Films with: Rapley, Rob

Abolitionists

"Radicals. Agitators. Troublemakers. Liberators. Called many names, the abolitionists tore the nation apart in order to create a more perfect union. Men and women, black and white, Northerners and Southerners, poor and wealthy, these passionate anti-slavery activists fought body and soul in the most important civil rights crusade in American history"--Container.

DVD 9778

Buffalo Bill

This film presents a portrait of the man who made the American West into the American story. For most Americans in the mid-1800s, the Wild West existed only in dime novels, but a young man from Kansas who had roamed the prairies in the war with the Plains Indians came to embody the picaresque frontier hero. As the frontier was rapidly disappearing, he realized he could market his life as entertainment, and millions around the world would pay for a taste of his Wild West. Tall, handsome, confident, and charismatic, he blurred the line between truth and entertainment, history and myth. Thus was a mere plainsman turned into an international celebrity and frontier hero, his meteoric rise to fame made possible by his genius and hucksterism. His name was William Cody, but the world remembers him as Buffalo Bill.

DVD 10366

Greely Expedition

In 1881, 25 men led by Lieutenant Adolphus Greely sailed from the harbor of St. John's, Newfoundland. Their destination was Lady Franklin Bay in the high Arctic, where they planned to collect a wealth of scientific data from a vast area of the world's surface that had been described by a British admiral as a 'sheer blank.' Three years later, only six survivors returned, with a daunting story of shipwreck, starvation, mutiny, and cannibalism.

DVD 13112

We shall remain America through native eyes /

"They were charismatic and forward thinking, imaginative and courageous, compassionate and resolute, and, at times, arrogant, vengeful and reckless. For hundreds of years, Native American leaders from Massasoit, Tecumseh, and Tenskwatawa, to Major Ridge, Geronimo, and Fools Crow valiantly resisted expulsion from their lands and fought the extinction of their culture. Sometimes, their strategies were militaristic, but more often they were diplomatic, spiritual, legal and political ... These five documentaries spanning almost four hundred years tell the story of pivotal moments in U.S. history from the Native American perspective, upending two-dimensional stereotypes of American Indians as simply ferocious warriors or peaceable lovers of the land" -- Container.

DVD 6626