Peter Miller

TV's most-watched history series brings to life the compelling stories from our past that inform our understanding of the world today.

Actor Dustin Hoffman narrates this decade-spanning documentary that highlights the contributions of Jewish Americans to the most American sport of them all: baseball. Highlights include a rare interview with legendary pitcher Sandy Koufax.

SACCO AND VANZETTI is an 80-minute-long documentary that tells the story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant anarchists who were accused of a murder in 1920, and executed in Boston in 1927 after a notoriously prejudiced trial. It is the first major documentary film about this landmark story.

Academy Award-winning screenwriter Robert Riskin headed up a secret film unit that sought to redefine America in the eyes of the world during the darkest days of World War II. The filmmakers created powerful short documentaries that showed America's strength not through images of tanks, but in portraits of farmers, school children and window washers. The "Projections of America" films were brilliant, moving portraits of America that were unlike any films ever made before, but seventy years later they are forgotten, hidden away in government archives.

Marcella Hazan didn’t just teach Italian cooking—she changed the way America eats. Fearless, passionate, and exacting, she introduced authentic recipes to millions. Julia Child called Marcella “my mentor in all things Italian.” Featuring Jacques Pépin, Danny Meyer, April Bloomfield, and Lidia Bastianich, this intimate portrait reveals the bold woman who forever shaped home kitchens.

Doc Pomus’ dramatic life is one of American music’s great untold stories. Paralyzed with polio as a child, Brooklyn-born Jerome Felder reinvented himself as a blues singer, renaming himself Doc Pomus, then emerged as one of the most brilliant songwriters of the early rock and roll era, writing “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “This Magic Moment,” “A Teenager in Love,” “Viva Las Vegas,” and dozens of other hits. Spearheaded and co-produced by his daughter, Sharyn Felder, and packed with incomparable music and rare archival imagery, this documentary features interviews with collaborators and friends including Dr. John, Ben E. King, Joan Osborne, Shawn Colvin, Dion, Leiber and Stoller, and B.B. King, as well as passages from Doc’s private journals read by his close friend Lou Reed.

The little-known story of a deadly race massacre and carefully orchestrated insurrection in North Carolina’s largest city in 1898 — the only coup d’état in the history of the US. Stoking fears of 'Negro Rule', self-described white supremacists used intimidation and violence to destroy Black political and economic power and overthrow Wilmington’s democratically-elected, multi-racial government. Black residents were murdered and thousands were banished. The story of what happened in Wilmington was suppressed for decades until descendants and scholars began to investigate. Today, many of those descendants — Black and white — seek the truth about this intentionally buried history.

Built around the landmark 1954 legal case Hernandez v. Texas, the film interweaves the stories of its central characters with a broader story of the civil rights movement. It also brings to life the heroic post-World War II struggle of Mexican Americans fighting to dismantle the discrimination targeted against them.

Examines the troubling case of Black Panther leader Dhoruba Bin Wahad (Richard Moore), released after 19 years in prison, when his conviction for allegedly shooting two New York City police officers was overturned on the basis of prosecutorial misconduct.

A short film about the enduring meaning of a beloved chocolate soda drink born on the Jewish Lower East Side. The egg cream contained neither eggs nor cream—it was a product of necessity and hardship, but a source of joy and sweetness. Through a tour of egg cream establishments led by a filmmaker and his young daughter, exhaustively researched archival imagery (and an eponymous song by Lou Reed!), EGG CREAM examines the Jewish experience in America and the mythology of a simpler time.

A small-town California boy planned to be a minister like his father, but instead became the greatest conductor of choral music the world has ever known. With no formal musical training, he moved from stunning early success in popular music to legendary interpretations of classical music's great choral masterpieces.

The film follows Audrey Kali as she visits farms and slaughterhouses and meets with experts to reveal the ambiguous moral underbelly of humane animal slaughter. But what starts out as a concern for animals becomes a story about people. What she once saw as senseless acts of violence, she understands as a complicated agricultural system, pursued by decent people fully cognizant of the contradictions and complexity of their actions.