six months. 20,000 die on wagon trains. By ship, it's an 18,000 mile journey around South America. To conquer the wilderness and unite East and West, President Lincoln green-lights a transcontinental railroad, 2,000 miles long. It will transform the nation triggering a tidal wave of settlement across the Great Plains. Railroads were vital to the expansion of America. “This technology connects people in a way that never before in the history of mankind has there been that kind of connection.”

America's ancient wilderness meets modern American modern steel and muscle. An army of hammer-wielding men, Irish immigrants, Civil War vets, Railway men. Their mission: to tame nature itself. The biggest obstacle heading east from California, a 12,000-foot wall of granite, the Sierra Nevada, With the Pacific of North America plates alive, billions of tons of ancient rock rise up crumpling like tinfoil. Over the last 4 million years, the Sierra Nevada mountains climb more than 2 miles high. They're still growing 13 Feet in 1,000 years. One day they could rival the Himalayas. Only a mad man could dream of running a railroad across mountains like this. They don't call him crazy Judah for nothing. Obsessed with the railroad, he sees a way through. “Come on down, boys.” Theodore Judah makes 23 trips into the peaks. And peg that, boys. Plotting a path across ridges and through mountain summits, building it will be the engineering challenge of the century. “Yup, let's mark that.” This is the most magnificent project ever conceived, an enterprise more important to the people of the United States than any other. The railroad will be built, and I will have something to do with it.

“Americans love someone who can go through seemingly difficult or impossible things, and make their dreams happen.” With Judah's route approved, two companies begin work. The Union Pacific starts from Omaha in the east, the Central Pacific from Sacramento in the west. They'll meet in Utah. It'll cost over $2 billion in modern money, but the government doesn't have enough cash. It pays the companies in federal land. They must finish in 15 years or lose everything. “We have learned in this country, you don't get anywhere in life if you don't take risks. I think America is by far the shining light of the world in so many ways because we are risk takers.”

Paid by the mile, adding curve adds profit. Corrupt investors built the railroad for every cent they can, a nine mile curve means an extra 120 acres of federal land, and they'll end up owning an area the size of Texas. First they must conquer the Donner Pass. 7500 feet up, the highest Judah's route, Cursed by 30 feet o of snow each winter Avalanches, tragedy. Here just 20 years earlier, the Donner Party became trapped in the snow and ate each other. Now Judah's railroad cuts right through the mountain, 1649 feet of rock must be excavated, the longest tunnel on the route. Chinese laborers dig day and night. “It's easier to ship workers from China than to get Americans across the continent.” The railroad magnets said, "The Chinese built a g great wall, didn't they? Let's bring the Chinese in to do this work."

Over 10,000 Chinese laborers earn less and do the deadliest jobs. The transcontinental railroad was built by Chinese workers brought over specifically to work on the railroad, and they were considered somewhere in between human and animal. They were not expected to survive. They were expected to come here and work and die.

7,000 miles from home, 17-year-old Hung Leiwo swaps a life in poverty in Canton for a back-breaking work on the railroad gang. Hung Leiwo must cut through granite so tough, a rock the size of a big toe will support 50 tons of locomotive. Progress slows to inches a day. To breakthrough, they need nitroglycerin, but transporting it is banned when 15 men are blown to pieces. In a mobile lab, Scottish chemist James Houghton mixes it on the spot. Nitroglycerin is 13 times more powerful than gun powder. So unstable, any physical shock, and it will explode in his hand. Houghton gets hazard pay, $4,000 a month in modern money. After three months in the mountains, he turns to drink, leaving the nitro to Chinese men like Hung Leiwo, Irish crews won't touch it. Detonation creates temperatures of 9,000 degrees. It's hot as the surface of the sun, an estimated 1500 Chinese die in explosions and rock slides. Hung Leiwo survives. His son will be the first Chinese-American to graduate an engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.

Once through the mountains, track laying accelerates from 10 inches to 6 miles a day. Each spike is struck 3 times. 10 spikes to a rail, 400 rails a mile. 21 Million hammer swings complete the railroad. May 10th, 1869. A one word message arrives by telegraph: "Done". A six-month journey across the continent is cut to 6 days. The folks would once had to risk everything in a wagon train. That is eliminated. You can now can get on the railroad and travel from Boston to Sacramento. That's a revolution. The Internet of the area, the transcontinental railroad, changes everything it touches, triggering a mass migration to the Great Plains The Great Plains conquered by steel and steam. The transcontinental railroad threads a thin line of civilization through the wilderness. People follow. In just one year, 40,000 settlers move to Nebraska, fanning out across the frontier in wagon trains. When in the mid-19th century to the late 19th century, they went out and settled some hostile territory known to mankind, The Great Plain where I grew up. These were true pioneers. The government accelerates the process with the greatest land giveaway in history. Anyone with a $10 filing fee can claim free land, a quarter are single women and ex-slaves. When you see the desperate scramble in these rickety wagon trains, you realize that promise of America was land. These are people who never in a million years would be a able own land in New York. Eventually 10% of the United States will be given away under the Homestead Act.

“I'm not going back to Indiana to rent until I bust entirely and have to walk back.”Uriah Oblinger, Civil War vet claims his 160 acres in Nebraska. There's a catch. 110 degrees summers spark prairie fires. Trees can't survive the drought on the plains. There's so little rain, nothing grows here but grass. Without lumber to build houses, the new inhabitants live in mud huts, Built of sod, cut from the plains. Uriah dismantles his wagon to make doors and windows. They often had insects. They invited snakes. “It was pretty much like living in a burrow in the ground.” I think the pioneers did have it hard. They conserved. They were frugal. “One dress lasted a long long time.” For Uriah's wife Mattie, it's a price worth paying. “I expect you think we live miserable because we are in a sod house. But I'll tell you, in solid earnest, I never enjoyed myself better. Every liquid we strike is for ourselves and not half of someone else's.” The devout Oblingers face daily tests of their faith. With no mountains to stop the wind, the Great Plains are a breeding ground for massive thunder storms. The most objection I have to the weather here is the wind. There's a great deal of it during the winter and spring, and being nothing to break it, one feels it more. “Not too far, honey.” The Oblingers live in tornado alley, More twisters in this region than anywhere else on earth. “Honey!” Over 400 touch down every year Tell the folks they never seen a storm in Indianna, only playthings. 200 miles an hour winds spin into a vortex, sucking in air and anything not bolted down. In 1930, a man is carried a mile across the Kansas, fish and toads rain from the sky. The Oblingers hunker down in their heavy sod house, clinging to their new found independence.

“I think that we're a nation of people descended from tough old coots and tough old broads. And I say that with great admiration. They just wanted to control their own future, and to have children who could control their own destiny,” Tornadoes aren't the only biblical challenge the Oblingers face. By the river of Rockies, the end of the world, it's brewing. A prehistoric species emerges to battle for the Great Plains. Locusts, after devouring the local vegetation, they released pheromones that signal it's time to move on. They grow long wings. These worms head east on the wind, They join up over the Great Plains and become a plague. In 1874, they devour half of the crops in the West. Three trillion locusts, half a mile high, 100 miles wide, 1,000 miles long, as big as Colorado, They block out the sun, Agricultural Armageddon. To men like Uriah, the locust are the wrath of God. By 1892, half the population of western Nebraska goes east. Uriah stays. “You have to be brave in order to achieve in this country, because nothing is set right there for you. You have to take chances. And I think bravery and fear are the same things. It's just a matter of how you react to that same feeling.” Those who stick it out get lucky. Within 30 years, the locust is extinct. It's breeding grounds in the Rockies plowed over by settlers like Uriah. In 10 years, the Great Plains become the bread basket of the country. For the first time, America can feed itself. Today 50 million tons of wheat is farmed each year, but trees are still scarce, and to build towns settlers need wood.

In Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, loggers harvest over 50 million acres of trees. Green gold, A magnet for Scandinavian woodsmen. Between 1825 and 1925, a third of Norway's entire population comes to America, including Nils Haugen. The pay was $3 a day. You had to have a good pair of driving boots well caulked to be able to keep on top of the logs. There's millions of dollars at stake. If the flow of logs stops, towns can't be built. Log jams, River man's ruin. In 1886, pines to build 20,000 homes get stopped on the St.Croix River. 150 Million feet of wood. Remove the right log, and the rest will explode downstream. Rivermen die clearing the obstructions like this. In 1892, 2 billion feet of lumber will be cut in Wisconsin alone. The railroad feeds lumber into the West's construction boom. Towns are built so fast, there's no time to name streets. They're given letters and numbers.

The Great Plains is also home to the most numerous species of large wild mammal on earth. 30 million buffalo, herds up to 25 miles long, race to summer breeding grounds, on a collision course with the modern world. The railroad brings a new kind of hunter to the Great Plains. Driven by profit, fresh from the carnage of the Civil War, Two million rifles are in circulation. Over a million veterans trained to use them have a new target in their sights. Frank Mayer, Civil War vet, Buffalo hunter. “I had nothing to look forward to in civilization. I was crazy about guns.” Mayer tracks 2,000 pound buffalo, easily capable of crushing a man. He picks them off from 200 yards. If you could kill them, what they brought was yours. They were walking gold pieces. Hunters harvest the buffalo for its hide. In 1872, they ship over one million out of Kansas alone, worth $3 a piece back East. On a good day, Mayer earns more than the President. Factories use long strong strips of buffalo leather as drag belts Small pieces become coats and shoes. To meet demand, hunters kill 8,000 buffalo a day for their hides alone. “For America, this is progress, because this is a natural resource. From the Indian's perspective, they couldn't understand what the white people were doing.” But, of course, they knew that the decimation of those buffalo herds would change their lives forever. The Plain Indians depend on the buffalo and worship them. The buffalo were our strength from whence we came, and whose breast we suck as babies all our lives. Black Elk is 6 years old when the railroad arrives. Unlike the white hunters, his people waste none of their kill. Sinews become bow strings. Bones are cups and spoons. Skin is clothing, tepees and coffins.

Native Americans and buffalos have co-existed since the last ice age. Black Elk's ancestors hunted them on foot. There were no horses to ride. The modern horse isn't native to North America. Spanish conquistadors brought them from Europe in 1493, some escaped to the Great Plains, perfect horse habitat. 400 years later, over a million mustangs run wild. Taming horses transformed the life of the Plains Indian. They become expert horsemen. The battle cry went up. “Hokahey!” ,which means "to charge." and the hunters went in for the kill. On horse back, the bow is the weapon of choice. And the time it takes to reload a gun, a warrior can ride 300 yards, and fire 20 arrows. Buffalo can run at 35 miles an hour. Hunts cover hundreds of miles over many days. It can take 15 arrows to kill a buffalo. White hunters like Frank Mayer use a single cartridge. He aims for the lungs. A clean kill drops a buffalo without disturbing the herd. 30 Million are killed in a little over a decade. After hunters take the hides, train loads of men arrive to pick their carcasses. They make buttons from bones and grind down skeletons for fertilizer and porcelain.

The primary resource keeping Native Americans alive is gone. Facing starvation, they're forced on to reservations. “My great-great-grandmother, Grandma Big Eagle was alive when buffalo hunting ended. They weren't just saying good- bye to kind of food stuff. They were saying good-bye to a way of being in the world. I think for them to look back on that was just unspeakably sad.” In 1889, just 85 wild buffalo exist in the whole United States. The men who ride the great iron horse are taming the wilderness. The railroad will bring another modern American icon to the Great Plains, The last of the great frontier's man. 1865. The Civil War leaves cities on the Eastern Seaboard stripped the resources. The country's booming populationmneeds food. In Texas, over 6 million cattle roam wild worth $4 a head here, but back East they're worth 40. By 1868, the railroad spreads from the East, crossing Kansas, but it hasn't reached Texas. There's still 1,000 miles of Wild West between the herds and the railroad. For that kind of cattle drive, America needs a new kind of hero, the cowboy.

After the Civil War, 60% of the South's population lives in rural poverty. In search of work, a new kind of adventurer heads west to cattle towns like Abilene, Wichita and Dodge City. One farmhand heading to Texas is Teddy Blue Abbott. 23-year-old Teddy Blue is the son of a Nebraska homesteader. “My father wanted to tie me down and make a farmer out of me. Never. I ran away from home to become a cowboy.” “The cowboy mentality is a spirit of individuals. I have a communion with land, with my horse. It symbolizes of a resistance to the authority.” Teddy Blue is one of 35,000 cowboys who will drive cattle to the railroad in Kansas, Standing in their way, 1,000 miles of untamed West, unforgiving terrain and gangs of ruslters. For only $1 a day, cowboys must be skilled horsemen and cattle wranglers. The lasso dates back to the ancient Egyptians. Mexican ranchers have been using them for centuries and pass their skills on to cowboys north of the border.

Cattle brought over by the Spanish in 1493 had bred with settlers' cows from England breeding a new breed, the Texas Longhorn. After centuries roaming the plains, they're wild and easily spooked. Teddy Blue hears what every cowboy dreads. Stampede. Over four cattle drives, Teddy Blue buries three pals, a tough job for tough man. One out of three cowboys is Hispanic or African-American. After the Civil War, thousands of freed slaves head to Texas looking for work. One is a 23-year-old, from Alabama. Matt Love. It's his first chance to be judged for his skills, and not just the color of his skin. The guys on the team were as broad-minded as the plains. It's every creed for himself and every friend for each other till the end. Many of the cowboys, to the surprise of most of us, happen to be African Americans. “Black people had the dream of conquering the imagination just like white people do.” The West, vast, wild, lawless, with herds worth up to $200,000. Cowboys guard the cattle with their lives, and their guns. Guns are a way of life in Texas then and now. Even today, Texans own over 51 million firearms. “It's very intrinsic to the American culture and the American identity.” We always had a pistol or a rifle. And I think it's part of "Don't try to tell me what to do". "I'll fight off my enemies on my own."

The cowboy's gun of choice, the Colt 45, the fastest handgun in the west, six shots without reloading, Colt produces over 30 million guns. The most popular being the iconic 45. In 1873, a Colt 45 cost $17, half a cowboy's monthly salary. Six rounds of bullets, Half a day's pay. Frontier men would say, Abraham Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal. Cowboys drive 5 million cattle from Texas to the railroad in Kansas, The largest migration of livestock in US History. But one simple invention will soon threaten the cowboy's entire way of life, Barbed wire. In just 20 years two and a half million new settlers flood into the west. New farms cover half a billion acres of open range. A new battle rages, Cattle rancher versus homesteader. Cowboys like Teddy Blue and farmers are on a collision course. They'd plant the crop next to the trail. When the cattle got into their wheat, they'd come out waving a shotgun yelling for damages. Boundary disputes are violent, often deadly.

One farmer is determined to find a cheap and effective way to keep livestock off his land. Joseph Glidden. “When we think about innovation in America, we often think about a big audacious projects like the Apollo project, but there's another strain to American innovation. That's the local inventor, an individual genius with some passion in the middle of the night coming up with that big transformative idea.” In the fall of 1873, Glidden has a breakthrough. Using a coffee grinder he crudely fashions some steel barbs. His problem: how to secure them. Glidden's solution: bind the barbs between two links of wire. His design cuts the price of fencing by 70%. Within 10 years, Glidden sells enough to go around the world 25 times, carving the Plainsinto countless ranches and farms and blocking the cattle trails. The open range is closed forever. “This single invention made possible the settling of the west much sooner and more efficiently than it would have occurred otherwise.” Teddy blue rides one of the last cattle drives to the railroad. The heyday of the cowboy on the open range lasts only 20 years. But settling the Great Plains will mark the end of one way of life and the birth of another.

1876, a century of government policies target native Americans. 371 treaties keep them separate, isolated, remote. Most of America's 300,000 tribes people now live on government assigned lands, reservations. But resistance is still fierce. “I think probably the darkest spot in our history, for me at least is what happened to native Americans. We came here and confiscated their homeland. I think we have a real sense now of what our part was in that, one that I would love to see redefined and rewritten.” Across the Great Plains, The federal government acquires millions of acres of the Native Americans' traditional hunting ground to make way for the iron horse. The Sioux are forced deep into the Black Hills. As a young boy, Black Elk witnesses the coming of the railroad and the destruction of the buffalo herds, now aged 12, he's about to be part of the Sioux nation's last triumph.

White men come in like a river. They told us that they wanted only a little land. But our people knew better. Gold is discovered in the Black Hills. 100,000 prospectors rush in to seek their fortune. The federal government wants to clear the area. On a reconnaissance mission with the 7th cavalry, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer stumbles across the Sioux camp near the Little Bighorn river. Custer makes a fateful decision. with 700 soldiers Custer charges the camp with 7,000 Native Americans. Within three hours all the men in Custer's regiment are dead. The Sioux win the battle, but will lose the war. In response, US soldiers force 3,000 Sioux warriors on to reservations. The rest scatter in small bands. Over the next 14 years, the Plains Indians struggle to survive, until the incident that finally defeats the Great Sioux Nation.

“Wounded Knee is a great, great scaron the American landscape.” December 29th, 1890, The Last band of independent Sioux surrender beside Wounded Knee Creek. As the cavalry disarms them, a gun goes off accidentally. It triggers a massacre. Within minutes over 200 Sioux warriors, women and children are dead. Now 27, Black Elk survived. “When I look back now, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered as plain as when I saw them when I was still young. And I see that something else died there. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”

The railroad has transformed north America. In just 30 years, 30,000 miles of track cross the continent. More than the rest of the world put together. Thousands of new towns spring up around railroad stations. One every eight miles, Five rail lines link the East and West Coast. The railroad even changes time itself. Until now, Americans set their clocks by the sun. 8,000 different times along 500 rail lines. Scheduling trains becomes impossible. On November 18th, 1883, the continental US is reduced to just four time zones. Standard time is born. The railroad is now the largest employer in America. Nearly a million workers, One is a 23-year-old station agent from rural Minnesota. Richard Sears. With the US adjusting to new railroad times, Sears turns entrepreneur, and buys a batch of pocket watches. He offers them to other station agents, and waits. Bingo. An order comes through. Followed by another, and then another. Within six months, Sears sells all his watches, 2500, earning 10 times his railroad salary. Realizing he can use the railroad for sales and distribution, Sears jumps on the opportunity with an idea that will transform the nation: the mail-order catalog.

“I think Americans are naturally entrepreneurial. If you worked hard and if you had good ideas and you were willing to make short term sacrifices, you could succeed in this country.” 10 Years after selling his first watch, Sears publishes a 700 page catalog. Now based in Chicago, he processes over 35,000 orders a day, delivering refrigerators, pianos, one year, over 100,000 sewing machines. Using the railroad, Sears can sell virtually anything, anywhere in the country. “What really transformed this country wasn't just the westward migration and development of cities in the east, but the ability to move products across great distances.” Linking together what it had previously been very disparate little settlement that had to be largely self-sufficient.

By the end of the 19th Century America has 200,000 miles of railroad track, linking the local markets and creating a national economy. Over the next 40 years, the amount of freight carried by rail shoots from 55 to nearly 700 million tons. Resources from the Midwest feed the country's growing industries in the East. The United States overtakes Britain as the largest manufacturer on earth, soon producing 30% of the world's goods. The railroads laid the basis for the creation of the single largest market in world economy. And this made it possible for the United States to become the global economic power that it did by the end of the 19th century. In 20 years, the U.S. population doubles to 80 million. The number of cities triples. 7 million Americans leave the country for the nation's booming urban centers. Where buffalo once roamed, now rises the modern world. A new generation, on a wild new frontier, rising into the sky, leaning towers of steels, a bold new urban landscape. And maybe America's greatest invention: The modern vertical city. We are pioneers and trailblazers. We fight for freedom. We transform our dreams into the truth. Our struggles will become a nation.

Episode Seven Cities America: Land of invention. Hot dogs, jazz, the elevator, skyscrapers. This is the story of the greatest innovation of all : the modern vertical city. One world-famous icon has come to symbolize it. Amazingly, we very nearly didn't have it.

It's 1885 and New York City has a big problem. A magnificent gift, but with some assembly required. Scattered across Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor in 214 crates. They contain the largest statue in the Western world. It's been donated by the people of France to celebrate the centenary of the Declaration of Independence. Built in Paris, broken down into 350 massive pieces for the journey to America. That's the problem. The cost of reassembling it would be astronomical--money New York does not have. At least six other US cities are jockeying to give it a home. New York City is in danger of losing the Statue of Liberty. Not if this man can help it. Joseph Pulitzer, tenacious newspaper magnate, immigrant, self-made man. He owns the biggest paper in the US, "The New York World. "And he's determined to keep Liberty in New York Harbor.

Through his chain of newspapers, Pulitzer launches the biggest fund-raising campaign ever seen in North America. It would be an irrevocable disgrace to New York City and the American republic to have France send us this splendid gift with out our having provided even so much as a landing place for it. We must raise the money! More than a million people read Pulitzer's papers every day. "Enclosed, please find 25 cents, is my contribution to..." "It contains my little savings..." "... I resolved to send you the contents of the first jackpot. You will find enclosed $4." "The money we saved to go to the circus with." Donations flood in from all across the country, rich and poor, East and West. Pennies and nickels, fives and tens, even thousands of dollars. In all, a staggering 121,000 donations...more than enough to keep this iconic statue in New York.

I think a statue is not just a statue. I think symbols really matter. I think they signify, in a big way. In fact, maybe they do more than reams and reams and reams of legislation and paper and print. Now the real work begins. To hold a statue 150 feet high, the pedestal will be the biggest concrete structure in the world. Over 200 men work through a grueling winter to complete it. As the last of the cement dries, workers toss in their own silver dollars for good luck. Next, Liberty's enormous iron skeleton. It's designed by Gustavo Eiffel, who will build the famous Eiffel Tower in Paris. The skeleton is 151 feet tall and with the pedestal，it's the height of a 30-story office block. Now for the outer layer. Wrapping around the skeleton are 60,000 pounds of hand-sculpted copper.

This sandal is 32 times bigger than a human foot, equivalent of the size of 879 shoes. It's on the job trailing, often and 300 feet in erect. It's as difficult as it is dangerous. They need to fix 300 pieces of copper shell to the frame work. with more than 300,000 rivets. Her robes have over 4000 square yards to cover her.Her outstretched arm is 42 feet long. A finger nail weighes 3 and a half pounds. The scale of Liberty is unimaginable. After six months of hazardous construction, there's no fatalities, the Liberty's 17-foot faceis finally winched to position It's bigger than Lincoln's on Mount Rushmore.

It's said the sculptor Frederic Auguste Barthol modeled the face on his own mother. It takes 25 years for Liberty to acidize and turn green. A functioning lighthouse until 1902.The statue's official name is: Liberty Enlightening the World. At first, the symbol of the alliance and friendships between France and the 13 colonies in the American Revolution. It will come to represent much more. At the entries to New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty becomes a beacon to the world and a welcome to millions. Later, a poem by Emma Lazarus in her base, celebrates America as a land of refugees:"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breath free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Over the next two decades, more than 12 million immigrants pass the Statue of Liberty on their way to Ellis Island, the first stop for most new Americans. Imagine what it took for someone to leave Eastern Poland or Lithuania or some village in the mountains of Northern Italy and come all the way to this strange place with nothing. Today, more than 100 million American scan trace their roots back to ancestors who came through Ellis Island.

If you go back only 150 years in our 200-and-almost-50-year history,95% of the people... were not here. There are no roots. They all came from someplace else. So, to me, America represents...the best of the human spirit. A guidebook prepares arrivals for a new life in a new world. Forget your customs and ideals. Select a goal and pursue it with all your might. You will experience a bad time, but sooner or later, you will achieve your goal. Don't take a moment's rest. Run .And from Ellis Island, they spread out across the continent. For the most part, Irish, Russians and Italians to big cities, Germans to the Midwest, Scandinavians to farmland. At the dawn of the 20th century, eventually, there will be more Italians in New York than in Rome。From 1880 to 1930,nearly 24 million new immigrants arrive in the US.A new era in US history is about to begin.

By the early 20th century, new urban megacities around America are bursting to the seams and look to expand in a new direction... up. But building these great to wers demands a critical ingredient that's much too expensive—Steel. One man will change all that, and with it, the face of America. He'll risk everything, and almost lose it all. It's 1872 and Andrew Carnegie ,a 5-foot-3 Scottish immigrant iron millionaire, is in Sheffield, England. He's looking at the future. A revolutionary way to make steel. Steel has been around for thousands of years, but so expensive to produce, it's always been a luxury item. 2,000 years ago it's used in Oriental swords. It is even used in designer jewelry. But America stands at the brink of a new age. To build it, they need steel-- and lots of it. It's the only material strong enough for the towers that will touch the sky. An English bullet maker is showing. Carnegie a new but simple method of producing steel. He's stunned. Blast hot air through molten iron .Carbon impurities burn off. You get the wonder material. Steel. For the first time, it can be produced quickly and inexpensively .If Carnegie can use this Bessemer process to mass-produce it...he'll own the future. Carnegie returns to the States, to Pittsburgh, to start building the biggest steel plant in the world. It'll be larger than 80 football fields. It's a massive gamble. Carneg risks everything he's got on the new plant. But only months into construction...disaster. A catastrophic stock-market collapse. The economy is in free fall. He has to borrow even more money and barely scrapes through. August 1875.Against all odds, Carnegie's giant furnaces are ready to test. Steel production is phenomenally dangerous. Inside, 5 tons of molten metal.3,000 degrees. Hot enough to vaporize a man in seconds. If it works, It will make Carnegie one of the richest men in the world. But there's a lot more at stake. Skyscrapers, cars, washing machines, airplanes, even space travel. None of it can happen if steel can't be mass-produced.

It's a success. Carnegie is the first ever to mass-produce steel. Prices plummet by over 80%.Output rockets from a few thousand tons in 1860to 11 million by 1900. So many American stories of success, are diligence, are perseverance, but there's an awful lot of luck involved, too. His timing couldn't have been better.

It was steel that built American cities, it was steel that built American railroads, it was steel that built American shipping. By the beginning of the 20th century, he was one of the wealthiest men in America. Pittsburgh transforms from a sleepy town to the industrial heart of the nation. Its population triples. Driven by a new steel railroad, millions of tons of steel are transported across America, the raw material to build the modern city. And the grandest of all is New York. It's an era of obscene opulence. New York is a playground for super-rich industrialists and financiers. Wildly extravagant, they smoke cigars rolled in $100 bills, their wives' hats--studded with diamonds. This is the Gilded Age. Land values are the highest in the world. There's only one place to go... up. By 1902,65 skyscrapers are being constructed in Manhattan.

This is one of them. It's called "Walking the steel". This man is 30 stories above the street, his first time at this height. No harness or safety rope. One slip...,and he's dead. Veterans are called "Fixers". The novices are "Snakes", because working with them can be deadly. The old hands know just how dangerous it can be. The thing I hate worse than poison is to take on a new man when we're near the top. They all get used to it or get killed. No hard hats. Just a 280- foot drop. A sudden gust of wind and it's all over. They're up here eight hours a day, meals when they can. No bath room breaks. They're called rough necks,

European immigrants and Mohawk Indians. Many were sailors and bridge workers, so they're used to heights. The guys balancing on the beams. I think it took a lot of bravery, I think it took a lot of skill, a lot of physically--physically challenging. But I also think it-- you had to be a little crazy. The stakes couldn't be higher. It's a risk they are willing to take. The pay is $4 a day, twice the going rate for manual labor. Foreman William Starrett sums up his dangerous job. Building skyscrapers is the nearest peacetime equivalent of war. Even to the occasional grim reality of an accident or a maimed body, even death，remind us that we are fighting a war of construction against the forces of nature. He makes it. Many aren't so lucky. Two roughnecks out of five die or are disabled on the job. Whether it's a builder or an architect, or... whatever, whoever had the imagination to design and build some of the great structures of New York, I'm inspired by.

In 1902 in New York, this is what the future looks like. The Flatiron Building, its triangular footprint determined by the intersection of three streets, not two. The steel frame means the outside can be hung in sections like a suit of clothes. Now the walls don't take the weight, the steel does. It's so radical, when people first see it, they think it will blow over and kill them. A lawsuit is filed claiming winds focused by the Flatiron's extreme shape damage a nearby shop. Today it's one of our best-loved buildings. Inside, the other break through that lets towers rise into the clouds. The elevator. Before it, the tallest buildings stop mostly at five floors. No more walking up stairs now, so the sky's the limit. For the first time, the higher the floor, the higher the rent.

You think it's a fairly humble invention, but when Otis invented the first really safe elevator, it enabled the growth of the modern city, where people could come in, build much taller buildings, get a much higher density of people. And sure enough, by the end of the 19th century, the urban population has increased 87 times over. In Chicago alone, in just ten years, they build 50 steel-frame buildings, and in 20 years, its population more than doubles to almost 1.7 million. American cities are exploding. But for many, living in the shadow of these new towers will prove even harder than building them. In America in 1890,crime and poverty are rife on the streets. But these mavericks are about to make a difference .Gangsters, murderers, thieves and fear are on the streets. New tabloid newspapers splash crime all over the front pages.

In Chicago, you can rent a gun by the hour. In the Sears catalog, you can buy one for $12.In New York, a policeman finds a list on a murdered gangster--his rate card. Punches: $2.Nose and jaw broke: $10. Ear chewed off: $15. The big job: 100 bucks and up. Detective Bureau Chief Thomas Byrnes--,a man who follows his own set of rules. He's shrewd. And he's very tough. Among his methods is a technique his detectives, call "The third degree."First degree: Persuasion. Second degree: Intimidation. Third degree: Pain. In four years, Byrnes claims he's arrested 3,300 criminals. He solved the biggest heist of the 19th century... nearly a $3 million Manhattan bank robbery. Reporters call him the greatest crime buster in the history of the New York City police force. His very manner. The size of him. His menacing shoulders and arms. The bark of his voice... Pickpockets! Forgers! Whoever cracked the safe... Unscrupulous rogues. Crooks are now afraid of their shadows. They lead double lives. But tracking down criminals isn't easy. There's no official ID, no birth certificates or driver's licenses. If a criminal is known in one town, he just moves to the next.

Criminals are anonymous. Byrnes is tackling this problem head-on and bringing police work into a new age. This is his rogues gallery, mug shots of 7,000 known lawbreakers. Using photography to identify criminals will change detective work forever. Annie Reilly. alias Middle Annie, deceitful servant. The mug shots are distributed to police departments around the country. But these are more than just pictures. Byrnes is also building psychological profiles of criminals. Rufus Minor. He comes from a very good family.

It's a pity he's a thief. This is the first tempt to create a national crime register. A city as diverse as ours, is going to have a significant crime problem that you've gotta be on top of. Even today, mug shots still catch criminals. 12 million are taken every year nation wide. That's more than the entire population of Ohio. And it all began with the rogues gallery over 120 years ago. Any questions?

But crime isn't the only problem plaguing urban streets. In many cities, slums are reaching epidemic proportions. Multiple families crammed into one small room. Human waste pours into the streets, alleys and open courtyards. People were crowded in, there were windowless tenements. sometimes you had no internal plumbing, just privies in the basement, in the backyard, and the Lower East Side during these years, was the single most crowded place in the entire world. Jacob Riis, Danish immigrant, crime reporter, photographer. He gets leads for stories from Chief Inspector Byrnes. Now he's about to expose the hell of tenements. Jacob Riis knows what it's like to be poor. 15 years ago, he lost his job in a stock-market crash. It's midnight，but Riis has a new technology that will change the public perception of poverty forever. An explosive powder that produces enough light to photograph in the dark. This is one of the first- ever photographs of slum life. Go. It shocks millions. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jacob A. Riis and this is how the other half live and die in New York City. Magazines refuse to print his work, so Riis puts on his own "Magic lantern" Shows. His mission: to show the nation's wealthy something they've never seen before, filth and desperation on their doorstep.

In this block, nine dead were carried out this year alone. Five in baby coffins. What he demonstrated was that there is another reality, that all that prosperity didn't trickle down all the way to the bottom, and there was some deplorable living conditions and this country was not just forced to confront those conditions but then was moved to begin to deal with them. Riis publishes his pictures in a book called "How the Other Half Lives." It will sell more than 28 million copies. Within two decades, the worst of New York's slums are torn down. Tenements sell at auction for as a little as a dollar. Riis' campaigning forces all New York schools to build playgrounds and landlords to install toilets inside apartments, not outside. It is the first step in tackling the slums.

But as cities keep on growing, an even bigger challenge remains. In New York alone, nearly 40,000 die in one year from diseases. Because of this--, filth. But one clean crusader is about to change everything. 1895, our major cities are drowning in filth. 120,000 horses dump half a million pounds of manure into the New York streets every day. Wagons are blocked by 3-foot-high piles, of human and animal waste. Into this world steps a man on a white horse, Colonel George Waring. Civil War veteran, legendary sewer engineer, "Apostle of Cleanliness." He's the head of New York's Sanitation Department. The city stinks with the emanations of putrefying organic matter. Black rottenness is seen and smelled on every hand. The crowded streets are a veritable hell. Waring recruits an army of 2,000 sanitation workers in white uniforms. Some dismiss him as a crank. They call his men "White ducks." But Waring means business. Tons of garbage, normally dumped into the river, is recycled. Ash becomes land fill on Rikers Island. Organic waste boiled into oil and grease. Waring is America's first eco-warrior. His men clean 433 miles of street. Death rates decline, water quality improves. Waring saves the lives of thousands. The measures spread across America. Just 16 years after Colonel Waring, half of all cities have waste collection. And it is not just waste .By 1907,every large city in the nation has sewers. By 1909, there are 42,040 miles of sewers in America

The battle against filth, crime and poverty has begun. But one of the city's greatest innovations is still in its infancy. One man will change the urban landscape forever. Menlo Park, New Jersey, 1879.

Thomas Edison: inventor, entrepreneur, showman. He was taken out of school as a boy, but that won't stop him from becoming synonymous with inventions that define the modern era. He pushes his team hard, 24/7, in one of the world's first R&D labs. It will generate more than 1,000 patents. America still lights the night in the dangerous flick candles, gas and kerosene. Edison thinks he has a better idea, if he can get a filament to burn slowly in a vacuum. The electric light bulb. Platinum. Edison locks himself in his lab, doesn't sleep for days. The stakes are high. His backers have sunk $130,000 into his research, millions in today's money. He claimed to have gone through 6,000 materials from the plant world alone in his search for the perfect filament. Turn on the lamp, Jack. Beard. Fish line. Thread. Teak. Boxwood. Celluloid, parchment. Then something extraordinary happens. Cardboard. A piece of carbonized cardboard burns for 300 hours. It's going to change the way people live forever. What Edison does is nothing less than to banish the darkness. Now think of the meaning of that. Think of what that means to daily life. New Year's Eve 1879.Edison shows off his new invention. Thousands of people flock to his lab to see the future take shape. The Pennsylvania Railroad arranges special trains to accommodate the crowds. When Thomas Edison invented that light bulb, that electric light bulb, what a-- how magical that must have been. You know, to sit there and just all of a sudden, without a match, without kerosene or gas and just flip a switch and light. In just two years, Edison builds more than 5,000 power plants, generating electricity for cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and New Orleans. Over the next five years, he builds over 127,000 more. By 1902, 18 million light bulbs are in use. The impact is massive. Sports, entertainment, factories, stores all can now operate at night. And as electricity comes to the cities, more and more people arrive with it. By 1900, nearly 4 million women are working in US cities. In just 40 years, that figure has more than quadrupled.

Places like this, modern steel-frame buildings

Urban factories are pounding out 75% of all consumer products in the US. equipped with all the latest technology, Otis electric elevators, Bell telephones, Singer sewing machines. But packing so many people into tall buildings is a disaster waiting to happen. The United States is hurtling into the modern age. Symbolized by megacities rising up all across the continent. By 1909, Americans are spending nearly 23 billion dollars a year on ready-made clothes. This factory is producing 12,000 garments a week. Known as shirtwaists, they're the latest fashion for the working woman. New York City, March 25, 1911.4:45 p.m. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, 8th Floor. 260 girls work here-- most of them teenagers. Someone-- we don't know who-- tosses a match or maybe a cigarette into the scrap bin. Eva Harris, a seamstress, smells burning. There's a fire, Mr. Bernstein. Production manager Samuel Bernstein grabs one of the three fire pails... but the fire is already spreading. There's a mad dash for the exit, but it is too narrow. Only one at a time can pass through. It's been designed that way so their bags can be checked for stolen fabric. There's a fire hose... but it's not working. There's no water! The only way to warn the floors above is through the switchboard two floors up, on the tenth floor. Hello, switchboard? Tenth floor. Fire, there's a fire. Put me through to the ninth floor! She drops the phone and runs to get help. The message never reaches the ninth floor. Samuel Bernstein races up the main stairs to help the 160 workers trapped there. But blocking the front door, there's a barrel of motor oil. On the ninth floor, flames are already shooting through the walls and windows. The girls on nine rush to the fire escape, but it's locked. Only two escape routes are left on the ninth floor: the elevator and the metal fire escape. Kate Weiner makes it to the elevator door, but she's lost her sister. Everyone was knocking and crying for the elevator to come up. Suddenly the elevator came and the girls rushed in.

I was searching for my sister, Rose, but I couldn't find her. The flames were coming toward me, and I was being left behind. I felt the elevator was leaving the ninth floor for the last time. She's the last person to get to the last elevator. More than 100 girls are left behind to die. The only escape route left is the metal fire escape... but it collapses. Firemen arrive with the biggest ladder in New York City. But it's 30 feet too short. 4:58 p.m. The girls trapped on the ninth floor are out of options. In desperation...they jump. 5:15 p.m. The entire blaze is over in less than half an hour. 146 people die in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. There's a trial, but the owners walk free. It remains the deadliest workplace disaster in NYC history until September 11, 2001. But some good does come out of it. This dramatic tragedy sparks a wave of reform, so you begin to get new restrictions and a new conversation about what to do to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening .But it did not stop, of course, that tragedy itself. Unions force management to take responsibility for the lives of their workers. The Life Safety Code now used in all 50 states is a direct result of this fire. It's why doors now open outwards in public buildings, why automatic sprinkler systems or multiple exits are now the law.

The US and the modern city grew up together. Typically new, enormous and fast-paced, the mega city is one of America's greatest inventions. The dawn of the 20th century. America is changing in ways never thought possible. Cities explode outwards. Booze fuels a criminal underworld. Millions head north to escape poverty. Violence erupts. America is about to become the richest nation on earth. It's 1900.The dawn of the greatest consumer boom the world has ever seen.

Episode Eight Boom But none of it will happen without the discovery of what lies beneath the Texas dirt .Oil. Oil will power the 20th century and build the modern world .Men call it... "Black gold" Texas: A wide-open and wild territory. Closer to the old West than modern day. The Hamill brothers, Al, 24, ex-cattleman, Curt,28, ex-salesman. A new breed of pioneer on the American frontier oilmen. Young, rugged, ambitious. Known as some of the best in the business. In the beginning of oil, it was hardship. Everything was hard to do. We didn't know anything. Only the surface of the ground. Oil has just been discovered in Texas but the wells are small. Prospectors have a hunch that this shallow hill near Beaumont, east of Houston, signifies oil.

What they don't know, what nobody knows, is that beneath their feet lie oil reserves worth more than $11 billion today. Nowhere in the world has anybody discovered this much oil before. The first prospectors to tap into these reserves will become rich beyond their wildest dreams. The field the Hamill brothers are hired to drill will become the stuff of legend...Spindle top. Until the late 1850s, oil had been, really an annoyance to most people. And people would dig water wells, and if they happened to strike oil by accident, they’d curse their bad luck. But with the development of railroads and with the Industrial Revolution, for the first time people began seeking oil. Until recently, whale oil cornered the market. It was used in lamps to light homes and streets. But the whales have been hunted to near- extinction. One discovery has saved them. Oil. Made from the remains of tiny organisms in the world's oceans, it’s been down there for as long as 160 million years. Native Americans have used it as medicine. Then, in 1854, scientists in Pennsylvania discover it can be used for lighting. There’s no turning back. Coal still dominates industry, powering trains and factories. But it's dirty and less efficient. A ton of coal has half the energy of a ton of oil. For the right rig in the right place, there are fortunes to be made. Well, that is the American dream, is that this is a land of opportunity. where anything is possible if you roll up your sleeves and get to it. Prospectors have tried drilling at Spindle top before, but all previous wells here came up empty. The land, great for farming, is lousy for drilling. Earlier attempts hit hundreds of feet of sand and collapsed. The Hamills get $2 for every foot they drill, top dollar in those days. And when investors pay top dollar, they expect results. Their contract pays them to 1,200 feet. If they don't hit oil by then, the well's a dud and they're through. That’s good, that's good. Right now, they are at 400 feet. Drilling for oil is dangerous work.6,000 die in oil explosions every year. Most rigs are primitive tools, smashing through rock by pounding it with a heavy object on a cable. But this is sand. You can't smash your way through sand. The Hamills are gambling on revolutionary technology, a steam engine that drills a pipe through the ground. So far, it's been able to bore through 500 feet of sand and bedrock with no collapses. But at 600 feet...disaster strikes. The drill hits a pocket of explosive gas and water. The pressure forces gas back up through the pip. They’re lucky to survive. I see a really strong parallel between the culture of prospecting and the culture of entrepreneurial endeavors. You do all your surveys, you plan it out, you think it's really great, you dig down and there's nothing there. It’s really hard to predict Progress is slow. They’re fighting for every foot. The sand is too fine even for their drill. The walls of the bore hole are starting to collapse. Normally these kinds of rigs pump water into the bore hole to support its walls. But the sand is too fine, the water too thin. They need a thicker liquid. They’re forced to improvise, using only material they have on hand. Water... dirt. and cows. We brought in a small herd of cattle and turned them loose in a nearby water pit. The cattle stomped around and made lots of mud for us. The answer to all their problems is mud. With mud holding up the walls of the bore hole, they’re back on track. From then on, we operated the rig 24 hours a day. Curt’s innovation is still in use today, only now rigs use synthetic compounds. But drilling fluids like this are still called mud. It’s January 10, 1901.The Hamills have been drilling for over two months. They’re past 1,100 feet--still no break through. Another 100 and they'll have to quit. Then....I walked over and looked down the hole there. I heard-- sort of heard something kind of bubbling just a little bit, and looked down there. And here, this frothy oil was starting up. It was just breathing, like, you know, coming up and sinking back with the gas pressure and it kept coming up and over the rotary table, and each flow a little higher, This is a day that changes America forever. Clear the rig, clear the rig! Finally, it came up with such momentum that it just shot up clear through the top of the derrick. The guides of crude oil shoot almost 200 feet into the air. The Hamills were hoping for 50 barrels a day. The well would soon be pumping out over 80,000,making the US the largest oil producer in the world. Overnight, the backers funding the rig are nearly $40 million richer. The Hamill brothers become legends. The oil just burst out of the ground, and it spewed for days and days before they could bring it under control. It really marked the beginning of the petroleum age in the United States, and one could argue, in the world as well. Spindle top changes everything.

Spindle top changes everything. Oil production in the US instantly increases 50%.Within a year, 500 oil companies are born, including Texaco and Gulf. The price of oil plummets from $2 a barrel to 3￠.It's cheaper than water. Cheap enough to turn into gasoline. Around the turn of the century, millions of Americans live their entire lives within 50 miles of their home. Gasoline makes the US mobile in ways never thought possible. Today the average American drives the equivalent of 2 and half round-trips to the moon. One man will seize the opportunity in cheap oil and change the face of the nation. Detroit, 1908.Henry Ford: maverick, visionary, obsessive...a man with a bad reputation. Recently let go by the company that will soon become Cadillac, he launches his third attempt to build cars. But these will be different. There are only 8,000 cars in the US. Expensive toys for the wealthy, like owning a private jet today. There were dozens and dozens of small companies building cars that were essentially play things for the rich. They were notoriously unreliable, they were not standardized, they were hand-built, essentially. And if you were to own a car, you practically had to have your own mechanic on staff as well to keep the thing running. Nobody’s figured out how to make a car that's affordable and low-cost. Henry Ford is about to change that. It won't just change how cars are made. It will change how everything is made. Detroit, 1913.Henry Ford isn't just making a revolutionary car. He’s making it in a revolutionary way. The production line. High volume, low cost. Products identical. The man who places the part doesn't fasten it. The man who puts in a bolt doesn't put on the nut, and the man who puts on the nut doesn't tighten it. Work is standardized. Simplified. It’s a more efficient way to make... everything. Mass production sweeps the nation. And it changes the world. To be an assembly-line worker, you did not have to have a high degree of skill, you didn't have to be a card-carrying machinist or whatever it might be. All you had to do was to learn how to turn the same wrench on the same nut 5,000 times a day and that was your job. Prices plummet. In 1913, a Model T cost two years' wages. By 1924, it's just three months. The Model T, without question, is one of the single objects in the history of America that changed America. What Henry Ford developed was the car for the common man.

The impact of this little car is massive.300,000 sold in 1913.By 1924,there's a new Model T every 24 seconds. Suddenly, this form of transportation, which was entirely new, was something that people could actually engage in. They could afford it. It wasn't like a spaceship, where there are only several of them, and they're millions and millions of dollars. Washington State, 1915.The Model T's success is creating a nation of student drivers. Roscoe Sheller used to be a dairy farmer. He’s about to start a new job...car salesman. The pay is fantastic. The only problem is... he can't drive. You’re not riding a horse, just take it easy. His boss offers to teach him the morning of his first day at work. It’s not long before Roscoe has his first customers. Luckily, there's a manual called” How to Drive an Automobile.”, Cranking is an art that is essential for the new motorist to become proficient in. It is always a good plan.... undoubtedly a good idea to learn to steer first. Steering is a very simple manipulation. An excellent plan for the beginning is to find a long, straight and slightly downhill road, free of other traffic...Roscoe takes his customers for a test drive. Most are used to a horse and buggy. The majority of first-time drivers completely ignored corners. Instead of using a brake, they shouted "Whoa" at the top of their lung power. Often, they demand I teach his wife and every kid old enough to reach the pedals.

America's love affair with the automobile has begun. The American has a great sense of freedom and not being tied to one place. If I don't like it here, I’m gonna pack everything in the car. They don't require anybody's permission, they don't have to sign out, and the automobile really enables that. When I came to America, the first thing I want to think about,” How can I get hold of a car?” I had a love affair with cars from the very beginning, because this method of movement that can enable you to see vast, expansive space is something I never experienced in China. Never. This is something I wanted to do almost more than anything else, is to buy a car. Roscoe Sheller is one of America's pioneer car dealers. Today America drives 2.7 trillion miles a year in vehicles that are descendants of Henry Ford's Model T. Cars. By the roaring '20s,they are transforming the lives of millions. Now you don't have to live near work. Cities explode outwards, creating giant suburbs. Brand-new highways are built. Shopping malls with giant car parks. The biggest urban sprawl of all, Los Anglesite center of a massive entertainment industry.800 films produced a year in the 1920s,double the amount today. A feverish land grab is in full swing. High in the hills, a real-estate syndicate buys 500 acres. They hire stonemasons from Italy to build luxury mansions overlooking the city. Dream homes fit for oil tycoons and film stars. To kick off their investment: the biggest advertising sign on the planet.4,000 light bulbs announce the name of this luxury development. Hollywood land. Movie director Busby Berkeley buys the first house on the plot. It supposed to be a temporary sign. In 1949, the end is removed. It becomes just "Hollywood.”. Built on oil, fueled by cars and movies, A is the fastest-growing city in the world.

But none of this incredible growth has been possible without one other vital ingredient Water. William Mohole land: Irish immigrant, tenacious, ruthless. Superintendent of the LA City Water Company. It’s 1904.LA is running out of water. It’s headline news. It’s up to Mohole land to find it. His reputation is on the line. The story of the West is the story of water, because you can't turn this region that has a fertile soil and sites for city development without that incredibly scarce resource in the West. Southern California. Rainfall as low as 2 inches a year. Temperatures as high as 134 degrees. The surrounding mountains get plenty of rainfall. The problem is, it stays there’ll has one small river. It provides a fraction of the water the growing city will need. California is at the edge of the great Western desert, and in order for large numbers of people to live in the cities of California, means had to be provided to get the water, from where it was in California, mountains, to where the people were, in the cities. Mohole land must find water. The fate of Southern California hangs in the balance. His search begins just outside the city. Nothing. He moves 200 miles northeast. Still nothing. Finally, he reaches an area called Owens Valley. It’s perfect. Water flowing out of the mountains has formed a massive lake, 110 square miles. Result, an oasis of lush farmland. Locals call it the Switzerland of California. Aided only by gravity, this water could flow all the way to Los Angelical you need is an aqueduct. It sounds simple, but the engineering feat will be phenomenal. It’s going to take 223 miles of steel pipe and concrete waterway,120 miles of railroad track,218 miles of power lines,500 miles of road. If Munhall land can pull it off, he’ll completely transform not just Abut the entire state. The first giant step in creating the largest agricultural economy in the country. But it will come at a cost. The Los Angeles Aqueduct.5 years, 5,000 men.223 miles of steel and concrete that change the face of the West. At the time, the largest water project in the world. It cost the lives of 43 men. Finally, in 1913...it's finished. This is yours! It is your own fidelity and unfaltering courage that made the work possible. The aqueduct is completed, and it is good. The aqueduct saves Los Anglesite city grows from 250,000 in 1900 to 2 million in 1930.The federal government's investment in projects that move water in the West is more deeply formative of the character of the Western region than all the cowboys and sodbusters and wagon trains and pioneers there ever were. But for Owens Valley, the source of the water, it's a disaster. The lake is sucked dry, creating a giant wasteland. Local farmers attempt to blow the aqueduct up, over 10 times. But it's an unsinkable contest. This was controversial stuff. There was a lot of backroom politicking, a lot of buying people off. This made a lot people unhappy. This devastated a region of California, the source of that water, but it was enormously beneficial, and in fact, one could argue Los Angeles could not have grown in the way it did, without Munhall land architecting that aqueduct of water being brought to that area. Owens Valley farmland remains barren for decades. But in the 1990s, LA authorities begin the long process of restoring it. It’s always been true that if you want something great, you may have to give up something great to get there. We’ve sacrificed our blood and treasure for just about every great thing in America. The Los Angeles Aqueduct remains one of America's most ambitious engineering efforts. When they built the aqueduct to bring water down across an entire state, what a feat that was and how it so fundamentally changed a whole part, of the state of California. And when you fly over California now, I always look out the window and I look down, you can see that glittering silver ribbon that runs the entire length of the state. It was always just magical to me.

1914.The aqueduct is a year old. America is booming. World War I creates massive demand for weapons, cars and oil. In just four years, the economy doubles. America is poised to become the richest nation on earth. Three generations from the end of slavery, black Southerners are on the move in search of a better life. Between 1915 and 1930,one and half Million head north--one in seven of the entire African-American population of the US. It’s called the Great Migration. The North represented the promised land, to blacks in the South. If you can go North, you can work.

If you can go North, you’re not going to have to step off the curb when whites walk down the block. If you can go North, you can live in better neighborhoods and your children get a better education. Many head for the Ford plant in Detroit. Ford is unique in paying black and white workers the same, a staggering $5 a day, five times more than a sharecropper's wage in Georgia. But equal pay doesn't mean equal treatment. Frank Hades is an engineer at the plant. You can have them on some dirty, rough job where there wouldn't be many whites to complain against them, but if you try to mix them in the assembly lines or any place elsewhere whites predominated and hung their coats touching those of whites, you know, you couldn't do that. Many white workers fear losing jobs to the new black workforce. Resentment is at the boiling point. The denial of white privilege clashing with the ambition of blacks looking for the promised land inevitably led to an explosion. The fuse will be lit in the summer of 1919.Chicago.There's no official segregation, but it's everywhere. Even on the beaches of Lake Michigan. Whites refuse to sell their houses to blacks. Homeowners in Hyde Park and Kenwood hold a meeting. The Negro invasion of the district is the worst calamity that has struck the city. Property owners should be notified to stand together block by block to prevent such invasion. Sunday, July 27th,a day that will be etched in history.17-year-old Eugene Williams skips church with some friends to go for a swim. John Harris is with them. We could swim under water and dive and come up. Swim, kick, dive and play around. A group of black men wander over to the white beach. They are not welcome. Don’t you come near me like that! Eugene’s raft is also drifting in that direction. It can only spell trouble. July 1919.On a beach in Chicago, tensions are rising. A white bather throws rocks. John Harris thinks it's a game. He’d take a rock and throw it, and we'd duck. One fell would say,” Look out!" And we would duck it. But it's no game. This is racial tension transplanted to city life. Eugene！Help! Somebody help! By the time they get Eugene Williams back to the beach, he’s dead. The police officer on duty is Daniel Callahan. He refuses to arrest the white man who threw the fatal rock...but arrests a black man instead. This is how the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 begins. Eight bloody days.500 wounded.38 die...23 of them black. But the violence is just beginning. Riots erupt in 24 more cities across America. It’s called "The Red Summer.” Many found that the promised land was not the promise they thought. The North was better than the South, but there was not the land of milk and honey. The divide separating black and white widens. Ghettos expand. Harlem in New York. Paradise Valley in Detroit. The Hill District in Pittsburgh. In Chicago, the South Side. Separate, but not equal. Black Americans are on the outside looking in. But black neighborhoods also mean black majorities, and in America, majority means power. In 1928,voters on Chicago's South Side elect Oscar De Priest, the first black congressman in the North.80 years later, another Chicago resident becomes the nation's first black president. It's 1920.The country is at a turning point. For the first time, more Americans live in urban areas than rural. Cities become a symbol for decadence and danger. Jazz, cabaret, liquor. It will take the shirt off your back! It should be whipped out of the land of America with a whip of scorpions! Billy Sunday, retired baseball player. Reformed drinker. The most famous preacher in the country. I go to a young man up on the scaffold...America has a booze problem. Drink! You will affect only those...At its peak, there's a saloon for every 300 people,20 times more than today.50% of all crime involves alcohol. When you come staggering home cussing right and left...Billy Sunday isn't the only one who thinks alcohol is ruining America. Religious groups rally. Industrialists say it affects productivity. Women campaign against drunk men beating up their wives. Alcohol is the crystal math of its day. For many, a total ban is the only solution. On January 16, 1919,the 18th amendment to the Constitution is ratified. Prohibition makes the manufacture and sale of alcohol illegal. This period in the early 20th century, just captured a whole swirl of desire to kind of rein in what's happening, shape it, come up with new policies that will ensure that people will get along, they will live virtuous lives, so Prohibition is this grand experiment. But Prohibition also creates a nation of criminals. This is one of them. Willie Carter Sharpe, 26.Thrill seeker .Outlaw. They call her "The Rum-Running Queen.”, It’s 1928. Prohibition is in its eighth year. It was the excitement that got me. We were mostly kids who liked the excitement. Cars scattering, dashing along the streets. Behind her is a convoy of moonshine. Franklin County, Virginia, is one of the biggest moonshine producers in the country. Bootleg liquor headed across the county line. Sharpe’s job, decoy, to distract the Fusin Franklin County,99 residents out of 100 are thought to be involved. Secret stills are everywhere. Moonshine is flooding across the country,100 million gallons a year. Even the President has a private wine cellar. It seemed so ridiculous. Anyone would ever tell you cannot legislate morality; you certainly can't stop people from drinking. People need a drink at the end of the day. Outrunning the cops is the new extreme sport. Locals witness Carter Sharpe in action. I saw her go right through our town. There was a federal car after her. They were trying to shoot down her tires. She was driving at 75 miles an hour. She got away. She gets away because of this: An ordinary car soaped up for more horsepower. A supercharger rams additional air into the cylinders. The result, America's first muscle cars. They’re so popular, they kick-start a new national pastime, stock- car racing. Even today, there's a driving maneuver called” The bootleg turn.” But there's a darker side to bootlegging. The illegal liquor trade is worth tens of billions in today's money, and it's not Willie Carter Sharpe who's in charge. It’s gangsters. Organized crime has a stranglehold stretching across the country.

Lucky Lucian in New York, Frank "Cha-Cha" De Mayo, Kansas City. Joseph "Iron Man" Arizona in LA. The Micaville family, Detroit. Harry Rosen, Philadelphia. Charles "King" Solomon, Boston. And in Chicago, the most notorious gangster of algal Capone. He earns over $100 a minute from illegal alcohol. That’s $1,500 today. But his luck is about to change.2122 North Clark Street, headquarters of Capone's bitter rival, George "Bugs" Moran. February 14, 1929.Two men in police uniform arrive. Normally the cops leave without arrests after a quick payoff. But this isn't a normal day, and these aren't regular cops. What happens on Valentine's Day 1929 will change the course of Prohibition in America. Chicago, 1929.More than half the city's cops are on the take. In a North Side garage, seven gangsters are lined up. They think it's routine. But today is no shakedown. Behind them, a group of men arrive, two carrying Thompson submachine guns. It’s the most notorious slaying in Mob history. The question is, who's behind the hit? The police or Al Capone? Detectives and photographers flood the scene. This shocking picture will appear in newspapers around the US. This is what Prohibition has come to. America has had enough. The federal government is forced to act. Major Calvin Goddard, methodical, clinical, weapons expert. Pioneer of a brand-new science, ballistic forensics. For the first time, vital clues like bullet casings at a murder scene can be analyzed. Goddard’s work leads to one of the first forensic crime labs in America. It will revolutionize the work of the Fishes job, to find out who is behind the St. Valentine's Day massacre. When a gun fires, it leaves marks on the bullet casing as unique as a fingerprint. By analyzing casings at the murder scene, Goddard establishes that just two Tommy guns were fired. Neither is a police gun. Everything points to Capone. But convicting Capone of murder won't be easy. He has an alibi. He was in Florida at the time. They’ll have to get him on a different charge. Frank Wilson, accountant. A very different kind of crime buster. He’s an agent of the Bureau of Internal Revenue in Dacha’s going after Capone on tax evasion. In 1913,the 16th amendment gives the federal government the right to tax personal income. Even criminals have to pay taxes. Capone is one of the richest men in the country. He should be paying 25% tax. Between 1925 and 1929,he pays nothing. The defendant himself had no bank accounts, kept no book records of activities, bought no property in his own name. He conducted all his financial dealings with currency. To secure a conviction, Wilson needs to prove, Capone has an income on which he is paying no tax. He uncovers a ledger, confiscated from a business called Hawthorne Smoke Shop, thought to be a Capone front. It’s a detailed record of a gambling business, but no taxes have been paid on the income from this business. If Wilson can establish a direct link with Capone, he may be able to nail the nation's most notorious criminal on tax evasion. Wilson studies the ledger but can't connect it to Capone. Then, a breakthrough. The handwriting. A careful comparison of the handwriting in the ledger with specimens from various employees of Capone organization established that the handwriting belonged to the managers and the cashier of the Hawthorne Smoke Shop. The handwriting proves Capone's connection to the business. It’s the vital evidence. On October 18, 1931,Al Capone is found guilty of tax evasion, and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Frank Wilson found out that he was not paying his taxes. It’s an odd thing, this man who had done all these other things, ordered the execution of lots of people, was responsible for the murder of people, and they get him on tax evasion. Tax is no small matter. Prohibition has been a disaster. It has massively increased the stranglehold of organized crime. It’s cost the government billions in lost tax revenue. Gangsters like Capone have become rich at America's expense, but now more than ever, the government needs cash. The stock-market crash in 1929 has brought the economy to its knees. The government is broke. A levy on alcohol is a solution. On December 5, 1933, Prohibition is abolished...killed by the need for cold, hard cash. It’s an extraordinary U-turn. The only time in history an amendment to the Constitution is repealed. The three decades of economic boom, fueled by oil, cars and the rapid growth of mega cities are now over. The country has hard times ahead. America boom. But now, it's bust. The Great Depression explodes across America. Social upheaval, poverty, drought. It’s time for America...to fight back. The American spirit is forged in the fires of Great Depression.

We are pioneers...and trailblazers. We fight for freedom. We transform our dreams into the truth. Our struggles will become a nation.

Episode Nine Bust

The 1920s is boom time in America. Money flows and oil wells explode. Though farmers are struggling, cities expand. Skyscrapers go higher than the stock market. Aspirations run wild for cars and suburban housing projects like Hollywood land. By 1929, more money is spent on advertising than on education.

We got a little carried away with consumerism and capitalism，and it bite us in the butt.

The boom is built on credit. In 1929, $6 billion of goods are bought on credit, but 80% of Americans have no savings at all. Some stocks are valued at 50 times what they're really worth. A giant bubble just ready to burst. By October 1929, the inevitable happens. The stock market loses 12 times more money in three weeks, than the US government uses in a year.

The entire country could've gone down, and almost did, from an economic point of view.

For a year after the stock-market crash, America's economy teeters on the edge of the abyss. December 1930, the streets of New York are quiet. It's been a year since the stock-market crash of 1929, but only 2% of the population own stocks. The other 98% get on with their lives. Until today. This man is about to shake America's confidence in its banks to its very core. He's put his money in his local bank. The Bank of United States, a bank that has only hours left to exist. But a newspaper article questions his bank's stability. This is the moment that begins a chain reaction, that will shake the whole country's economy...

Yet we don't even know the man's name. But his story was recorded by "The New York Times." A small merchant in the Bronx went to a branch of the Bank of United States and asked bank officials to dispose of his stock in the institution.

“Good day, sir, how may I help you? ” “Yes, I'd like to withdraw my shares from the bank.” “I beg your pardon, sir? ” Bank regulations are virtually nonexistent at the time. Bad real-estate investments mean the bank has only kept itself afloat by cooking the books.

“Good day, sir, how may I be of assistance? ” “I'd like to sell my shares.” “Well, the stock is a good investment, sir. I would advise against the sale.” “I want my money.” The last thing the bank needs is to hand out all its cash.We almost witnessed that fairly recently and I've seen what can go on, and I've seen travesty.

He departed and apparently spread a false report, that the bank had refused to sell his stock. By mid-afternoon, a considerable crowd had gathered outside the bank, estimated at between 20,000 and 25,000 persons. This is the day worry turns to panic. Would the banks go the same way as the stock market? Hysteria spreads like wildfire. $2 million are withdrawn from this branch alone. Even though all the anxious depositors who asked for their money before closing time were given it...the crowd became restless. A squad of police were sent in to control them. The trouble spreads to other branches. By the next morning, the Bank of United States has collapsed. Confidence in US banks disintegrates. In the last 60 days of 1930, 600 banks shut. Banks close in wave after wave across the country. By 1933, there are 28 states without a single bank open. Unlike today, the federal government does not bail out the banks. Unemployment goes from 4 million in 1930 to 12 million in 1932. Every day, 1,000 homes are repossessed. 200,000 vagrant children wander the country. 34 million Americans have no source of income.

It was an American tragedy, the Depression was, and it took American ingenuity to lift America out of it.

The fight back starts here. Vast building projects, publicly funded...privately built. This is Frank "Hurry Up" Crowe. He's already built six dams on time and under budget. And now he has his eye on something even bigger: the Colorado River.

“I was wild to build this dam, the biggest dam ever built by anyone, anywhere.” The Colorado River is one of the most powerful rivers in the world.

Every second, twice as much water tears through these canyons than goes over Niagara Falls. Frank Crowe's plan is to harness it. The water and hydroelectricity will transform the whole of the Southwest. March 4, 1931. The government gives the go-ahead to build the Hoover Dam.

The Hoover Dam, even before they started building it, it became a metaphor, people saw it as a statement of the American's fortitude, of our ingenuity, of our talent for hard work and for our willingness to transform the environment around us.

The Hoover Dam will cost nearly $1 billion in today's money. Frank Crowe is offered a 2.5% cut of the dam's profits if he gets the job done quickly. It should take 6 years to build, but Frank says it can be done in 4.

42,000 men come from across the country looking for jobs on the biggest construction site in America. Frank Crowe takes 5,000 men willing to work harder and faster than anyone else. The survival of the fittest. Men are ready to do anything for work.

There's a large cando attitude in the United States and it come soon the fact that over the centuries, there has been a lot of adversity, and we have usually triumphed. First was the triumph of developing this whole vast continent, putting in railroad lines, putting in all the civil engineering to support it, putting in Hoover Dam. These were all incredible challenges.

There are two stages to building the dam. First, divert the river around the worksite. Second, build the colossal wall. To divert the raging Colorado, four massive tunnels are drilled through 3 miles of solid rock. Each tunnel is as wide as a four lane highway and is tall as a 5-story building. A million and a half gallons of water flow through here every second.

“The Hoover Dam was a statement about what America is all about. Nothing is too big to take on. We are going to change this country.”

If Frank Crow was in a hurry before, now the pressure is double. Time and money. The tunnels can only be dug when the river is low. That's only four months in a year. And the money. There is a $3,000 fine for every day the project falls behind the schedule. The clock is ticking. Frank's answer is as bold as he is. Gigantic mobile drilling rigs. 4 stories of scaffolding mounted on the backs of trucks. Up to 30 men drill into the rock around the clock, 24 hours a day. They move ten times faster than normal drilling. Temperatures hit 140 degrees in the tunnels. Frank just pushes harder. The drilling crews compete against each other. Which will drill the furthest every day? As drill man Marion Allen puts it: It didn't make any difference what you did, but you had to beat that other crew.

Deadly fumes pump out of the trucks. They build up in the tunnel. They get into the men's lungs, into their blood. “You men, get him out of here.” Carbon monoxide poisoning claims hundreds of men. “I went to work down there one night, and there was 17 men in my crew. The next morning, myself and three others was all that was left. All the rest was taken out sick. It was rough.” Crowe has only one working rule. “To hell with excuses-- get results.” But the drive to get results quickly will have deadly consequences. Men desperate to keep their jobs make mistakes like trying to clear rubble before the blasting is finished.

You are having to dynamite areas and you have to dig out. There's machinery, but you're still using a lot of pick and shovel. Treacherous work.

A miner's wife remembers one worker, desperate to keep his job. “Everybody was trying to work in the tunnels. This man was so anxious to work that he just went into the tunnel too quick. Just as he put his shovel in, there was a delayed blast.” The company says 96 men died. The workers claim it's hundreds. The tunnels are finished 11 months ahead of time. But that's just the beginning of the Hoover Dam. The hardest job is yet to come: building the biggest concrete structure on earth.

Frank Crowe is driving ahead the building of the Hoover Dam, the biggest engineering project America has ever seen. He's driving his men hard. The crews work day and night. A sea of concrete rises in the canyon, as thick as two football fields laid end to end. 5,000 men, 50,000 machines and tools, the best engineers alive, enough materials to fill a train 1,000 miles long. This is the 1930s' equivalent of putting a man on the moon.

6.6 million tons of concrete have to be poured. That's enough to lay a 4-foot-wide sidewalk around the earth. How to pour that much concrete and get it where it's needed? Frank Crowe designs the most sophisticated cable system ever built. Giant bottom-opening buckets. They pour the concrete into molds exactly where it is wanted. Concrete was invented by the Romans 2,000 years ago, but the Hoover Dam is the first large concrete dam in history. Today virtually all dams are made of concrete.

It's malleable and it's strong. It's the world's favorite building material for any structure. Frank is up against the clock, and he has a big problem. The curing concrete generates heat. If the dam were constructe d in a single, continuous pour, it would put out enough heat to bake half a million loaves of bread every day for three years. But worse, the dam would take 125 years to harden. Frank Crowe's got no time for that.

Backs against the wall, we figured out who we were. We worked our way out of that Depression.

The secret of cooling the concrete lies within the dam itself. 582 miles of 1-inch pipes carry ice-cold water from the very river the dam is taming.

No one had ever thought of this before, and those pipes are still in the Hoover Dam today.

Frank "Hurry Up" Crowe lives up to his name. The Hoover Dam is completed on September 30,1935, two years ahead of schedule. Frank receives a bonus worth over $4 million in today's money.

For those workers to have built something as monumental and as challenging as Hoover Dam was, it was an astonishing feat of construction and I think it gave us all a sense of the possible.

1936. The Hoover Dam is the largest hydroelectric power-producing facility in the world. Each of the 17 generators weighs more than four jumbo jets. Together, they can supply power to 750,000 people in booming cities like Los Angeles. The dam creates Lake Mead, the biggest reservoir in America, big enough to flood the entire state of New York under a foot of water. It helps California produce more food, for the United States than any other state. The Hoover Dam workers make something else boom as well. A little town 30 miles away where they go to drink and gamble. Its name: Las Vegas. As the wife of one Hoover Dam worker puts it: When men worked in such dangerous surroundings, you couldn't blame a lot of fellas for sort of letting their hair down. They were having fun. 1930. 5,000 people live in Las Vegas. Then the dam workers arrive. Then the tourists. Then the gambling. Now, over 37 million people come every year to party in Las Vegas. After 70 years, the Hoover Dam still supplies power to the people of Nevada, Arizona, and California. One Las Vegas hotel has the biggest flashlight on earth, 40 billion candle power. You can read a newspaper 10 miles out in space by its light.

1934. Darkness falls across America. The worst environmental disaster in American history. Dust storms hit New York, Chicago and Boston. In Manhattan, the streetlights come on at midday. A monstrous dust storm 1,800 miles wide from the Great Plains to the Atlantic Ocean. The air turns to earth. The storm carries 3 tons of dust for every American alive.Ships stop off the Eastern Seaboard, not sure what is happening. The cloud reminds the captain of the ship "The Deutschland" of the sands of the Sahara blowing out to sea. But now the clouds are devouring the Statue of Liberty. Dust storms were born out of a 100 million-acre dead zone 2,000 miles away in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and Colorado. The Great Plains had once been the most fertile grasslands on earth. The topsoil was 6 feet deep, but it has been plowed up and used up by four generations of farmers. Now the sun has dried it up.

What really did the farmers in was an environmental cataclysm that involved an extended drought, high winds, and the loss of millions and millions of tons of topsoil. It was almost as though the heavens themselves had turned against the farmers.

By 1930, the rains virtually stop. The lighter organic matter, the best soil, is literally gone with the wind. The tiny particles of soil are suspended in the air. Then a freakish phenomenon happens. Static electricity builds between the earth and the dust. Like a magnet, the static electricity sucks up more and more dust, feeding itself, growing in size and power. A monster is created. The dust is lifted up to 10,000 feet. Powered by high-altitude winds, the monster rips across the country looking for prey.

April 14, 1935. Lamar, Colorado. Louise Walton, once a Broadway dancer and an actress. She gives up the glamour to breathe the clean, dry air of the prairies. The doctors say her lungs need it. Louise thrives on the Southern Plains, and so did her six-year-old daughter Jeanne...until recently. Their rural dream has become a nightmare. 49 dust storms in the last three months. But today the air is crisp and clear. Jeanne has just got out of hospital with respiratory problems because of the dust storms. Early that morning, 600 miles north, a cold front from Canada had hit a warm high- pressure front--perfect conditions to create the winds for a dust storm. But this is not just any duster. By the time it passes Bismarck, North Dakota, it's the biggest, strongest dust storm ever seen in America. The cold front drives the storm south across the prairies. It's heading straight for Louise and Jeanne's place at 65 miles per hour. It grows more and more powerful. It produces enough static electricity to power New York City. By the time the storm reaches Lamar, colorado, it is 200 miles wide. The temperature plunges. 2:40 p.M. Jeanne finds herself looking into the heart of the storm.

“Mommy!” “Jeannie? ” “It was like I was caught in a whirlpool. All of a sudden, it got completely dark. I couldn't see a thing.” “Mommy!” The dust clouds contain over 300,000 tons of Great Plains topsoil. People tie themselves to ropes before going to a barn just a few hundred feet away. Cattle die, and when they are cut open, their stomachs are full of sand.

There are these memories of people that go for days and days and days holed up inside of their little ranch houses, and they never see the light of day because the dust is so severe and it's so thick, over hundreds of miles. For days, they don't see light.

The tiny dust particles drill into the child's lungs. She comes down with dust pneumonia, the brown plague. The Red Cross set up six emergency hospitals in Kansas, Colorado, and Texas to deal with the rise of respiratory infections. Louise Walton had come to Colorado for the air, and now doctors tell her that her little girl could die of it.

There is an Exodus of Biblical proportions underway on the Great Plains. By 1936, farmers are losing $25 million a day.

“Farming is no longer a possibility. The Great Depression takes hold. Their mortgage comes due, they can't pay it-- they're not growing crops. They lose the family farm, they lose their identity.”

A century before, a half a million people had gone west on these same trails looking for hope. Now 250,000 of them are fleeing the Dust Bowl in despair. But not everyone has the choice to leave. Jeanne and Louise survive Black Sunday and stay put. 2/3 of Dust Bowlers stick it out. They have nothing left but their determination and will.

Radio is one of the few things to bring comfort to those wh o stay. It connects them to the rest of the country. By 1935, a network of stations with 10,000-watt transmitters links the country together. The same voice can be heard from coast to coast. Radios become the country's most popular household item. By 1934, there are over 18 million radio sets. 40% of America lives in isolated rural communities, but now they can get local news and weather, farm prices, and be part of national events.

America was built for the introduction of radio. This is a vast land. It has a lot of different layers to it as you go across the country.

America was learning about itself through news from across the country and around the world. “Germany is rearming.” Regular news reports bring international events straight into American homes. Little do. Americans realize that news from so far away will change America forever. “... will tie Hitler's ambitious...”

The struggle against the Great Depression continues. The American people will not give up. The French gave America the Statue of Liberty. Now America builds her own monument to its people's tenacity. Blasted out of solid rock, Mount Rushmore is created.

“The blasting of Washington's chin and the first step in the world's largest monument is finished.”

It began in 1927, desolate corner of South Dakota, as a way to attract tourists. Now it's a federally funded project, part of President Roosevelt's New Deal, to reinvigorate the country.

“Soon they'll start on Jefferson, then Lincoln The heads alone will be 60 feet high and Washington's nose is 19 feet long, as big as the head of the Sphinx in Egypt. You can get a good idea of the size of the monument by these men playing leapfrog along the nose of the father of his country. It's a grand undertaking.”

“They were, in a way, our pyramids. We were building something that would last and be a statement about who we were.” The 500-foot cliff is being sculpted by dynamite...a dangerous way to make a living for drillers like Bill Reynolds. Below Bill are 20 charges of dynamite able to blast 3 tons of solid rock. Above him is 60 feet of sheer cliff... where the detonator and the hoist man are. “Take me up!” Drillers always move up to stay above any charges, just in case they should accidentally go off. “Up! Up!”

The charges are due to be set off at 4:00 p.m. “That's good!”

It's only 3:34, so Bill's not worried. But behind him, a mighty Midwestern storm is brewing. He has no idea what is happening 5 miles away. The electrical charge runs straight down the power lines into Mount Rushmore...and the detonator. Bill Reynolds survives with only a burst eardrum and his boots blown off. He's back on the job the very next day.

Mount Rushmore becomes a symbol of pride for the whole country. Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Thomas Jefferson's portraits join George Washington's. Ordinary men of the same proportions would stand as high as 40-story buildings and could wade the Mississippi River without even getting their knees wet. 3 extra inches of granite cover the presidents' faces to allow for erosion by wind and rain. It takes 10,000 years to wear away an inch of granite. Mount Rushmore has been designed to wear back to its ideal shape in 30,000 years. It is a symbol of America's faith in its future as well as its past.

By 1936, one in six workers are still out of a job. Despite the government's public-works programs, there is little economic recovery. Public works aren't working. Free enterprise is stagnating. It will take World War II to pull America out of its economic slump.

“Louis in the front of the ring, Schmeling with his back to me...” June 19, 1936. America is already at war with Germany in Yankee Stadium. American Joe Louis fights German Max Schmeling, to be the number-one contender for the Heavyweight Championship of the world.

“And there was a hard left...” With a record of 24 straight wins, Joe is the 10:1 favorite. “Indeed Louis, a terrific right hand to the jaw...” 57 million people listen to the fight on the radio. “... while Louis is following it up with good short rights and lefts.” It's the 12th and last round. Joe Louis is taking a beating. “Schmeling's cut back and shot a hard right hand to Louis' jaw.” The grandson of slaves, his family driven out of Alabama by the Ku Klux Klan. The Depression takes his family's jobs. Unemployment amongst urban african-Americans is up to 50%. Joe keeps his family alive by boxing. Within three years, he's fought his way to the top.

These are not just two boxers, they're symbols of totalitarianism against democracy, supremacy against a nonracial kind of society.

America sees Schmeling as old. He's 30, Joe's 22. “Schmeling gets over two more hard rights to Louis' jaw. He has puffed up Louis' left cheek. And Louis is down!”

But tonight, Joe has underestimated his much older German opponent.

“And Louis is down! Hanging through the ropes, hanging badly. He is a very tired fighter. He is blinking his eyes, shaking his head. The count is done, the fight is over! The fight is over!” Schmeling wins, against all the odds. “Schmeling is the winner. Louis is completely out.” Germany is on the rise. America is on its knees. But not for long. America will get its revenge in the most politically charged fight of all time.

Boxer Joe Louis just knocked out by Max Schmeling. Germany is triumphant. America is in shock. It's a publicity dream for the Nazis. Adolf Hitler calls Schmeling an Aryan superman. Hitler considers Americans a mongrel race, doomed to the trash heap of history. Hitler says their "mistake" was freeing their slaves.

“I had been humiliated, and I had to prove that I was the best heavyweight around.”

A rematch is arranged, but this time, it'll be the fight that involves the whole world. Though attacked in the press, Joe just keeps training. In Germany, the Nazis expand their power. They build their army and prepare to attack their neighbors.

The second Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight took on a proportion far greater than any other fight in the history of boxing.

“This is the feature attraction, 15 rounds...” This fight cemented the unity of the people of the United States, vis-a-vis Nazi Germany. “Weighing 193, Max Schmeling.” And for one of the first times, if not the first time in American history, America symbolically was being represented by a black man.

“Wearing black trunks, the famous Detroit Brown Bomber, Joe Louis.” June 22, 1938. The rematch finally takes place. The hype is at a fever pitch. 70,000 people pour into Yankee Stadium to watch the fight live.

“Joe Louis in his corner, prancing and....” 70 million people tune in via radio across the country. Over 100 million listen in around the world, the biggest audience to that date for anything, anywhere.

“Max Schmeling standing calmly, getting last word from Doc Casey.” For Joe Louis, I can only imagine the immense pressure that he was under to go out there and perform because he had the whole-- almost the world on his back.

The fight is no longer just about boxing. It's a battle of ideologies, as Joe Louis knew all too well. Schmeling represented everything that Americans disliked, and they wanted him beat and beat good.

“And they're ready with the bell just about to ring. And there we are. And they got to the ring... And Joe Louis is in the center of the ring, Max going around. Joe Louis with two straight lefts to the chin. to the jaw. And, again, a right to the body. A left hook, and Louis hooks a left to Max's head quickly. And shoots over a high right to Max's head. Louis, a left to Max's jaw, a right to his head. Max shoots a hard right.”

Schmeling is stunned by the ferocity of Louis' attack.

“He's landed more blows in this one round than he landed in his five rounds with the other fights. ... Schmeling's going down. And Schmeling is down! The count is four. And Louis, right and left to the head, left to the jaw, a right to the head. And the German is watching carefully. And Schmeling is down. Schmeling is down. The count at five...Five, six, seven, eight. The fight is over...”

The second-shortest heavyweight title fight in history is over in only 124 seconds. “Max Schmeling is beaten in one round! The first time in a world heavyweight championship...” “I'm sure enough champion now.” At the end of the fight, Joe Louis, this inferior, this former slave's child, defeats the master race. Schmeling knows what his defeat will mean to the Nazis. “After this defeat, I no longer existed for Hitler. My name simply disappeared from the newspapers.”

Joe Louis is America's hero again. His victory is the comeback the whole country needs. Look, something's gonna knock you down, but you can't stay down.

You got to get back up and plow on. You can't sit around feeling sorry for yourself, and you certainly can't look back and reminisce about the good old times. You just got to keep on going forward and reinvent things. And I also believe that that is going to get us through the crises that we're facing right now.

The American spirit is forged in the fires of the Great Depression. But an even harder fight with Germany and her allies is still to come.

The United States of America will be attacked. Over 400,000Americans will die. The battle will be for survival. For America. For the world. World War II will transform America into the greatest power on earth. Nothing would ever be the same again.

World War II strikes America. The country fights back like never before. America becomes the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen. By entering the war, the United States transforms itself into a superpower in only four years. America prepares for battle.

Episode Ten World War II The 1930s meant poverty, no future. But with war comes purpose and determination. American industry goes into overdrive. It will go to war with the economic and military powers of the Axis: Germany, Italy and Japan. Now every weapon, ration, medical supply is mass-produced on a scale never seen before in human history. Sometimes it takes a terrific challenge and a horrific threat to the republic to discover how good you can be.

December 7, 1941, 200 miles north of Hawaii. A pack of cutting-edge killing machines are on a mission: To destroy the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese Zero was a better fighter than anything the Americans had produced at that time. The Japanese Zero, it can fly 2,000 miles without refueling-- perfect for a surprise attack. When Pearl Harbor was attacked,, it was one of the most stunning moments in American history. Now 183 Japanese bombers and fighters are heading straight for Hawaii. Another 170 follow right behind.

Japan has built an empire across Korea, Manchuria and Hong Kong. It wants the whole Pacific Ocean. But the US fleet in Pearl Harbor stands in its way.

Opana Mobile Radar Station, 30 miles north of Pearl Harbor, radar operator Joe Lockhard makes first contact. What's this? Two blips are showing something out to sea. Radar is still experimental technology in 1941. Its importance is about to be realized. Michael said, if I could reach out and touch you from greater distances, I had a tactical strategic advantage. Radar will evolve into a system essential to the modern world, tracking 10 million flights around America and 5 billion passengers around the world every year. Definitely incoming. So far, America has kept out of the Second World War. William said, We had almost our whole fleet in one little harbor, one little area. We were sitting ducks. But then again, we trusted in the Japanese. At the same time, we were having peace talks with them. They even gave us a peace medal. America is about to receive the biggest wake-up call it's ever known.

Operator, private Joseph McDonald of the 580th Aircraft Warning Division: “Yeah, this is Opana. It looks like there are a large number of planes coming in from the north, three points east. ” “I think everyone's gone off shift. Hold on. ” It's early Sunday morning. Japan is over 4,000 miles from Hawaii. Pearl Harbor is not expected to be attacked. The surprise attack flaunts the specialty of American rifle men in the War of Independence. The tactic that made America free is now being used against it.

“We still got planes coming in. It looks like an awful big flight.” “Okay.” Lieutenant Kermit Tyler said. He knows there is a flight of American B-17s due in today. He assumes that's what's on the screen. “Look, don't worry about it.” “What do you think it is, sir?” “Nothing. ” Though radar is invented and used by the British as early as 1935. This SCR-270 mobile radar system was developed by the US Army, but radar is still considered a gadget by the military. There are only five radar trucks to cover the whole of the Hawaiian islands, and they're only manned three hours a day. 20 miles. Radar has another weak point: It can't see through Hawaii's mountains. The low-flying Japanese squadron vanishes from the screen. Shift over, there's nothing more the men can do. McDonald types up his report: “Hey, Bob, take a look at this, will you?” Today, America pays the price for neglecting radar. “When did this come in?” “At 7:50 a.m.” “the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor., Fire!”

Most of the marines and sailors were still in their rack. They were still asleep. We had no idea that this was gonna happen. But we all know that it did. The Japanese have prepared this attack for a year. They have rehearsed bombing a model of Pearl Harbor in Japan, until they reach an 80% hit rate. All eight battleships are put out of action. 1,178 Americans are wounded. 2,403 are killed. Private McDonald's report was finally read, but by then, it was too late. “A day that will live in infamy. We were completely unprepared for that, emotionally, and it turned the country on a dime, overnight.” Antiwar people were down, signing up to join the Navy, the Army, or the Marines-- whatever was required. 27 hours after the attack, America declares war on Japan. Three days later, the US is at war with Germany. “It unleashed the wrath of America,” Michael said, “and I think it gave us an energy hat carried us through the rest of the war.”

“Once provoked, that massive tiger of engineering was awakened. We had factories that were sitting underutilized in Detroit and around the country because of the Great Depression. We were ready to go on a building spree. The sleeping giant awakens. America transforms into an arsenal of democracy. The nation sets to work. Before the war, there were 3 million unemployed. Now, America's huge potential is being realized. There was no country that had a deeper economic base,” David said, “and an enormous pool of not just labor, but of scientists and engineers and technologists.”

An American icon is born, the general-purpose vehicle, known as the GP, or the jeep. It's made for war: tough, fast and low to the ground. It's 37 inches high, has a flat hood and a folding windscreen. Its low profile makes it difficult to line up in an enemy's sights. It's small, but can carry up to seven men. Even the front bumper is a seat. An M1 carbine gun goes just below the windscreen. There's a shovel and an ax to dig yourself out of trouble. There's a shovel and an ax to dig yourself out of trouble. There are jerricans of gas to get you home. If the jeep flips over, you just lift it out. It weighs in at a lean 2,315 pounds, light enough to be put in gliders and dropped behind enemy lines. What the jeep symbolized in World War II was not cutting-edge technology, although it was a four-wheel-drive vehicle, so it was very capable, but what the jeep really showed was the power of American manufacturing. Designed by Bantam and produced by Willys-Overland and Ford, three jeeps are produced every four minutes, by the end of the war. Over the course of the war, we deployed over 600,000 jeeps. To fly around this open vehicle at top speed was just something every American boy wanted to grow up to do. To this day, I mean, part of the boom in SUVs that we saw was that notion that you want a vehicle that can go anywhere, that can do anything. That's a very American spirit and it really started with the jeep.

Jeeps, tanks and every other weapon of war, will be produced in record numbers. But America's best-kept secret weapon of World War II has yet to be revealed. America sets to work. The plan: overwhelm the enemy through mass production. 88,000 tanks. 7,333 ships. 20 million rifles and small arms and 40 billion bullets produced in four years. 43 million men are registered for combat service, but America needs more manpower. The answer is the best-kept secret weapon of World War II. "It was actually the women back in this nation. "William said," that were the ones working in the factories, building the ships, building the airplanes. You know, so they are actually the ones that, logistically, won the war for us." Women like Peggy Blakey, a migrant farm worker. Now she works in a munitions factory, like 2 million other women. The Depression is suddenly over. The factory used to make fireworks. Now it's pumping out 20-milli meter tracer shells. Tracer shells leave a trail of burning chemicals containing magnesium. See where it's going and you can hit your target. The pressure to produce quickly is real. So is the danger. Just combing your hair could kill you. Static electricity and gunpowder equal explosion. But the risk is worth it. Peggy makes real money. $32 a week."To us, it was just an absolute miracle. Before that, we made nothing. Now we'd have money to buy shoes and a dress and pay rent and get some food on the table. And pay taxes." Tax returns jump from less than 4 million in 1939 to 42 million in 1945. World War II will cost $300 billion twice as much as the federal government had spent since George Washington. Women's salaries set off a wartime consumer boom. 11,000 supermarkets are built. Purchases go up 12%. David said:"The precedent of what women had accomplished during World War II did linger in the memory of the society at large, and I think was one of those things that energized the feminist movement a decade or two later."

"In World War II, when women entered the workforce, once they got a taste of that kind of fulfillment" Meryl said,"that work can give you, there was no going back." But Peggy's job is undeniably dangerous. I was most worried about the detonators. Detonators are put into the tip of the shell last. They explode on impact. They set off the gun powder in the shell. Detonators are extremely unstable. The factory is a giant bomb. It's loaded with tons of explosives. It only takes a spark to set it off. This terrible thunder storm came. Would all staff report to the cafeteria immediately, please? We were in a hurry to go and somebody knocked the detonators on the floor. We were in the pitch dark. somebody was screaming, "Don't move, anybody!" I just froze right where I was. I was afraid to step. I was so scared, I crawled on my hands and knees. We were in slow motion because if we'd stepped on one...Making weapons can be as dangerous as using them. In the first 16 and a half months of the war 12,000 military men died, but 64,000 American workers die through accidents. Another 6 million are injured. Tonight Peggy is one of the lucky ones. "First, they survive the Depression, now they risk their lives every day for their country at war. That was our finest generation in terms" Micheal said, "of people who would sacrifice and give something of themselves."

300,000 aircraft come out of US factories during the war. America will put them to use with a bold new tactic: high- altitude precision bombing by day, while the British bomb at night. August 17, 1942. These are the men who will see if it can be done. If they survive, the way war is fought will change forever.

Paul Tibbets from Quincy, Illinois, one of America's best pilots of the B-17 bomber, the Flying Fortress. "My father thought I was crazy not to be a doctor. He said, "If you wanna go kill yourself, go ahead."" The planes are cramped, unheated and unpressurized. Crews suffer claustrophobia, altitude sickness and frostbite. Of the 111 men on this mission, 31 will be dead or missing by the end of the war. These men depend on each other. You know, if you ask anybody that's ever been in combat, they will tell you, yeah, sure, you fought for your country, you fought for your way of life, you know, but in all reality, you're fighting for your buddy that's right next to you. The B-17 bomber is just as tough as its crew. It's got four engines, not two. It's got 4,000 pounds of bombs and it can go at least 2,000 miles. It bristles like a porcupine. Eight 50-caliber machine guns fight off enemy air attacks. "The B-17 bomber-- it may not have been the greatest aircraft," Richard said," that was ever created, but it was tough, it was durable, and it found a way to keep going, which is pretty much like an American soldier. You know, tough, durable, and found a way to keep going. "

The planes climb. Oxygen keeps you alive above 10,000 feet. No oxygen, you could black out in three minutes and die in 20. The target is Rouen, the Germans' biggest railway marshalling yard in Northern France. Trains supply the German economic and military empire across Europe. Tibbets' mission is to wipe the yard from the map. August 17, 1942. Before today, the Allies had only bombed under the cover of night. But targets are hard to see. To increase the chances of a direct hit, America bombs by day. The aim is accuracy. The Norden bomb sight is the way to get it. It's an early computer. It's top secret. The crew will destroy it rather than have it fall into enemy hands. Dial in air speed, wind direction and altitude. One minute to target. The machine calculates where to fly and when to drop the bombs. By destroying the Germans' economic and industrial base, America will weaken the Nazis' military might. Today's target is key. The railway yards at Rouen keep the German war machine alive. 45 seconds to target. US air crews pay a high price in casualties to achieve their goal. In 1943 alone, 2/3 of air crews never came home. The weather is perfect for the bombing run. Visibility--virtually infinite. But at 23,000 feet, B-17s leave vapor trails, arrows in the sky pointing right to the planes. Okay, it's on. German antiaircraft fire explodes under the B-17s. Tibbets keeps his nerves and the plane steady. The computerized bomb sight zeroes in on the target. Target in sight, target in sight. The success of the mission all rests on this moment. Bombs away! Success. 36,900 pounds of bombs hit the rail yard. 50% of the bombs fall in the target area. In 1942, that is precision bombing a big improvement overnight time attacks. This technology will ultimately lead to today's GPS-guided smart bombs. But now the direct-hit rate is up to 95%. Tibbets knows his mission is a success. We caught the Germans by surprise. They hadn't expected a daytime attack. But then shrapnel rips the air. The Germans open up their big guns. 88-millimeter antiaircraft shells explode around the plane. Tibbets goes in to a steep climb, swinging away from the flak. They have proved daylight bombing is possible. A feeling of elation took hold of us as we winged back across the channel. We had braved the enemy in his own skies, and we're alive to tell about it. All sides bomb industrial targets in cities in World War II. Targeting trade in industry means bombing in or near population centers, a grim fact of World War II that sees ordinary families killed in numbers undreamt of in earlier conflicts. Paul Tibbets will be famous for another bombing run, but it's three years away. He will drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

For every B-17 shot down, American workers produce two more. Overwhelm the enemy. Overwhelm them with machines and manpower. By 1943, 10 million Americans have been drafted. One is 18-year-old Harold Baumgarten, a NewYorker from the Bronx. He'd been offered a try out at Yankee stadium. But before I could begin playing for the team, I was drafted. On July 10, 1943, I entered the US Army. What they did as 18 or 19-year-old soldiers was far and away of greater significance than anything they ever did in the rest of their lives. William Dabney convinces his grandmother, to let him sign up at the age of 17. I just wanted to follow my buddies. During the Revolutionary War, 1/6 of all of George Washington's soldiers were black men. And every time, in the course of our first couple of hundred years that we had a conflict, and we called upon all citizens, black citizens as well, to serve, blacks stepped forward.

Despite the struggles of war, old prejudices remain. Platoons are segregated. The Army played a significant role, because,in many ways, the Army was the first place hat blacks and whites began have to stand together and represent the same idea, even though they were in segregated barriers. Attention! World War II changed the entire world, but it certainly transformed the American the black American psyche in a way that led to and made possible the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and the 60s. William Dabney volunteers for the exciting-sounding "Special service." Left, left, left, right, left. Left, left, left, right, left. But all the training in the world, cannot prepare him for the horror that is to come. June 1944. Southern England becomes a massive Army camp of 3 million Allied troops. Over a million and a half tons of equipment are shipped and flown from America. The goal is to retake Europe from the Germans. General Dwight D. Eisenhower takes command of the biggest amphibious military operation in history, code- named "Operation Overlord." To the world, the Normandy landings are simply known as D-Day. Every material factor of war is catered for. The medical corps alone stockpiles tens of thousands of tons of medical supplies: bandages, morphine, surgical instruments, bedpans, oxygen tents, and X-ray machines. There are prosthetic limbs and even eyeballs in five sizes and four colors. By 1944, an American combatant could draw on 4 tons of supplies, versus a Japanese combatant, who had just 2 pounds. No one had ever produced so much in such a short time, and this is what really... Shocked both the Japanese and the Germans.

Blood is so crucial, the US develops a system of blood banks on an industrial scale. In the six months leading up to D- Day, Americans donate a pint of blood every two seconds. The blood is turned into plasma so it can be used on the battlefield. It is bottled, put in ice and packed in cans. But all these supplies are useless without men prepared to die. D-Day is coming. June 5, 1944. American industry gives the military the means to retake Europe. Now the nation must sacrifice its sons. Over 5.4 million US soldiers will invade Europe in World War II. That's 40 times the number of US combat troops that originally invaded Iraq. This is the night before the biggest single amphibious landing the world has ever seen D-Day. Harold Baumgarten has come a long way since enlisting a year ago. Many of us had our heads shaved so that our hair could not be grabbed during hand-to-hand combat. Many of these men have less than 12 hours to live. I did not expect to come back alive. I wrote such to my sister to get the mail before my parents and break the news gently to them when she received the telegram. You know, we were brought upon good guys and bad guys. We go back, we talk about our Westerns that way. You know, Hitler was a clear enemy. I think when you have a really clear enemy, you've won the hearts and minds. There is that commitment of sacrifice. Eve of battle rituals include Mohican haircuts and war paint. Preparations are mental as well as material. Dog tags are taped together so they don't rattle. Stealth can mean you live or die. One officer tells his men what they can expect. Look to the right of you. Look to the left of you. There's only going to be one of you left after the first week. William Dabney now knows what his special service mission is. He has to drag a barrage balloon ashore while under heavy fire. It's a tactic designed to block German aircraft from strafing Allied troops. His chances are slim, but he is determined to survive. I will return. I will come back to the USA. I'm not looking forward to getting shot or killed. I'm looking forward to going home. More than 70,000 American troops are about to invade German-held France. Over 1,000 will die on the first day: June 6, 1944. D-Day. Over 5,000 ships and 10,000 aircraft are involved in the first wave alone.

Five beaches will be stormed. The most infamous is code-named "Omaha Beach", Think about Omaha Beach from the standpoint of the young men. The ramp is about to drop and the sights and the sounds all around provide the context of hell. The first troops on Omaha Beach meet ferocious German resistance. Rocket launchers, mortars and 85 machine-gun nests tear into the Americans. The men are left with virtually no cover on the beach. Go! William Dabney is totally exposed. Tethered to his barrage balloon, he's defenseless. When it's shot down, he has his chance. Like every other soldier on Omaha Beach, black or white, Dabney's mission now is to survive. There wasn't any segregation there. Harold Baumgarten is thrown straight into the carnage. There were men with guts hanging out of their wounds and body parts lying along our path. Some men were simply overwhelmed by the hell they met. Get down! Get down! By 9:00 a.m., almost 5,000 men are ashore. There are more than 2,000 US casualties on Omaha Beach alone. William Dabney survives. He is later awarded the Legion of Honor. Operation Overlord is a logistical miracle, but the cost is staggering. Nearly 126,000 Americans are killed, wounded or go missing during the Battle of Normandy. Harold Baumgarten is hit five times. After losing blood for over 30 hours, Baumgarten is brought back from the dead by a plasma transfusion, then injections of penicillin and morphine the very supplies America has mass-produced to keep its men alive. D-Day is key to Hitler's defeat. Within a month, the Allies have landed more than 877,000 troops, 112,000 vehicles, and 573,000 tons of supplies. US bombing destroys German oil reserves and transportation. American machinery and men powers the drive to Berlin and victory in Europe.

But men are still dying fighting the Japanese. America turns to technology once again. A weapon to end the war. A weapon to change the world. The Alamogordo Desert, New Mexico July 16, 1945. 5:27 a.m. In three minutes, American technology will change the world forever. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who loves poetry as much as science. The FBI would track his every move, worried that he's a Communist yet Oppenheimer leads the biggest scientific test in history, the top-secret Manhattan Project. Theoretically, fission physics could enable enormous amounts of explosive energy to be released from a single device: the atomic bomb. The bomb is the most technologically advanced weapon in the world, but nobody is sure whether it will work. Even many of the people who worked on the bomb itself were skeptical that the bomb would actually work. No one had ever done anything like this. The use of bombing escalates on all sides in World War II, so that whole cities of civilians are being hit. Now the US military hope a single bomb can destroy an entire city. Wreaking that kind of mass destruction, that was something new in the history of warfare. The atomic bomb has put an emphatic punctuation to that decision, but the decision was way before 19-- August of 1945. If this test works, there are more atomic bombs to use on the Japanese, in hopes of ending the war. 29... Deputy Commanding General of the Manhattan Project, Thomas Farrell, watches Oppenheimer. Dr. Oppenheimer grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. He stared directly ahead. 11... 10, 9, 8, 7, 6,5, 4, 3,2,1. The temperature generated at the center of the explosion is 10,000 times greater than the surface of the sun. The heat turns the desert sand to glass. The explosion is more massive than even Oppenheimer expects. When it went off in the New Mexico dawn, that first atomic bomb, we thought of Alfred Nobel and his hope, his vain hope, that dynamite would put an end to wars. Even the scientists themselves recognized the gravity of that moment, and, of course, Oppenheimer famously said, "I become death, the destroyer of worlds," Quoting "The Bhagavad Gita" And recognizing that man had really reached a turning point where the power available to us was almost limitless. When atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an estimated 120,000 people die instantly. Over the days, months and years that follow, up to 80,000 more die slowly. A day after the second bomb is dropped, the Japanese surrender. America's technical innovation is decisive in winning the bloodiest war in history.

Having survived the Depression and World War Ii, the greatest generation comes home. They'd been through it all and they wanted one thing, they wanted a better life for their families than they'd had, and that's what they dedicated themselves to. America's distance from battle leaves its infrastructure intact and its economy vibrant. It produces twice as much oil as the rest of the world combined. It has half the world's manufacturing capacity and 2/3 of its gold stocks. They had no real competition in the world because Europe was devastated, Asia was devastated and America could be the colossus that it became. World War II transforms the USA in only four years. Americans make twice as much money as they did before the war. They have 50 million babies in 15 years. There are 20 million new jobs in 25 years. America becomes a superpower.

Episode Eleven Millennium 1945. America stands tall. Enemies vanquished, duty done on the battlefield. And the greatest riches on earth at its feet: more than half the world's oil, two-thirds of its gold, and the talents of 140 million people ready to build modern America. we are pioneers and trailblazers.We fight for freedom. We transform our dreams into the truth. Our struggles will become a nation.

Post-war America will be turbulent, dynamic and overwhelming. More change and more progress than in the last 400 years put together. But some things haven't changed. American courage, vision and determination will always shape the nation. The character of the country and its people forged in the past drive the story forward. The USA has ended World War II a superpower. Its economy turbo charged. Prime to construct the future. The greatest generation is ready for peace time. Their ambition knows no limits. The average American family already earns 15 times more than they do in Europe. The USA hums with economic potential. This was the greatest moment of collective innovation in all of American history. This country was giddy with the sense of accomplishment pride, prospect for the future. America's future looks bright. Invention and innovation have always been the things that bind its people together.

But America's sheer size threatens to pull it apart. The landmass is 9 million square miles and a road system isn't working. You saw this vast wilderness in front of you and what am I going to do with this? The older highways, the white shield highways would go across the country and when it came to town it became the main street of every town. And there is always bottlenecks. It's almost impossible to get around by car. Only half of the roads are even pane. Eisenhower, the new President has seen it for himself. As a young soldier, he drove across the nation. It took 62 days. America has faced this problem before how to move people and goods across its great expanse. Each generation has come up with its own solution.

The rivers were America's first highways. 1811, the paddle steamer is launched, taking goods upriver as well as down, opening up the Mississippi to more trade. The Erie Canal is America's next great conveyor belt of commerce. 1825, it links the Eastern sea board to the Great lakes. Like the steamboats, it spawn cities along its route. The canal transforms New York into a boom town that quadruples in size. Now it's time to get America's roads working like the canals and rivers before them. To get the country moving again. And President Eisenhower makes it his mission to get the job done.

He started looking at the development of this country in the 50s. And you really saw the vision of what the interstate highway system could do. And it was amazing. It changed America. There's a common theme to the greatest innovations in American history, and that is these were things that helped people or goods or ideas travel about more freely. The Interstate Highway becomes the biggest engineering project in American history. It costs the nation $129 billion. 2.4 billion man hours of hard work. And just like the railroads a century before it's built with manual labor and sheer grit. America's landscape has been shaped by transportation. The transcontinental railway opened up half a billion acres of land and 8 new states. 200,000 miles of track huhn out of hostile terrain. Faced with a mountain, find an inventive way of blowing it up. Nitroglycerin, black powder, dynamite. The Interstate is the largest earth-moving project in the history of the world. One and a half million tons of explosives. 4.2 billion cubic yards of earth removed. Enough to fill more than 8 million football stadiums.

We can build anything, we damn will, please, we're going to go about it. And it did change the country. The Freeways, the Interstate Highway System. It connected the cities in a way that no one had seen before on a level no one had seen before. Today there are 46,876 miles of Interstate Highways. Enough to wrap nearly twice around the world. And the journey that once took Eisenhower 62 grueling days now it can be done in 4. Those were the means can take to the roads. There was nothing that could stop person from being what they want, going where they want, doing what they want. Freedom to travel where you want. Freedom not to be stuck to where the trolley rails go. A freedom and life-style that came with it that really celebrate that sense that the car was your ticket to personal freedom.

This is a country that will not accept being shackled, perhaps because of our georgraphy and we are able to expand the wheel and move where we wanna to. Good roads need more cars. Bigger, faster, better. 1946. 2 million of them are manufactured in America. And that's just the beginning. It's the age of the automobile. When I came to America, the first thing I want to think about, "How can I get hold of a car?" I didn't have enough money. so I shared with two friends by a jalopy. I've crossed the country with that. I had a love affair with the car from the very beginning because this method of movement that can enable you to see vast, expansive space. From as soon as they could get their hands on one, Americans have always liked their cars. Now the whole country has fallen in love with the automobile. 1955.Americans are spending $65 billion on car, buying 8 million of them every 12 month. By now, the USA is making 80% of the world's automobiles. More than 20,000 cars a day roll off the production line across the country. Four times as many as the Model T at its height. There was now a car in every driveway, maybe 2 cars in every driveway. One for mom, one for dad, and maybe one for the oldest child. We have this ideal of American life as the two parents, two children, brand new gleaming American cars with fins the size of Pennsylvania coming off the rear of it.

Once Americans get into their cars, there is no going back. The Interstate Highways take them where they've never been before, meaning some places get left behind. No one really thought about how it would fundamentally change these communities because on Route 66, they would always say "We didn't have to travel, the world come to us." And overnight when the ribbon cut on the Interstate highway system, they were bypassing the town. And many towns died. You know, they call it death by interstate. The interstates bypass the towns, but they lead somewhere else to America's next invention-- the suburbs. America has always used technology to overcome the challenges of its vast open spaces. Carving out the environment, building houses for its people, shaping its future. Technology has built America. Every major development in the history of America technology has been the center of it.

1607. 50 million trees. Nine million square miles of wilderness. 60 million bisons. This is what the first settlers were faced with. Within a year of arriving at Jamestown, they had built themselves a fort, a church and 50 houses. If America needs it, they build it. If people need housing, they will always find a way. That is the American dream. To just create a new life for yourself, reinvent yourself get a little patch of land somewhere grow some crops and be the master of your own destiny. America is about to embark on its biggest house building project ever.

This greatest generation and what they went through Then they came home and just went back to being civilians. Houses have been built before. But never on this scale. 13 million over the next decade. Because at the end of the day I do want to go home. I want to drink a few beers and I want to watch my football and I want to have my backyard barbecues and celebrate the 4th of July. And the problem to be tackled this time is the sheer scale of what's required. 1946.330 new babies delivered every hour. That's one baby every ten seconds. It's the baby boom. They all need housing. A million acres are plowed under each year of the 1950s for housing plots. 3,000 acres a day. It's the birth of suburbia. The next innovation.

Building houses outside the cities to give new families a new life. Farmland into family homes. New York loses about two million people over that period. And it looks like people are just going to slowly kind of hollow out the inner city. And they would buy a new, perhaps, saltbox house in Levittown in New York or its equivalent housing development across the country. All of these icons of sort of the 1950s domestic culture, suburban culture that begin to emerge during these years. Levitt and Sons are family builders. They'll give their name to America's most famous post-war housing: The Levittown. Here on this Levittown and Sons construction site, they're building houses almost as fast as babies are born. One every 16 minutes. 8:00 am, trucks unload. 9:30, bathrooms arrive. 11:00, floors are laid. 300 windows a day. 30 baths a day. These techniques are inspired by the industrial age.

1840, Lowell Mills Massachusetts, the manufacture of cotton is transformed by mechanized looms. 1918, Henry Ford's Detroit production line. The automobile revolution. Now in the 1950s America is mass producing family homes. Levitt and Sons call it the Ford production line of house building. This is human enterprise. Human ingenuity. Putting these buildings there they were put there by free men and women making their own free decisions. By 1951, Levittown New York has 17,000 identical new homes. A second Levittown is built in Philadelphia. A third in New Jersey. My father grew up very poor during the Depression. He fought in World War II. It was a big deal for him to get out of a poor neighborhood and buy a 50x100 lot in Franklin Square Long Island, where I grew up. There was a feeling the country now has regained prosperity. After the long decade of the Great Depression which had made many people think the prosperity might never return. A family home for less than $8,000. That's $71,000 in today's money. Down to the eve of World War II, down to 1940 or so only about 40% of Americans owned their own homes. By 1960, one short generation later, 60% of Americans owned their own homes.

That's just one way to quantify the spread of affluence and prosperity and all that came with that in terms of self- confidence and enthusiasm for the future. The American home has developed since the Pilgrims, into, really, the center of the family. The family is the most important social unit in the United States. And it should be. Through the centuries, the family home has shaped America and showcased American innovation. Plantation houses built by stone masons. Log cabins made from what's available on the land. Merchants' houses, the backbone for the early cities. Each time technology has transformed how these houses have been built and where they've been built.

Overcoming the extremes of America's climate. 1913, Los Angeles booms when the L.A. Aqueduct brings in water. Without it, the city would have stayed an outpost. Now it's air conditioning that wins the South. 1902, invented in New York, 1952, $250 million worth of air con units are sold. Hispanic architecture had once kept the Sun Belt States cool. Now it's air con. In the 1960s, more people moved to the Southern states than moved out after the Civil War. America's toughest landscapes opened up for housing. California and Florida became states that were overrun with new people moving in and wanting to live a better life.

Living a better life goes back to the big innovation of the 19th century: Steel. 1875, Pittsburgh. Andrew Carnegie has a vision. Large-scale production making steel the greatest building material in the world. Malleable, versatile, strong and now affordable. Used to construct everything from skyscrapers to refridgerators. Labor-saving domestic appliances freeing people to do more with their time. 1925. The family wash takes six hours. Soon washing machines will do the job in 45 minutes.

One of the kind of common themes that runs throughout the history of America all the way back to the founders is this really this obsession with technology and gadgets. If you look at America's greatness and standard of living that was built in 200 plus years, this is America's great story. The land of plenty has become a land of technology. And soon that technology will take America even further. "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Massive engineering projects uniting the nation. Americans working together to push the boundaries of science and technology. There was a unity of ideas and purpose. And that's what brought us together. It was a spirit of exploration like when we went to the moon.

The impetus for the Apollo Space Program came from aviation. Invented by the Wright Brothers accelerated into production by two world wars. Aerial Combat won in the air and built by American technology. 300,000 aircraft made in the U.S.A. from 1941 to 1945. Within a decade, harnessing that technology, America will lead the world into the jet age. and from there into space. 1959, the Boeing 707 flies between New York and Los Angeles. The journey that once took four days by road now takes six hours. Today, over two million make that trip every year. The push to fly faster and further is unstoppable. Airplanes, rockets, spacecraft. And people on the moon. What a magnificent testimony to the progress of humanity.

1961. President John F. Kennedy tells the world that America will put a man on the moon. I still remember when I was a little kid, you know, John F. Kennedy stand up there and saying "We are gonna go to the moon by the end of this decade." America had been a land of frontiers from the early 17th Century. And the frontiers had moved gradually across America and now it seemed to make sense that the frontier would expand beyond the boundaries of the earth. Space is unchartered territory. Like the expansion westward. A grueling five-month journey through the interior. It hasn't stopped America before. The pioneering spirit drives people onward. Americans are impatient. They want to see new things, new opportunities. And they challenged millions of people into putting this program together. And you know what? They did it.

We just made it. July of that last year of that decade, we just made it. 400,000 Americans worked directly on "Apollo" 11. Flight controllers, engineers, scientists, seamstresses. After 8 years, they're ready for the big one. And the fact that this team of delicate people from astronauts all the way down to, you know, every engineer to achieve that goal it's really one of the truly inspiring stories in American history. A timeline planned down to the last second. 17,000 people in Florida to handle take-off. 131 people man the mission control room in Houston, Texas. Ten, nine... ignition sequence, start. 3,000 tons of metal and three astronauts set off for the moon. Six, five, four, three, two, one. Zero. All engine running. Liftoff. We have a liftoff. We set our sights on the moon and everybody felt that, yeah, it sounds impossible. But we're in this business and we're gonna do it.

More power than all the waterfalls in North America combined. 60 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. A million gallons of fuel. Enough to drive a car around the globe 400 times. All the team work and discipline still leaves the astronauts to face the unknown alone. When they approached the moon they did a burn to slow the command module down so they could go into lunar orbit. If it didn't work, they would have shot past the moon into the distant solar system never to be seen again. Less than 30 seconds of fuel are left when the landing craft touches down. And then he said "Contact light on. Tranquility base here. The eagle has landed." "We copy on the ground." "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." I thought for a minute, "Isn't this beautiful? it's magnificent desolation." The Stars and Stripes first raised in 1776. Now planted on the moon. Walk around the moon and look back at the world. You know? A view that nobody else has ever seen.

We believed they could do anything. We believed NASA's technology was perfect. It was the genius of the best of American science and engineering. And it was. You have to remember what we had come through leading up to that summer night in 1969. we lost a President to assassination. We lost his brother to assassination. But for a few minutes one summer night, we all stood and stared up at the heavens. That became the first of nine spaceships that went to the moon and 24 Americans reached the moon. And we landed six out of seven times. And I think for the country as a whole it remains something of a metaphor. You know, you always have to say we did the Appollo Project to solve this problem that problem.

The lunar landing unites America. It is the nation's greatest scientific achievement. Technology is powering forward. But America is held back. There's a fault line that changed the nation: Race.

African Americans have been part of America's story from the beginning. As foot soldiers and fighting men, civilians and citizens, doing the dangerous job of whaling in the 19th century. 1619. The first Africans arrived in Virginia. Although some will gain their freedom and own land most were slaves. Over 200 years, slavery became a key part of the American economy, particularly in the South. By 1861, nearly four million slaves. They helped to fuel a $2 billion cotton boom that makes the South rich.

The ghosts are very much alive today in people who have, if not the actual memory of that, but a family memory, a memory of what that was like and the social memory of what it was like when people were treated as things. Now, in 1963, drawing on the inspiration of their deeper past, African Americans are about to change everything. This country once and for all grasps the nettle of the most vexed issue in all of this country's history, which is race.

We waited a hundred years after the Civil War to take that issue up again. The Civil War was fought in part over the right to own slaves. When it was over, African Americans were supposed to be on an equal footing, but segregation then took hold in the South. And so you needed that second Civil War. I call it that others would not perhaps call it the same thing. But it was a different kind of Civil War. But it had the same goal as the first Civil War did. And it was led by different people.

20th century America will see a long struggle for equality. Race riots in Chicago in 1919 leave 38 dead. In the segregated South, separate schools, separate buses, separate restaurants. Twice as many unemployed. Change begins when one million black soldiers join up in World War II. And blacks demonstrated they could fly planes just like anyone else, they could sail ships, they could do anything the white soldier could do. They don't know it yet, but these soldiers are the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

Individuals more than willing to fight and die for our country and for the freedoms that our country represented. Yet freedoms that were not still truly shared by all Americans. And the first step towards equal rights is taken. July, 1948. The military is desegregated. No more whites-only regiments, no more blacks-only Regiments. Just Americans shoulder to shoulder. When I came in, my superior said to me, we don't care if you're black, we don't care if you're white. We don't want to hear any hard luck stories. The only thing we care about is performance.

But outside the military, it is a different story. Blacks do not have the same status as whites. The people among us who in many cases were doing the dirty work of society, the people who were making the hotels ready for us to stay in and serving us food at restaurants that wouldn't see them as guests. The civil rights movement of the 1960s will use words and actions to convince the world that the time for freedom has come. that African Americans are ready to fight for justice. So people say, why are you gonna identify yourself as black. Because I'm black. And because everybody else would identify me as black. And did for the most of my life. Now, they might not think that same way about my children but I will not shrink from that. And the single reason why I won't is because of all those who went before me. To put right the wrongs of slavery. That's what motivated those who went before.

Come on, you all! Blacks who despite being enslaved were already fighting for freedom. Inspirational people like Harriet Tubman. A former slave. From 1849 she was part of an underground network bringing some 300 slaves to freedom. One of America's first civil rights activists. I mean it's a story that's not just about black people, but it's about human beings caring for other people and having the courage to do what is right even at peril to yourself. The voice of the modern civil rights movement and its most determined and eloquent leader is Martin Luther King, Jr. Baptist minister, preacher and campaigner.August 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. leads 250,000 on the March on Washington. His marvelous speech that every American knows at the Lincoln Memorial talking about "I have a dream".

America is telling the world that blacks and whites have come together to say we are ready to make the next step toward equality and the young, black preacher talked about a dream that connected back to the American dream. What he did was hold a mirror up to the face of all Americans and said, hey, it's been a couple hundred years now let's do what the Declaration of Independence actually said. We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. The promise of 1776 back on the agenda. Now this is a culmination of everybody together saying this.. this is our moment. This is the time for us.

Whites looked inside themselves and said you know what, why should black kids go to second-rate schools? That's not good for the country. That's not good for what we are as people. That's when the tipping point was reached. A year after the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act is passed through Congress. Voting rights extended. Racial discrimination outlawed, segregation ended. America's problem with race does not disappear. But the way is paved for an African American to reach the White House. To be able to inspire our kids, let them know that they have such greatness out there they can be anything they want to be and we can mean that. Fighting segregation and discrimination by law and we're changing hearts and minds. We're moving out of that and memories tend to fade. But not for me. I'll never forget.

But, 1960s America still has a problem. A growing challenge from beyond the nation's shores. A rival that wants to blow the USA out of the water. July 1945, New Mexico. The Manhattan Project. Robert Oppenheimer leads the team that develops the atomic bomb. The original weapon of mass destruction. Terrifying in its power. And America got there first. Only the Americans in the end had a plausible chance at success because they have the enormous resources they could invest in this thing on a crash basis and make it happen. But someone else wants one too. America's great rival on the world stage, the Soviet Union. Now that America has the bomb, they'll stop at nothing to build their own. Communist spies even infiltrate the Manhattan Project. The arms race between the world's superpowers has begun.

You could not possibly have grown up in this country in that era without being very acutely aware of that great diplomatic standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States that we call the Cold War. After 1949, when the Soviets got the atomic bomb, this was a foe that could wreck horrible damage on the United States at an instant's notice. It was a time unlike anything Americans had lived through before. It's the Cold War and Americans are on red alert. We did these duck-and-cover drills routinely at school. First you duck, then you cover. The siren would be tested and we were instructed how to get under the desk and cover your head and face so that the debris from glass blowing in from the windows when the atomic bomb went off downtown wouldn't hurt us. Both sides stockpile weapons to defend themselves against possible attack. From 1940 to 1996. The USA will spend $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons. That's nearly $20,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. It was the arrival really of the specter of real nuclear war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no longer seen as isolated one time incidents. By the mid-1950s, there were over 40,000 defense contractors working for the federal government.

America has always won wars using technology. In the revolutionary war, the accuracy of the Kentucky Rifle was a key factor in defeating the British. In the Civil War, the minie ball could travel 600 yards and shatter bones on impact. 1959, America's first intercontinental ballistic missile. It can travel 3,500 miles and destroy cities. 200 years of American weapons finding their target and defeating the enemy. But this time it's different. This is a war that no one can win. If an atomic bomb is used, there's no going back. Every time the Soviets make a move American fear the worst. 1960, the U2 incident when a US spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union. 1962, The Cuban Missile Crisis. The standoff with Moscow over nuclear weapons in America's backyard. Actual warheads - the bombs, the actual bombs were in Cuba. They were already there. And the delivery system was coming over. Suddenly it seems very important to have adequate supplies in every home. I remember vividly people going to the local supermarkets and buying up all kinds of canned goods and throwing them back in their cars and driving up to the Siskiyou Mountains or the Trinity Alps or the Sierra Nevada Range to get out of the blast range of any nuclear weapons that might fall in the bay area.

There are rumors that an attack may come from within, that Soviet spies are plotting to bring America down. The Senate sets up hearings to unmask communists in the government and media. And they saw ghosts behind every corner and enemies on every bookshelf. So this effort to root out the enemy at home became a defining moment. After World War II when the Cold War emerged there was this feeling that the country could split apart very easily politically and there was a desire that that not happen. So there was this kind of sort of self-imposed conformity. If the communists are atheists, Americans are religious. If the communists are acting collectively, we are true individuals. If the communists want to break down family structures, we are the tight nuclear family. Communism. Armageddon. These threats to the nation's freedoms are just too close for comfort. The United States has seen off superpowers in the past. Digging deep to defend what matters. Maybe the most important values we have are our family, faith, and the American flag.

But these values, which Americans have defended since the Revolution, are about to be challenged in unexpected ways.

Episode Twelve

America is at the height of its power. Innovation and invention will define a new era of prosperity and technological wonder. One invention will change the world. Along with the biggest communications revolution ever seen, And while old threats fade, new challenges will test America as never before.

The 1970s, America is locked in a global standoff with another superpower, the Soviet Union. It's the Cold War. Communism and capitalism clash in an ideological battle for supremacy. For many, it's an era of fear and uncertainty, nuclear nightmares. By the end of the Cold War, the rival countries will amass enough explosive firepower for over a million Hiroshimas. But the Cold War has another battlefield: the Space Race. And when America claimed the prize by putting man on the moon, a technology that will define the era comes of age. Television. 185 Million Americans are united in front of their TV sets. "Looking back at those images now, we marveled at the clarity of the picture. This was live from the moon, after all! It was the height of technology and we marveled at it. "In 1940, there are just a few thousand TV sets in the whole country. By 1970, there are over 60 million. TV will play a defining role in shaping a new era. America has always tried to adopt new technologies. Television, as we know it today, I mean, it was considered, think about this crazy idea. We can send moving images to any place in the United States.

But America's been built on technological innovation and invention. From steam boats and six-guns to automobiles for everyone. It's conquered a continent with technology. But throughout the nation's history, it is communications technology that played a defining role. 1865, the telegraph help its President Abraham Lincoln win the war for the North. He virtually seize and can command every battle. 1945, David Sarnoff, Eisenhower's most senior communications expert, helped develop television for America. By 1950, Sarnoff creates one of the biggest TV broadcast networks in the world. TV may be a new form of entertainment, but it's also the most powerful communications device in existence. "Sarnoff recognized that there was going to be awesome power. And that, with that awesome power--was going to come awesome responsibility. "

By 1970, the American public is watching more television than any nation on earth, Over five hours a day for every man, woman and child. There are more TV news programs than any country in the world. Over 70% of the adult population watch the television news every evening. And when pictures of the moon landings are broadcast live, it isn't just a technological success, it is a symbolic victory in the Cold War. But there's a real war closer to American lives. Vietnam. A bitter conflict in Southeast Asia. America fears communism will sweep the region and wants to stop its influence. But the U. S. Military and all its technology comes up hard against determined guerrilla movements. And the war is being fought by hundreds of thousands of drafted young Americans. "We ask so much of our 18-year-olds to go over to a foreign land, the jungle no less and fight gorillas who are home on their turf and don't like at all the invading army, "The generation that is fighting the Vietnam war are the baby boomers, The biggest ever American generation, over 50 million new Americans born in 15 postwar years, This huge generation are unlike any Americans who have come before, and their influence and attitude toward society are destined to change the face of America. The 1960s were inevitable. "The greatest generation came home with fixed idea of what life should be about, And they were so busy putting their own lives back together again in a traditional fashion that they weren't paying attention to the changing sensibilities of their children. ""America in a way reinvents itself every 10 or 15 years. And that reinvention is always feared by the generation that came before. "

June 1969, upstate New York, Woodstock, A weekend concert for over 100,000 ticket-hoders, was over run by nearly half million baby boomers. Over a million more tried to get in. It is the world's biggest ever music festival and become the boomer's coming out party, a signal to America of the generational change taking place. "Coming from the society culture that was fairly buttoned up and prim and proper to one that suddenly was what we had Woodstock. We had hippiedom. We had free love. ""Baby bombers had a huge tremendous impact on how we view the world and how we view society, "But the baby boomers aren't just rebeling against their parents' values, "People begin to attempt to affect from the streets the highest levels of foreign policy.

The baby boomers want an end to the Vietnam war, and they take their protest to the street. "The willingness to stand up for what you believe in, in mass demonstrations of revolt, that's very American. In the Vietnam war, people were unwilling to die, for something they didn't believe in. "Protest is deep in the American character. The pilgrims against the old world and religious persecution, The colonies against the British and their taxes. Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman against slavery, 1970s, there have been thousands of anti-Vietnam war protests. Kent State University, Ohio. The National Guard are ordered in to control 500 protesting students. Television is here watching. Four students are shot dead. . "I think that that drove it home for a lot of Americans, to see on their television, and to have this mass of people who felt so passionately about it. The images, you know, America is a very visual country. "

And because Vietnam is the first televised war, battles and casualty lists are daily news events. Television brings the reality of the war into the nation's living rooms. Just as hundred years ago Civil War photographer revealed the true horror of war, now TV news images begin to turn the nation.

We had already lost over 50,000 soldiers, many more wounded than that. I think most Americans realized Vietnam was a hopeless cause. More bombs than were droped in the whole World War II, Hundreds of billions of dollars. But what the most Americans remember are the pictures they see on their TV sets, watching people in Sigon clinging to helicopters as we left in disgrace. This is a profoundly unAmerican notion. 1975, the Vietnam War is finally over. In many ways it really was the anti-war movement on the ground that shaped our story of Vietnam and to some degree the actual experience of the war. For many of the baby boomers, the protest and rebellion has a wider aim: to create a completely new way of life. "You could rebel against your parents and rebel against society while creating your own utopia, this is a very 60s ideal. "

Creating a land where you can live your dreams is part of the American character, the reason that the pilgrims came to America. Why Mormon pioneers headed west. The baby boomers aren't looking for a new land. They want to change American society, make it a fairer place. As the 60s turn into the 70s,black activism, native American land rights, gay rights, ecology and feminism burst on to the agenda and the streets. The baby boom generation shaped America, the movement for equality for women in the workplace certainly came out of that. There is a tiny moment in American history gave a lot of confidence to American women, Freedom is freedom. All men and women are created equal. I had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in. I neither took part in nor knew about any of the subsequent cover-up activities. .

1974, President Nixon is implicated in the break in and the bugging of his political rivals headquarters. He's accused of covering up the crime. Congress starts an impeachment process which transmits live on television. Holders of the highest offices in the land are subjected to a grilling watched by millions. The Nixon administration hits the TV age and losses, There had been scandals previously in American history, but none that unfolded on television, with the immediacy of the Watergate Scandal. What was revealed by the Watergate Scandal was a level of internal corruption, a level of deception and a real violation of American democracy that even critics of the American government up to that point simply hadn't imagined. It was the last nail in the coffin you might say of, for many, many people of Americans confidence in their own society.

I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow, the only president ever to resign the office. His speech watched live by 85% of all American households. Freedom of the press and TV showing their true power, I mean, the power of Watergate is saying you need a free press, because there are some things that you will not learn if you do not have a free press. While television proves the downfall of one President, throws America into crisis, another will learn to use this new technology to rebuild American confidence and usher in a new era.

As the 70s turn into the 80s，America feels bruised, The Middle East oil crisis. American hostages in Iran, Surveys show only 22% of Americans trust the government. Unemployment and inflation are both at the highest levels since the Great Depression. America has endured economic downtimes before. In the 1930s, Roosevelt tries to bring America out of its Great Depression with government spending in new initiatives. But he also harnesses the power of a new media--radio-- to speak directly to the nation. Franklin Roosevelt had this truly mysterious capacity to speak through the radio in a way that compelled not just the attention but the affection of millions upon millions of his countrymen. Now half a century later, a new President uses television in his attempt to restore the nation's confidence. "How can we not believe in the greatness of America. How can we not do what is right and needed to preserve this last best hope of man on earth. ""His nick name was the great communicator. He was able to articulate in a way that many people would accept as being innately American. Americans wanted to believe that their country was good and strong. And Reagan spoke to them in a voice that said "Yes, we are". My fellow citizens, I would like to speak to you tonight about our future, about a great historic effort to give the words "freedom", "fairness" and "hope" new meaning and power for every man and woman in America. Specificly I want to talk about taxes.

The 1980s appear to be a new era of American financial prosperity. Low interest rates and the easy credit flows lead a business boom. Over the course of the decade, trading on Wall Street markets breaks records, the Dow Jones Index rises more than 200 percent. By the 1980s, 100,000 Americans become millionaires every year. There have been boom times before. The oil rush leads to cheap gasoline and cars for the masses. And cheap steel leads to a construction boom, builds new cities. Now in 1980s America, cheap credit creates a boom in consumers. The credit card is the symbol of the decade, invented in 1958, once reserved for the wealthy, now it's democratized. By 1989, more Americans have credit cards than vote in elections. The 80's see cardholders increase their debt by a factor of five. By the end of the decade, Americans are spending nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars on their credit cards every year. During the 80s, the number of shopping malls surpasses the number of high schools. There's a 78% increase in fast-food stores, Spending on restaurant food more than doubles to over 250 billion dollars in decade. During that decade we probably became more materialistic than we ever had before. Consumption was off the charts. But what consumers really want is technology, the latest home appliances, the latest entertainment technology. There are barely 2 million VCRs in 1980. Over 63 million by 1990, from a few thousand cell phones, by the end of the decade there are over 5 million.

James Meigs (Editor-in-chief, Public Mechanics):Your first pocket knife, your first bicycle, your first car, today, you know, your first cell phone, your first laptop, all these are badges of gaining control over your world, of having, being able to live life better because you have a better tool, and the skill to use it. That's something that's deeply appealing to the American psyche. But many of these consumer technology advances are developed directly from the biggest spending spree of all: the Space Race.

The Cold War with the Soviet Union is still going strong. Laying out across the globe and the final frontier. By the end of the Cold War, 7 trillion dollars has been spent keeping America ahead of her communist rival. The result, one of the most sophisticated and daring spacecraft ever built: The space shuttle. The space shuttle was a beautiful idea. It was an elegant craft that would be more efficient, more economical because it could take off and land and be reuseable. . . and lift off. The shuttle adds to America's consumer boom. One of its primary functions is to launch communication satellites, helping expand America's ever growing appetite for entertainment, communications, telephones and GPS. And the technology that goes into the shuttle also comes back to earth. Cell phones, water purification, airplane landing gear, fire fighting equipment. Cordless power tools, medical tech, and even ski wear. All benefited from the shuttle program. For many, the shuttle is symbolic of the American story. It's like one of those self-fulfilling prophecies.

You know, let's work for a better future. we'll get the better future. Talk about the frontier spirit, it's not a question of succeeding or failure it's just continuous growth, which is really inspirational.

25th space shuttle mission. . . But the nation's faith in technology is about to receive a blow. The shuttle is a new era for America. Space-age technology is powering the country forward. The nation's been built on innovation. New technology create progress, wealth, expansion. As axes improve, forests can be cleared at a greater rate. A new military technology wins wars, makes nations. Throughout our history, every one of these technologies has been transformative in a way that has changed economies, it's changed lives, it's changed settlement patterns. It takes entrepreneurs like Andrew Carnegie. He takes new steel production techniques and supersizes them to produce vast quantities of the raw materials that build the great American city. And engineering geniuses like Mulholland, his 200 mile L, A Aqueduct allows the city to grow from the desparate. But progress often carries a human cost, 1825, building the Erie Canal to connect the Great Lakes to New York City claims nearly 1,000 lives. 1865, the transcontinental railroad, almost 2000 lives. At the turn of the century, two out of every five men died or are disabled building the skyscrapers of America's new cities.

Three, two, one, and lift off. Now the space shuttle is the pinnacle of a new era of American technology. 1986 is to be the fleet's busiest year. The crew of the Challenger shuttle is chosen to represent cross-section of modern America. Different races, backgrounds, professions. And the idea always was "Can we begin to open this up somehow to more people than just highly trained astronauts. "

The dream of space flight is extending to everyday Americans. The shuttle is seen as an easy safe route to the final frontier. But on January 28, 1986,just 73 seconds after it takes off, Challenger explodes, live on national television. You could see that it took the audience a few seconds to realize what they were seeing, because it was so hard to interpret. Seven lives lost. All of a sudden it was like "How could that have happened?” I mean, NASA, the United States, we're like the best in the world at this. What happened?

Challenger, go with throttle up, It was like a blow to the gut of the nation. And we do fail at times, but the greatest test comes from what happens after you realize and accept the fact that you fail. Do you go crawl into a corner and never do anything again, or do you get back up, dust yourself off and move forward? Just three years after Challenger, the Cold War is over. So is the space race. While one generation has dreamed of their future in outer space, the next will create theirs on a new frontier:

Cyberspace, Individual, entrepreneurial ideas, run wild. And that really is the American spirit. And it's a way to figure out how to fully utilize something that's out there. In 1873, on his kitchen table, an Illinois farmer called Joseph Gliden invents something that changes the face of America: Barbed wire. Within ten years, over half a million miles of barbeded wire parcels up a billion acres of the Midwest and turns open prairie into the breadbasket of America. 1879, Thomas Edison invents the electric light bulb. It will generate a further 1,000 patents. But he also creates the first commercial power grid. Within two years, he sets up 5,000 power plants. In five more, he creates a further 127,000 electric light and power across the nation.

We're a nation of entrepreneurs. We have this incredible entrepreneurial spirit. But one 19th century American invention introduces an idea that will shape our 21st century World. In 1850,the Lowell cotton mills are automated with paper punch cards. The holes in the cards instruct the loom to use different coloured threads, switching one color on, one color off. It's binary code and the key to the future computer revolution.

At first, computers don’t seem like a revolution. In the 1940s, a single computer with the power of a basic PC today could be the size of a Greyhound bus and needs the same amount of power as a small town. Many people believe that only a few computers will ever be sold, but then they start to reveal its power. In the 60s, computers are used by universities to achieve previously unthinkable calculations. And from the 1970s onwards, corporations use them to replace thousands of manual clerks. Cold War super-spending helps fund computer development helping companies like IBM to become massive corporations. But it’s not the corporations or the government that create the next computer revolution. 1976, a garage in Northern California, two computer hobbyists, Steve Jobs and Steve Wosneak create the world’s first practical personal computer. In a sense, they were building computers for themselves, for ordinary people like them. They weren't particularly wealthy. They weren't working for large organizations. They just were tinkers. Soon competitors brought about their own machines. When IBM launched their PC, it ups the game, computers are changing fast.

Steven Johnson (author): The original kind of pioneers of the digital revolution.

Woody Nonnis (inventor): Along came the mouth and along came pictures on the screen. That kind of competition is really where innovation comes from.

The Apple II of 1980 has more computing power than was used in the entire Apollo moon landing program. Personal computers become more powerful, more popular. There are just 300,000 PCs in 1980. By 1990, there are over 67 million. That year, Microsoft sales alone topped 1 billion dollars. But the true power of computers is yet to be realized. Only when they start to talk to each other will the computing revolution be complete. In 1969, a communication revolution begins. Four computers start talking to each other down a telephone line. It’s the birth of the Internet.

Steven Johnson (author): In a sense, it’s our kind of DNA as a country to trying jump on whatever new form of communication technology is there because it was so essential for our ancestors in building this large nation.

By the middle of 19th century, the continent’s vast distances shrink. The horse and wagon give way to the railroad. Along with the railroad spreads the telegraph, the Internet of its era. Messages that once took days or even months to reach their destinations, now travelled down the wire at the tap of a button. One young railway clerk from the Midwest has a vision of how the telegraph and railroads can revolutionize the way we do business. By 1900, the Sears catalog transforms how Americans buy and sell. A century later, the Internet takes this revolution one step further. By 2005, almost 200 million homes have computers and Internet access, with over 5 billion dollars of goods sold online in 2009.

Soladad Obrian (CNN Anchor): You realize that just the power of this connectivity was unstoppable, overwhelming, incredible and scary at times.

From the first email sent in 1969, by 2009, 90 trillion emails are sent worldwide, 247 billion every day. One young railway clerk from the Midwest has a vision of how the telegraph and railroads could revolutionize the way we do business.

Jimmy Wales (Founder of Wikipedia): The spirit of liberty, of freedom, of openness has been a really core part of the Internet and this sort of basic idea that everyone should be able to participate in equally in this new medium. It’s a very American spirit of an idea, this idea that everybody should have access to knowledge.

And in 1990s California, the Internet boom sparks a second gold rush.

H. W. Brands (University of Texas): Gold Rush mentality still existed over hundred years later when Silicon Valley got started. And the secret of Silicon Valley was the people were willing to take huge risks.

In ten years, 30 thousand new high-tech companies launch. Silicon Valley creates nearly a million new jobs in the 1990s. Venture investors inject over 121 billion dollars into high-tech companies in 1998, but not every dotcom entrepreneurs makes a fortune.

Jimmy Wales (Founder of Wikipedia): In the silicon valley culture, it’s perfectly fine if you have a brilliant idea and you try it and it doesn’t work. out. People accept that, “Hey, you know, they don’t all work. ” But if you actually did a good job at it, you probably get another chance.

In March, 2000, the dotcom bubble bursts. The world is transformed. While people didn’t make as much money as they thought they were going to make. Everybody got online and the country got wired and embraced this new technology much faster than it would have had there not been big boom. So just as the gold rush kind of invented California, I think the Internet boom days didn't make as many fortunes but they did wire the whole country in a really transformative way.

But as the information superhighway comes of age, America wakes up to a new and terrifying friend. It came quite literally and metaphorically out of the clear blue sky. Nobody saw this coming. It was the blackest day in American history. No doubt about it. Someone said," General, you need to turn on the television. "I did that and I watched along with the world as the second jet hit the second tower. On the morning of September 11th, 2001,two passenger planes hijacked by terrorists linked to al-Qaeda crash into the World Trade Center towers in New York. When it first happened and I first realized how bad it was, it took a while to understand how bad it was, and I realized it was the worst attack in our history. I remember thinking, "Well, the world is gonna change. "I'm not sure how, but the world is gonna change. "34 minutes later, a third plane, American Airlines Flight 77,hits the Pentagon, At 10:03, a fourth plane, believed to be heading for the Capitol or the White House crashes near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after passengers on board take on the hijackers.

We are stunned. We were frozen. And I know in our small community that same feeling of helplessness and hopelessness was replicated out across the United States, coast to coast. We watched while the fires developed. It was a horrible event. But almost no one, certainly no one around me had any idea that the integrity of the entire towers was at risk. At 10:28, the World Trade Center's North Tower also falls. And there was a line of ambulances up the West Side Highway, it just went on forever. And they never called the ambulances and nobody ever came. And after a while we began to realize like "Oh, my God, there aren't survivors.” The 9/11 attacks claim almost 3,000 lives in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D. C. People wouldwalk up Sixth Avenue, completely shell-shocked, and they would be covered in white dust because the towers had just fallen around them. People call 9/11 our generation's Pearl Harbor. It was an attack by enemy that no one really saw coming. It was devastating. This was seen almost as a declaration of war by Al-Qaeda and transnational extremists on the American homeland. But the worst attack on American soil serves to galvanize the nation. I believe the terrorists attacked us for two reasons: to kill a lot of people and to kill our spirit. And they did kill a lot of people, but they didn't kill our spirit. People displayed very brave attitude in the way they dealt with it. And I think the terrorists never expected that.

Belief in freedom and the courage that it can give you over came the ability of the terrorists to try destroy the spirit of the country. It's really weird being in the city after 9/11 because the city was so quiet. People get on the subway, no one would speak. People were very polite to each other. You know, just everybody would move in. People would give up their seat with one talk. It was just weird. It was almost like they realized how fragile everybody was. Despite what happened and the horror and the loss kind of amazing that Americans could rebound and you know, they came back to New York, America came back to New York, and helped New York, spent money in New York and visited New York. We were able to do something so quickly, so expeditiously in terms of getting back to order after the travesty of the World Trade Center when it came tumbling down. To have done that so quickly, it's amazing.

You have the worst attack in the history of the country in the small little tip of the island and ten years later you go back and it's filled with people. More people have moved there than ever in the history of that neighborhood. Certainly it didn't have that many families. Now the playground is right around the spot where the planes hit, are filled with kids. And so there's kind of this sense of like "Yes, try it, fine, you can fly planes into our buildings, but, you know, we're going to go back and build a new life for ourselves there. "America rebuilds and looks to the future. 400 years ago, adventurers crossed an ocean and began an experiment that would become the United States. They saved up every penny they had, so they could take treacherous ship ride to the United States and then come to a country where there was nothing here. They had to make everything themselves, build everything themselves. America was born out of adversity. It's like in our DNA. At the start of new millennium, the American experiment is still under way. This is an unfinished country. We're not fully completed and settled and settled down. There're still opening new space, new territory and we're still incorporating new people. who continually transform the very DNA of our society. The last decade of the 20th century saw nearly 10 million new Americans welcomed into the country, More than in any other decade of the country's history. I think the unsung heroes, began with the first people with the courage to get on those very small wooden ships in 1607 and have continued up to today. I always tell people, you just walk down the cab rank at National Airport and list where people come from, you realize that the spirit of immigration and the spirit of better future hasn't disappeared at all.

In 2007, one in eight Americans was born abroad. My mother's Cuban and my dad is Australian, my mother is black, my father's white. But America is this melting pot. You know, I'm a black latino with freckles. And that's kind of America. We're this melting pot and we always have been. We've been the place that people are desperate to get to because they know once there, their story can be written. It can be anything, each society in the past created tremendous innovations in civilizations. All of a sudden we have them all here. It's not just one philosophy. It's many, many philosophies which makes for a very creative country.

In the past 20 years, two-thirds of new immigrants have come from Latin America and Asia. I think this theory that you can be anything that you want in America is not a theory. It's a truth. It's a basic truth that plays itself out in every immigrant story. It's really what America has always been about. Coming from someplace else, Coming to a place where you can rise up with your own sweat, and your own hard work and achieve something better than what you might have had elsewhere. So for me the immigration experiment in America will never end because really that's what defines us as a nation. I think Americans are a collection of incredible souls and beings who believe we are all in this together. This is a country where you can take chances. You're allowed to try anything to achieve success and failure is always there. and in order to try things and have failure there you have to be brave. There's a large can-do attitude in the United States. I think America's a land of opportunity again because, there were no set rules. We sort of invented it as we went along. It's this belief that wherever you are in every moment of history whatever your circumstances that radical progress is possible. I believe the United States has and hopefully will continue to have some of the great thinkers in terms of entrepreneurship. We are a nation of open-mindedness. I think we love new things. I think we love to try new things. We've sacrificed our blood and treasure for just about every great thing in America whether it's been on an overseas battlefield or something as seemingly mundane as the Hoover Dam. Over the centuries there has been a lot of adversity, and we have usually triumphed. We're a country that is always prepared to fight back. It's just part of the American character. This country reacts very well under pressure. It goes through these pressurized times and then comes out stronger than before. So I suppose you could say the most defining and equally important we are an optimistic people. We are a people who believe the future is our friend. Everybody was created equal. It's in the Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal. That really gives voice to the whole American experience. We still have racial difficulties, we still have disadvantaged people, but the unique thing about America and its diversity and its people, is that we are always moving forward. And we're always dealing with problems, not ignoring them. Questioning your country and constantly going back and examining the beauty of it and the flaws,

I think that makes a patriotic American. That's real American character in my mind, I mean, the frontiers that we've conquered is kind of amazing, In a relatively short period of time America's helped to transform the world.

From few fragile footholds, in just 400 years America has grown into the most powerful nation on earth, Born from the enterprising experiment, and piety of the first settlers, forged by revolutionary passion and high ideals, driven by a thirst for innovation and technological change, a nation drawn from across the world.