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The Civil War - A Film by Ken Burns (Boxed Set)
: essential video:The most successful public-television miniseries in American history, the 11-hour Civil War didn't just captivate a nation, reteaching to us our history in narrative terms; it actually also invented a new film language taken from its creator. When people describe documentaries using the 'Ken Burns approach,' its style is understood: voice-over narrators reading letters and documents dramatically and stating the writer's name at their conclusion, fresh live footage of places juxtaposed with still images (photographs, paintings, ...
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Cnn: Cold War (8pc)
: essential video:If anything defined the 20th century as the age of anxiety, it's the cold war with its ultimate no-win nuclear endgame. While conflicts in Korea and Vietnam dragged on, providing the traditional images of modern warfare, some of the conflict's most dangerous battles were invisible--tactical, intellectual, and fought primarily in the minds and war rooms of U.S. and Soviet leaders: Kennedy, Krushchev, Castro, Kissinger, Gorbachev, and Reagan. This 8-volume, 24-episode series, narrated by Kenneth Branagh, is ...
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The Winds of War
: :An engrossing, 1983 television miniseries based on a bestselling work of historical fiction by Herman Wouk, The Winds of War is an admirable production reminiscent of the era of Hollywood's epic features. At the center of the globe-trotting story is the Henry family, whose laconic but straight-shooting patriarch is United States Navy Commander Victor 'Pug' Henry (Robert Mitchum), sent to Hitler's Berlin in the spring of 1939 as a naval attaché to the then-neutral American embassy. A keen ...
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The World At War - 9 Volume Gift Set
: essential video:Sir Jeremy Isaacs highly deserves the numerous awards for documentaries he has earned: the Royal Television Society's Desmond Davis Award, l'Ordre National du Mérit, an Emmy, and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. His epic The World at War remains unsurpassed as the definitive visual history of World War II. The Second World War was different from other wars in thousands of ways, one of which was the unparalleled scope of visual documents kept by the ...
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Vietnam - A Television History
: :Exactly why was America in Vietnam? This remarkable and essential seven-volume series--six years in the making and originally broadcast on public television in 1983--tells the agonizing history of Vietnam's lengthy conflicts with some of the largest powers on Earth. While the primary focus is on the United States' miserable efforts to prop up a porous, anti-Communist government in South Vietnam as a bulwark against Chinese and Soviet expansionism, the series' makers expend no less energy detailing important antecedents ...
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The 50 Years War: Israel and the Arabs
: :The conflict in the Middle East between Israel and its neighbors is given comprehensive treatment in this two-video set produced by PBS. Using archival footage and extensive interviews with participants, the production begins by explaining conditions in Palestine at the end of World War II and the crisis created by the exodus of European Jews who went to the Middle East after the Holocaust. The withdrawal of the British, who had controlled Palestine for decades, is detailed, as ...
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Vietnam the Ten Thousand Day War 6 (Mini-Series)
: :The military, political, and social repercussions of the Vietnam War continue to be felt, in the ways in which it altered the landscape of American life forever. Written by CNN correspondent Peter Arnett, the 13 episodes of Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War trace the entire course of the conflict, from the closing days of World War II when Ho Chi Minh first began to assemble his revolutionary army, to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Documentary filmmaking ...
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American Caesar - General Douglas MacArthur
: :The military, political, and social repercussions of the Vietnam War continue to be felt, in the ways in which it altered the landscape of American life forever. Written by CNN correspondent Peter Arnett, the 13 episodes of Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War trace the entire course of the conflict, from the closing days of World War II when Ho Chi Minh first began to assemble his revolutionary army, to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Documentary filmmaking ...
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Rise & Fall of Adolf Hitler (6pc)
: :Typical Hitler biographies start either at his birth or at his appointment to chancellor in 1933, and follow events through 1945. Not so here: ZDF and A&E's psychological biography The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler manages to give us something new. Each of the six tapes in this set starts with Hitler's youth and ends with his suicide but focuses specifically on only one archetype in his personality: 'The Private Man,' 'The Seducer,' 'The Blackmailer,' 'The Dictator,' ...
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Hitler: The Whole Story
: :Typical Hitler biographies start either at his birth or at his appointment to chancellor in 1933, and follow events through 1945. Not so here: ZDF and A&E's psychological biography The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler manages to give us something new. Each of the six tapes in this set starts with Hitler's youth and ends with his suicide but focuses specifically on only one archetype in his personality: 'The Private Man,' 'The Seducer,' 'The Blackmailer,' 'The Dictator,' ...
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