English

Explores the causes and consequences of World War I. Featuring four live-action segments, the program explores a history of Czarist Russia and the birth of Communism in Russia, as well as the life on World War I battlefields and the story of the Red Baron. Rise of Nationalism explores the rise of nationalism in the early 20th century, specifically oppression in Czarist Russia.

Part I: The War in Europe: Uses archival footage to look at the roots of the war in Europe; the weapons of war including chemical warfare, air planes, and submarines; the United States enters the war; Support of the war including industrial production, rationing, government price controls, propaganda, and taxes and bonds.

World War II, we have been told all our lives, was our greatest triumph, the moment when the forces of light—the Western democracies and the U.S.S.R.—prevailed over the forces of darkness—the Nazis and the other Axis powers. It was a conflict that began in Europe in September 1939 and ended with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in August 1945. Or did it?

THE WAR, a seven-part documentary series directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, explores the history and horror of the Second World War from an American perspective by following the fortunes of so-called ordinary men and women who become caught up in one of the greatest cataclysms in human history.

Although the United States tried to stay out, America entered World War I on the side of the Allies in 1917. Why this happened and the effects of the war on the home and military fronts is analyzed. President Wilson's plans for a peaceful world and the Senates refusal to go along with his vision is examined.

"This series documents the struggles of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in the last year of World War II as each sought to impose his conception of the post-war world on the others. The war would soon be over, but who would win the peace and dominate the world?