Mr. Tornado is the remarkable story of Ted Fujita, whose groundbreaking work in research and applied science saved thousands of lives and helped Americans prepare for and respond to dangerous weather phenomena.

In the late 19th century, as America's teeming cities grew increasingly congested, the time had come to replace the nostalgic horse-drawn trolleys with a faster, cleaner, safer, and more efficient form of transportation. Ultimately, it was Boston – a city of so many firsts – that overcame a litany of engineering challenges, the greed-driven interests of businessmen, and the great fears of its citizenry to construct America's first subway. Based in part on Doug Most's acclaimed non-fiction book of the same name, The Race Underground tells the dramatic story of an invention that changed the lives of millions.

On a perfectly still August morning in 1960, Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger lifted off in a helium balloon from an abandoned airstrip in New Mexico, floating upwards into the clouds. When his open gondola reached 100,000 feet, nearly 20 miles above the earth, Kittinger disconnected his onboard oxygen supply, said a prayer, and stepped off into the unknown. Within seconds, he was hurtling at over four hundred miles per hour through temperatures nearing one hundred degrees below zero.

The Perfect Crime tells the shocking story of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; wealthy college students who had planned to abduct and kill a child at random just to prove they were smart enough to get away with it. Their lawyer summoned experts to show that the murderers had been shaped by childhood trauma, setting off a national debate about morality, individual responsibility, and capital punishment.

Shortly before dawn on August 21, 1992, six heavily armed U.S. marshals made their way up to the isolated mountaintop home of Randy and Vicki Weaver and their three children on Ruby Ridge in Northern Idaho. Charged with selling two illegal sawed-off shotguns to an undercover agent, Weaver had failed to appear in court and law enforcement was tasked with bringing him in. For months, the Weavers had been holed up on their property with a cache of firearms, including automatic weapons.

Command and Control presents the true story of what happens when weapons built to protect threaten to become the very source of our own destruction. Based on bestseller by Eric Schlosser, the film tells the story of a 1980 accident at a Titan II missile complex in Damascus, Arkansas, and explores the great dilemma or our time: How do you manage weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them?

From acclaimed filmmaker Ric Burns, Death and the Civil War explores an essential but largely overlooked aspect of the most pivotal event in American history. With the coming of the Civil War, and the staggering casualties it ushered in, death entered the experience of the American people as it never had before - permanently altering the character of the republic, and the psyche of the American people.

City of the Century tells how in just 60 years Chicago grew from a remote, swampy frontier town into one of the most explosively alive cities in the world. It's the story of the wealthy and the indigent, the heralded and the forgotten, the shop assistants and the millionaire retail barons who together created Chicago. It describes how through innovation, ingenuity, determination and sheer ruthlessness, the captains of industry created empires in a marshy wasteland.

SILICON VALLEY tells the story of the pioneering scientists who transformed rural Santa Clara County into the hub of technological ingenuity we now know as Silicon Valley. The film spotlights the creativity of the young men who founded Fairchild Semiconductor and in particular the brilliant, charismatic young physicist Robert Noyce.

The little-known story of the American effort to relieve starvation in the new Soviet Russia in 1921, The Great Famine is a documentary about the worst natural disaster in Europe since the Black Plague in the Middle Ages. Five million Russians died. Half a world away, Americans responded with a massive two-year relief campaign, championed by Herbert Hoover, director of the American Relief Administration known as the ARA.

The extraordinary spy plane that defused a Cold War arms race and ignited the "U-2 affair."
Cold War. New weapons. The threat of World War III. In this high stakes game, how would the U.S. president play his hand?
Despite Russian claims of nuclear superiority, the question remained, what do they really have? If Russia's boasts were true, their Bison bombers put the U.S. within nuclear range for the first time. In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower launched an espionage mission like no other — requiring a spy plane that could fly without detection.

The night began as any other peaceful Sunday evening, with millions of listeners tuned to their radios. Yet the outward calm hid a nation tense with apprehension: the Great Depression refused to let up, and the threat of war in Europe loomed larger every day. Then, at 8:15 p.m., there was a report on the radio that Martians had landed in New Jersey.

The story of Jesse James remains one of America's most cherished and wrong-headed myths. Less heroic than brutal, James was a product of the American Civil War; a Confederate partisan of expansive ambition and cunning, who helped invent his own valiant legend. A member of a vicious band of Missouri guerrillas during the war, James sought redemption afterwards, but, rode further from it, redeeming instead the glorious memory of the Old South.

On April 28, 1881, just days from being hanged for murder, 21-year-old Henry McCarty, alias Billy the Kid, outfoxed his jailors and electrified the nation with the last in a long line of daring escapes. Just a few weeks later, he was finally gunned down by an ambitious sheriff, and the felling of one of the most notorious criminals of the age made headlines across the country.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were the most famous criminal couple in US history. Newsreels in movie theaters across the country flashed images of a pixyish Bonnie and handsome Clyde, turning them into the underworld's dark prince and princess of crime. In reality, as this film reveals, Bonnie and Clyde grew up in the slums of West Dallas and had little in common with their glamorous media images.