This documentary looks at political, industrial, medical, and transportation revolutions of the late 18th and 19th centuries. The American Revolution inspired other nations to revolt for freedom and liberty. The Industrial Revolution pioneered mass production, led to mass consumerism, and turned Britain into a world power. Steam powered engines and railway networks decreased travel time and facilitated urban migration. However, industrial megacities...

April 1453. The Ottomans, led by Sultan Mehmed II, lay siege to the city of Constantinople. They intend to seize the city and unify their Sultanate, which was cut into two by the Byzantine Empire. In the defense of his capital, Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI can count upon his citizens, and also upon Genoese and Venetian soldiers. The reinforcements expected by the Byzantines are late in arriving, but the besieged city holds firm under the command...

Throughout this century, the Muslim population of southeastern Europe has been hounded and periodically massacred. Communist Bulgaria continued the pre-Communist policy of "ethnic cleansing" (a misnomer, since many of the victims are Slavs), attempting to "Bulgarize" its Turkish-speaking Muslims. After a particularly tense time in 1989, Muslims are once again permitted to practice their religion openly, but after decades of official repression, knowledge...

The great grandson of a slave, Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 2, 1908. At the age of 25, Marshall graduated first in his class from Howard Law and joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the nation's largest and oldest civil rights organization. As NAACP counsel, Marshall used the constitution to successfully argue for a slew of rights now taken for granted, and forced the University...

Part one of this program, presented against a backdrop of Gothic architecture and pre-Raphaelite art, asks whether religion and science can coexist in a post-Darwinian world. Are Creation and Evolution mutually exclusive? Part two focuses on the questions raised by the global movement toward social equality. Must Christianity adapt to survive, and if so, do issues like female priests and homosexuality threaten to rob it of its scriptural authority?...

The historic town of Mostar, spanning a deep valley of the Neretva River, developed in the 15th and 16th centuries as an Ottoman frontier town and during the Austro-Hungarian period in the 19th and 20th centuries. Mostar has long been known for its old Turkish houses and Old Bridge, Stari Most, after which it is named. In the 1990 conflict, however, most of the historic town and the Old Bridge, designed by the renowned architect Sinan, were destroyed....

As a tool for characterizing rational thought, logic cuts across many philosophical disciplines and lies at the core of mathematics and computer science. Drawing on Aristotle's Organon, Russell's Principia Mathematica, and other central works, this program tracks the evolution of logic, beginning with the basic syllogism. A sampling of subsequent topics includes propositional and predicate logic, Bayesian confirmation theory, Boolean logic, Frege's...

With a tiny and delicate paintbrush, Jean Fouquet adds the golden threads of a tentative humanism to "The Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia" (circa 1450) and unveils a glimmer of the modern era, crouching behind the horizon of the Middle Ages. This film analyzes the illumination for clues of what Fouquet sought to convey to viewers. Completed for a book of hours commissioned by one of Charles VIII's financial advisors, it portrays Apollonia's martyrdom...

A wave of bold American writing from both white and black authors gave expression to Southern life during World War II and the years that followed. This program tells the story of that literary development up to the era of the Civil Rights movement. It presents the work of Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, Lillian Smith, Flannery O'Connor, and others - as well as a revealing 1997 interview with Welty herself. An inventive...

Alex is digging for buried treasure, when Timeblazers Jen and Sam tell him that his pirate's map is a fake. To help him better understand fact from fiction, they head back to ancient Greece and Plato, who made up the story of the mythical island Atlantis. Next Alex learns that the story of King Arthur and the Round Table is just a good story, written by Geoffrey of Monmouth; also that the Sword Excalibur and Merlin come from Celtic myths and legends....