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History

  • 10 Million Names aims to recover and restore the history of those enslaved from America's past.
  • AMERICAN EXPERIENCE is pleased to present a film preview and discussion of our upcoming film, The Cancer Detectives. The event will feature an extended clip from the film and a panel discussion with filmmakers and participants.

    Click this link to join: https://wgbh.zoom.us/j/99001979557

    Featured guests include:

    Gene Tempest is the writer and director of The Cancer Detectives. She is an award-winning filmmaker and historian whose work has appeared in The Boston Globe and The New York Times. From 2016-2017, she served as the first-ever Historian in Residence for American Experience, where she helped fund and develop new history programming for public television.

    Deirdre Cooper Owens is an award-winning historian and popular public speaker. She is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut and the author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and The Origins of American Gynecology.

    Rachel Gross is an award-winning science journalist and the author of Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, WIRED, New Scientist, Slate, Undark, and NPR, among others.

    The discussion will be moderated by Cameo George, executive producer of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE.

    About the film: The story of how the life-saving cervical cancer test became an ordinary part of women’s lives is as unusual and remarkable as the coalition of people who ultimately made it possible: a Greek immigrant, Dr. George Papanicolau; his intrepid wife, Mary; Japanese-born artist Hashime Murayama; Dr. Helen Dickens, an African American OBGYN in Philadelphia; and an entirely new class of female scientists known as cyto-screeners. But the test was just the beginning. Once the test proved effective, the campaign to make pap smears available to millions of women required nothing short of a total national mobilization. The Cancer Detectives tells the untold story of the first-ever war on cancer and the people who fought tirelessly to save women from what was once the number one cancer killer of women.

    The Cancer Detectives premieres Tuesday, March 26th at 9/8c on PBS.



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    Major funding for American Experience provided by Liberty Mutual Insurance, Carlisle Companies and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Funding for The Cancer Detectives provided by GBH Voices and Equity Fund and members of The Better Angels Society including The Fullerton Family Charitable Fund. Additional funding for American Experience provided by the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation, The American Experience Trust, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and public television viewers. American Experience is produced for PBS by GBH Boston.


    Photo credit: GBH Creative
  • Photographer Stanley Forman captured a desegregation protest at City Hall Plaza that roiled the nation.
  • "Fly With Me" features the stories of stewardesses who fought back against the sexist and racist restrictions of the 1950s airline industry.
  • A new podcast from GBH News, "What Is Owed?" explores what reparations would look like in one of America's oldest cities.
  • Ray Anthony Shepard has put together an award-winning book for young readers to counter what he says are "years of sanitized Black History months and schoolbooks." He has chosen instead to tell the story from the inside - examining the question of race through the lyrical biographies of six prominent American heroes, all of whom challenged and changed the racial barriers of their day - Ona Judge, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B Wells, MLK and Barack Obama.

    Cambridge Forum guest speaker Shepard, intertwines his academic research with personal memories of his mother's stories about her enslaved father, accounts informed by his own experiences of living through eight decades from the era of Jim Crow to the present day. He provides a refreshing and corrective understanding of the role of race in American life - Black and White. As a retired history teacher and textbook editor, he now writes books "that didn’t exist when I was in the classroom and books I couldn’t publish as an editor.” Ray Anthony Shepard graduated from the University of Nebraska and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

    The conversation will be moderated by Jude Nixon, Professor of English and former Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Salem State University.
    Partner:
    Cambridge Forum
  • Join us on an genealogical quest – an author’s exploration of her family and its history, brought to life in Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family, named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker. Don’t miss Rachel Webster’s presentation and conversation with historian Kendra Field about her experience connecting with relatives across lines of color, culture, and time.

    In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington, DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative. Acting as a storyteller, Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations, among them Banneker’s grandparents, an interracial couple who broke the law to marry.
    Partner:
    American Ancestors
  • Michele Norris's latest book, "Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity," explores how Americans are engaging in frank and covert dialogues about race.
  • The Granite state is not usually considered a mecca of Black culture — but the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire is working to preserve all the ways the state has been shaped by Black figures.
  • Saturday is Holocaust Remembrance Day, yet too many young people lack basic knowledge about the genocide.