Episode
American Experience: Annie Oakley
Overview
An on-target profile of the sharpshooter (1860-1926) who was “the first American woman ever to become a superstar.” Included: Oakley, at 15, winning a shooting match with future husband Frank Butler; achieving stardom with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show; filing libel suits against a number of newspapers for reporting that she was a drug addict; teaching thousands of women to shoot, while opposing women's suffrage.
Details
- Series
- American Experience
- Season
- Season 18
- Episode
- Episode 12
- Air date
- 2006-05-08
- Runtime
- 55 min
Episode context
Annie Oakley is Episode 12 in Season 18 of American Experience. It aired on 2006-05-08. The runtime is 55 min.
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Episode 11: The Alaska Pipeline
The history of the Alaska Pipeline, which was built in the 1970s to transport oil across 800 miles of pristine wilderness, from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. Included: the 1968 discovery of the largest oil field in North America at Prudhoe Bay; the battle between Native Americans and the government over the land the pipeline would cross; environmental concerns; and construction of the pipeline itself, which employed 78,000 people and cost more than $8 billion.
Episode 13: The Man Behind Hitler
A profile of Joseph Goebbels (1897-45), who helped launch Hitler's rise to power. Kenneth Branagh provides voice-over readings of Goebbels' personal diaries. Included: footage from German archives tracing Goebbels' life; how Goebbels continually stage-managed his life and reinvented himself from his early days as a radical “popular socialist” to his death.
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Episode 9: Eugene O'Neill
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Episode 8: Hijacked
A look at the coordinated hijacking of four jetliners in 1970 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which blew up the evacuated planes in Jordan. Included: the militants' use of civilians to further their goals.
Episode 7: Jesse James
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Episode 6: The Nuremberg Trials
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Episode 5: John and Abigail Adams
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Episode 2: Race to the Moon
"Race to the Moon" chronicles Apollo 8, the first voyage to the moon. "It was an event beyond all other events," says Walter Cronkite of the December 1968 mission, which laid the groundwork for the first lunar landing seven months later. Cronkite and author Andrew Chaikin put the flight into context; astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders and their wives recall it firsthand. Says Lovell of seeing the lunar landscape, "We were like three kids looking into a candy-store window."
Episode 1: Two Days in October
"Two Days in October" recalls two 1967 events -- a Vietcong ambush and a violent antiwar demonstration at the University of Wisconsin -- that together marked a turning point in America's Vietnam tragedy. The ambush, on Oct. 17, killed 64 of the 142 U.S. troops attacked, and showed, maybe for the first time, that the war might not be winnable. And the protest, a day later against Dow Chemical Co., is believed to be the first antiwar demonstration to turn violent.