2025 marks the 60th anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In this video, The Henry Ford Curators Heather Bruegl (Oneida/Stockbridge-Munsee) and Amber N. Mitchell discuss the events that set the stage for the Voting Rights Movement in Selma, Alabama, the impact of the act itself and how its s...

Director Ford and his regular camera man Joseph August, who had worked on many Hollywood features with Ford, were assigned to Midway Island in 1942 to document, for the Navy, the work of guerrillas and resistance fighters in the Pacific. Two days before the battle of Midway, he learned that the J...

Tunisian Victory (1944) was an Anglo-American film which follows British and American armies from the planning of Operation Torch and Operation Acrobat (the latter subsequently canceled) in summer of 1942 to the liberation of Tunisia in May 1943.
The principal narrator is velvety voiced British a...

Tommy takes us on a deep dive of fighting knives issued to and used by Marines in WWII. In addition to looking at them, he introduces us to some of the men and lets them speak again through voiceover so you hear the words and thoughts of veterans and journalists from the front lines. Come explore...

The Dr. Sullivan Jackson and Mrs. Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson Home holds powerful stories of an ordinary family doing extraordinary things in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. In line with the wishes of the Jacksons’ daughter Jawana, the Jackson House has been relocated from Selma, Alabama,...

Mr. Beat tells the story of the Korean War, aka "The Forgotten War," a war his grandfather fought in.

The Pictorial Record of Man’s Conquest of the Colorado River, this program documents the building of the Hoover Dam, one of the engineering marvels of its day, begun in 1931 and completed in 1936. It was the largest dam in the world for many years. It cost 50 million dollars (800 million in today...

The footage is first-rate, taken by hundreds of battle cameramen and expertly edited into a fast-moving account of an immensely complex and dramatic story. There is some narration, principally by Leslie Banks, but the story is told mostly in the words of ordinary soldiers who were there.
Much of ...

The Spanish Civil War, erupting in July 1936, was a ferocious conflict that claimed over half a million lives and reshaped Spain for decades. For nearly three years, the leftist Second Republic battled a right-wing Nationalist uprising led by General Francisco Franco. More than a domestic strugg...

Dr Arnold Toynbee, the great 20th Century historian, observed that the breakdown and eventual disintegration of civilizations, for the most part, follow a common pattern. The ruling class, who once were able to creatively respond to challenges on behalf of the masses, lose their ability to inspir...

Report from the Aleutians (1943) is a 46 minute documentary directed
by John Huston, an iconic (and frequently iconoclastic) director of
some 40 feature films, many regarded as classics, over a 45 year
career. During World War II he served in the Army Signal Corps with the rank
of Captain, making...

This documentary explores the extraordinary history of America’s airborne command posts—better known as “doomsday planes.” From the Cold War’s Operation Looking Glass EC-135s, which maintained an unbroken 24/7 airborne alert for three decades, to the E-4 Nightwatch 747s designed to safeguard pres...

The Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star marked a turning point in American aviation—the U.S. Army Air Forces’ first operational jet fighter, designed and flown within a staggering 143 days in 1943. But how did it truly compare to its contemporaries, like Germany’s Me 262 and Britain’s Gloster Meteor? And...

December 7th (made in 1943) is a striking manifestation of its time, a feature-length docudrama about the bombing of Pearl Harbor that is often at cross purposes with itself in the message it means to convey.
Gregg Toland, the brilliant cinematographer fresh off of Citizen Kane, The Little Foxes ...

From Cold War hover rigs to the dust-stripped battlefields of Afghanistan, the Harrier Jump Jet redefined the boundaries of combat aviation. Developed by British engineers with the revolutionary Pegasus engine, the Harrier became the world’s first operational fixed-wing V/STOL aircraft—capable of...

Eugene Castle was a newsreel photographer starting around 1925. In 1937 he started marketing 8mm and 16mm movies for home use, one of the first to do so, and his company was immensely successful until home video made it obsolete by 1984.
He started out selling newsreel compilations, many of which...

The March (1964) is a documentary directed by James Blue on the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, one of the watershed events of American history, made by the United States Information Agency for showing outside of the USA. Only in 1990 did it become available domestically. Its high ...