The presidential canvass of 1860 was the most important in US history. It resulted in Abraham Lincoln's election as the first Republican to occupy the White House and brought sectional tensions to a head.

In many ways the war's pre-eminent confrontation, the Overland Campaign brought together each side's greatest captain in a novel and relentless combat. The prominence of Grant and Lee ensured that their contest would deeply affect civilian morale. The armies would battle fiercely and almost continuously from early May to mid-June.

By March 1865, the Federals had restricted Lee's supply lines and forced him to extend his lines. Lee failed to break the siege and headed west. Grant blocked the way at Appomattox, where Lee surrendered his 28,000 starving men on April 9. CSA forces elsewhere quickly surrendered.

See African Americans in the 1900s using artistic expression against revisionist history and racism.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents the definitive history of the transformative years following the American Civil War, when the nation struggled to rebuild itself amidst profound loss, massive destruction and revolutionary social change.

Explore the rise of Jim Crow and the undermining of Reconstruction’s legal and political legacy.

This illuminating documentary explores the life of a unique American artist, a man with a remarkable and unlikely biography. Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama. After the Civil War, Traylor continued to farm the land as a sharecropper until the late 1920s. Aging and alone, he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, in his late 80s, Traylor...

REMEMBERING ANARCHA explores the legacy of “the father of modern gynecology,” Dr. J. Marion Sims, the enslaved women subjected to his experiments, and related issues of ethics, race, and the lingering effects on modern society and medicine.

REDEEMING UNCLE TOM, narrated by acclaimed actor Danny Glover, is a ground-breaking documentary that will restore a hero of the abolitionist movement to his rightful place in history. Josiah Henson overcame incredible odds and brutal oppression to escape from slavery. His life inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the classic novel which has been recognized as one of the sparks that ignited the Civil War.

This 2-hour special, narrated by Deon Cole, gives a fresh perspective of the black movement in America, from Emancipation to the Civil Rights era.