David Steward

Since its 1988 premiere, this critically acclaimed documentary series has presented hundreds of films that put a human face on contemporary social issues by relating a compelling story in an intimate fashion. "POV" has won virtually every major film and broadcasting award available, including 38 Emmys, 22 Peabody Awards and three Oscars.

In 1931 the rains stopped and the "black blizzards" began. Powerful dust storms carrying millions of tons of stinging, blinding black dirt swept across the Southern Plains — the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, western Kansas, and the eastern portions of Colorado and New Mexico. Topsoil that had taken a thousand years per inch to build suddenly blew away in only minutes. One journalist traveling through the devastated region dubbed it the "Dust Bowl." This American Experience film presents the remarkable story of the determined people who clung to their homes and way of life, enduring drought, dust, disease — even death — for nearly a decade. Less well-known than those who sought refuge in California, typified by the Joad family in John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," the Dust Bowlers who stayed overcame an almost unbelievable series of calamities and disasters.

In the spring of 1927, after weeks of incessant rains, the Mississippi River went on a rampage from Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans, inundating hundreds of towns, killing as many as a thousand people and leaving a million homeless. In Greenville, Mississippi, efforts to contain the river pitted the majority black population against an aristocratic plantation family, the Percys, and the Percys against themselves. A dramatic story of greed, power and race during one of America's greatest natural disasters.

American Experience looks at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago where Vice President Hubert Humphrey won his party's nomination for president amid massive civil unrest and violence perpetrated by Chicago Police and anti-Vietnam War protesters.

In the predawn hours of March 28, 1979, a reactor of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, began to overheat. The lives of half a million people soon hung in the balance, as human error and mechanical failure combined to create the worst nuclear accident in American history.

Performance and conversation with husband-and-wife poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon at a New Jersey festival, in their Wilmot, NH hometown and their Eagle Pond farmhouse.

A new era in the search for alien life has arrived as numerous bodies of life-sustaining water have been found all over our solar system.

For 99 years, the residents of Salamanca, N.Y., have rented the land under their homes for an average of $1/year form the Seneca Indians, under the terms of a lease imposed by Congress. Now, as the lease is about to expire, a century of bad business must be renegotiated. Chana Gazit and David Steward's film captures the unfolding drama as the survival of an American town and justice for the Senecas appear to be in conflict.