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Teenagers today have more money and independence than ever before. Their lives have become the object of obsessive focus by corporate America. Their tastes, attitudes, and aspirations are sampled and resampled by marketers wielding the latest scientific tools to determine exactly who they are and what they want.

FRONTLINE takes an in-depth look at the multibillion-dollar "persuasion industries" of advertising and public relations. To cut through mass-media clutter and to overcome consumers' growing resistance to their pitches, marketers have developed new ways of integrating their messages deeper into the fabric of our lives.

In 1961, segregation seemed to have an overwhelming grip on American society. Many states violently enforced the policy, while the federal government, under the Kennedy administration, remained indifferent, preoccupied with matters abroad.

The heroism of nine students in Little Rock, Arkansas
Pioneers of desegregation

Nine From Little Rock chronicles the Arkansas school integration crisis and the changes wrought in subsequent years.

In 1957, Little Rock Central High School became a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement when, in defiance of federal orders to integrate the school, the Governor of Arkansas called out the National Guard to prevent nine African-American students from entering the building.

UNFORGIVABLE BLACKNESS: THE RISE AND FALL OF JACK JOHNSON tells the story of the first African-American boxer to win the most coveted title in all of sports and his struggle, in and out of the ring, to live his life as a free man.

Sent by the President Thomas Jefferson to find the fabled Northwest Passage, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the most important expedition in American history—a voyage of danger and discovery from St. Louis to the headwaters of the Missouri River, over the Continental Divide to the Pacific.

Revered as the author of the Declaration of Independence, the most sacred document in American history, yet condemned as a lifelong owner of slaves, THOMAS JEFFERSON remains the enigma that is America.

HORATIO'S DRIVE recounts the simultaneously inspirational and hilarious saga of Horatio Nelson Jackson, an eccentric Vermont doctor, who in 1903—on a visionary whim and a 50-dollar-bet—became the first person to drive an automobile across the continent, heralding the future of the "horseless carriage" as a vehicle destined for more than inner-city travel and as a machine that would transform Am

Samuel Clemens rose from a hardscrabble boyhood in the backwoods of Missouri to become Mark Twain, America's best-known and best-loved author. Considered in his time as the funniest man on earth, Twain was also an unflinching critic of human nature who used his humor to attack hypocrisy, greed and racism.

Frank Lloyd Wright was the greatest of all American architects. He was an authentic American genius, a man who believed he was destined to redesign the world, creating everything anew.