Studs Terkel

Buck Weaver and Hap Felsch are young idealistic players on the Chicago White Sox, a pennant-winning team owned by Charles Comiskey - a penny-pinching, hands-on manager who underpays his players and treats them with disdain. And when gamblers and hustlers discover that Comiskey's demoralized players are ripe for a money-making scheme, one by one the team members agree to throw the World Series. But when the White Sox are defeated, a couple of sports writers smell a fix and a national scandal explodes, ripping the cover off America's favorite pastime.

Documentary about the blacklisted folk group The Weavers, and the events leading up to their triumphant return to Carnegie Hall.

During World War II, hard-luck farmer Colvis Nevels leaves his rural Kentucky home to take a factory job in bustling Detroit. Reluctantly accompanying Colvis is his long-suffering wife, Gertie, a talented woodcarver set in her traditional ways. When the perils of city life and Colvis' reckless squandering of money send the Nevels into precarious financial straits, Gertie starts a business making hand-carved dolls in order to provide for her family.

The Big One is an investigative documentary from director Michael Moore who goes around the country asking why big American corporations produce their product abroad where labor is cheaper while so many Americans are unemployed, losing their jobs, and would happily be hired by such companies as Nike.

Algren will spotlight the hard-knock life and authentic creative legacy of one of the most underrated writers of the twentieth century, Nelson Algren. Algren's brutally honest portrayal of the American underclass and his hard-nosed lifestyle became his pathway to compassion. Through interviews with Algren contemporaries, experts, and "literary soulmates," as well as through the photography of Algren's friends, Art Shay and Stephen Deutch, the film will tell his story. It will celebrate his tremendous contribution to and influence on American letters, and push Algren, champion of the marginalized, out from the margins.

This documentary features acclaimed Chicagoan broadcaster and Pulitzer Prize winner Studs Terkel talking about the value of oral history and the voice of ordinary working Americans.

This 90 minute, 3-act documentary details the rise & fall of Maxwell Street, Chicago's great outdoor market, the birthplace of the electric blues and where "the only color that mattered was green".

Documentary narrated by Paul Winfield, this documentary follows the course of Mahalia Jackson's extraordinary life - from her humble beginnings as a sickly child singing in New Orleans churches to her breakthrough with Columbia Records and her ascendancy to Carnegie Hall and Europe's great stages. Her story's told through archival footage and interviews with those who knew her best.

Quearborn & Perversion: An Early History of Lesbian & Gay Chicago (2009, 109 min) is a documentary on LGBTQ life in Chicago from 1934 to 1974. Moving from the speakeasys and Henry Gerber’s founding of the Society for Human Rights in the 1930s, to the underground social structure of the 1940s and 1950s, to the dawn of consciousness-raising entities such as the Daughters of Bilitis and Mattachine Midwest in the 1960’s, and concluding with the emergence of the gay liberation movement with the first Pride March and opening of the first community center in the early 1970s.

On May 8th, 1945, writer, director Norman Corwin broadcast ON A NOTE OF TRIUMPH, an unforgettable homage to the end of war in Europe. This film shines a light on a lost work of genius, and examines it's haunting resonance to today's current events.

For over 60 years, Studs Terkel elevated the voices and experiences of everyday Americans through his skillful interviews on radio, in books and on TV. This documentary takes a fond and illuminating look back at one of America's most influential authors and media personalities whose curiosity about people never dimmed over the course of a long and brilliant career.

Harry Bridges: A Man and his Union chronicles the life of one of America's most important and controversial left-wing labor leader. He headed the International Longshoremen and Warehouseman Union from the 1930's to the 1970's and was a champion of workers' causes on an international scale. Harry Bridges (July 28, 1901 - March 30, 1990) was controversial as he was charismatic. He was prosecuted by FDR, Truman and Eisenhower alike, and convicted by a federal jury for having lied about Communist Party membership-a conviction which was set aside. On the West Coast, Bridges still excites passions both for and against the labor movement.

The World's Fakest News Team tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and pop culture.

A documentary on the American Civil War narrated by Ken Burns, covering the secession of the Confederacy to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

A weekly BBC Two magazine programme focusing on the best of the week's arts and culture news, covering books, art, film, architecture and more.

The history of the rise, rule and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and the entire era it encompassed (1920-33). After nearly a century of activism, Prohibition was intended to improve the lives of all citizens by protecting individuals, families and society at large from the devastating effects of alcohol abuse; but paradoxically it made millions of people rethink their definition of morality.

A weekly series with alternating interviewer: Harvard psycho-historian Doris Kerns; poet, playwright and author Maya Angelou; syndicated columnist George Will and populist chronicler Studs Terkel. Each program featured one of the four in a 30-minute film or videotape report on someone who contributed to the ideas and issues of America.