Episode list

Ernest Hemingway was the best-selling, most celebrated author of his time. He wove war, love, pain and death into unforgettable patchworks of prose, and sought adventure and craved risk. Behind a cheerful facade were wounds much deeper than any physical ones sustained in an eventful lifetime. Hemingway battled devastating personal wounds he found impossible to shake.

Few figures are so well known and strike as much terror as that of the vampire known as "Dracula." This creature - not yet dead, but no longer alive - has at one time or another tempted, fascinated and repelled us all. When writer Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, he couldn't have predicted that he was creating a figure who was larger than death. Today, he might be timeless, but in the 15th century, he was all too real. His name was Prince Vlad Dracula whom history has come to know as Vlad the Impaler. In many ways, the reality of Dracula's life was more terrifying than the fiction he helped inspire, his story more shocking than anything Hollywood could manufacture.

In the 1920s the sprawling, brawling, skyscraper-studded city of Chicago ruled the American heartland. And one man seemed to rule Chicago. A racketeer, pimp, bootlegger and cold-blooded killer named Al Capone. Capone's empire lasted just six blood-soaked years. But his image as the ultimate American mobster still survives, decades after his days of gangland glory.

At the height of his career, Louis Armstrong and his band toured Europe. The sextet had come to perform America's greatest export - jazz - but Armstrong's adoring audiences knew him as much more than a musician. He was known as the ambassador of goodwill. Armstrong's joyous stage presence electrified audiences, but many of them didn't know he was the father of jazz itself. He pushed music into the 20th Century by inventing a new way of playing. By doing so, he helped to change the world of music, and the culture we live in, forever.

From the film: "Jazz was born in America. In cotton fields and cities, in brothels and churches, in the opera house and the night club, jazz was music of the people. It began as part of a quest for freedom among those who were disenfranchised. From their struggle, it became a platform for self-expression. For more than one hundred years, jazz has been played throughout America, and everywhere it has been played, it has been more than just a style. It has been more than just a technique. It has been a way of liberation through music."

The film looks at the history of jazz as a platform for liberation, and explores the music of three artists with very different approaches to their art: Kahil El'Zabar, Joe McPhee and Billy Taylor.

The year was 1927, and the New York theater district called 'Broadway' was entering what would be its greatest season in history. More than 264 shows were going to open that year - and as many as 11 would open on a single night. Every new production was an overflowing of talent that was expressly American. In the years following World War I, America's identity came into sharp focus, and it did so on the Broadway stage.