Episode
American Experience: Transcontinental Railroad
Overview
Charting the race between the Union Pacific and Central Pacific to construct a transcontinental railroad to link the U.S. It ended May 10, 1869, in Promontory Point, Utah. The construction was "the engineering marvel of the 19th century -- and a flat-out swindle,” says narrator Michael Murphy. It was also "the technological manifestation of Manifest Destiny,” says historian Wendell Huffman, one of the program's commentators. And it sealed the fate of the Plains Indians. When the final spike was in place, Murphy says, "America could take its place as the first nation in the world."
Details
- Series
- American Experience
- Season
- Season 15
- Episode
- Episode 7
- Air date
- 2003-01-27
- Runtime
- 55 min
Episode context
Transcontinental Railroad is Episode 7 in Season 15 of American Experience. It aired on 2003-01-27. The runtime is 55 min.
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Episode 6: The Murder of Emmett Till
Recalling the 1955 murder of a 14-year-old black youth in the Mississippi delta, an incident that could very well have launched the civil-rights movement. "He was a sacrificial lamb," says Mamie Till of her son Emmett, a fun-loving Chicago teen who was slain after whistling at a white woman outside a general store in Tallahatchee County, Miss. Less than a month after Till's mutilated body was found, two white defendants were acquitted (in 67 minutes) by an all-white jury.
Episode 8: Partners of the Heart
Chronicling the unlikely partnership between a white surgeon and a black "technician" that led to a procedure to correct blue-baby syndrome in 1944. The principals: Vivien Thomas, a black man with only a high-school diploma, and Alfred Blalock, the patrician chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins. Blalock pioneered the surgery to correct the congenital heart defect, but it was Thomas who devised to procedures that were used. And they did it at a time, narrator Morgan Freeman says, when the two "could not share the same lunch table in the Hopkins cafeteria."
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Episode 13: Murder at Harvard
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