Season 17

July 13, 2004

Global corporations who buy up local water supplies and sell for profit, including a look at tensions in Bolivia, India and Stockton, Calif.

July 20, 2004

What is old is often new again. Most funerals today are part of a multimillion-dollar industry run by professionals. This increased reliance on mortuaries has alienated Americans from life's only inevitability — death. A Family Undertaking explores the growing home funeral movement by following several families in their most intimate moments as they reclaim the end of life, forgoing a typical mortuary funeral to care for their loved ones at home. Far from being a radical innovation, keeping funeral rites in the family or among friends is exactly how death was handled for most of pre-20th century America. Prior to the Civil War, caring for and preparing the dead for burial on family farms or in local cemeteries was both a domestic skill and a family responsibility.

August 3, 2004

The movement to take the end of life process out of corporate funeral parlours and put it back into the family's hands.

August 24, 2004

A profile of demolition-derby driver Ed "Speedo" Jager.

August 17, 2004

Three New York mothers unite to seek justice for police brutality.

September 14, 2004

Freedom Machines is a 2004 PBS/P.O.V. documentary that looks at disability in the age of technology, presenting intimate stories of people ages 8-93, whose talents and independence are being unleashed by access to modern, enabling technologies. Nearly twenty years after the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the film reflects on the gaps between its promise and the realities for our largest minority group – 54,000,000 Americans with disabilities. Whether mainstream tools or inventions such as a stair climbing wheelchair, Freedom Machines examines the power of technology to change lives.

September 21, 2004

Pete O'Neal, a former leader of the Black Panthers, lives in exile in Tanzania.

February 7, 2005

Shirley Chisholm's 1972 presidential bid.

June 21, 2005

Teenager Shelby Knox advocates sex education in the high schools of her hometown, Lubbock, Texas.

June 28, 2005

Physical and emotional challenges faced by the dwarfs profiled in the 1982 film "Little People."

September 28, 2004

Lost Boys of Sudan is a feature-length documentary that follows two Sudanese refugees on an extraordinary journey from Africa to America.

September 7, 2004

Wattstax is a 1973 documentary film by Mel Stuart that focused on the 1972 Wattstax music festival and the African American community of Watts in Los Angeles, California. The film was nominated for a Golden Globe award for Best Documentary Film in 1974. It was also screened at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, but was not entered into the main competition.

June 29, 2004

September 21, 2004