Department of History

Grand Jury Prize Winner at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival - Why We Fight - is an unflinching look at the anatomy of American war-making. Granted unparalleled Pentagon access, the film launches a nonpartisan inquiry into the forces - political, economic, and ideological - that drive America to fight. Inspired by President Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 Farewell Adress in which he warned Americans about the dangers of the "military-industrial complex", filmmaker Jarecki ("The Trials of Henry Kissinger") weaves unforgettable stories of everyday Americans touched by war with commentary by a "who's who" of military and Washington insiders. Featuring John McCain, Gore Vidal, Richard Perle and others, Why We Fight explores a half-century of U.S. foreign policy from World War II to the Iraq War, revealing how, as Eisenhower warned, political and corporate interests have become alarmingly entangled in the business of war. On a deeper level, what emerges is a portrait of a nation in transition - drifting dangerously far from her founding principles toward a more imperial and uncertain future.

Frank Capra's film for the War Department. Traces Japanese aggression through the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The story of Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Ida Cox, and other pioneering blues women from early in the century are brought to life in Wild Women Don't Have the Blues. We learn of their vision and their struggle, their pain and their humor, their unflagging spirit, and most of all, their legendary music. The film compiles for the first time dozens of rare, classic renditions of the early blues to commentary by "Queen of the Blues", Koko Taylor. Ma Rainey, "Mother of the Blues", first put the work songs of Black field hands on stage in 1902. At the end of WWI, millions of African-Americans left the fields of the South to search for work in the factories of the North. The blues singers followed with their music - salty and melancholy, full of pain, humor and love. Audiences, black and white, rocked through the twenties to groundbreaking recordings like Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" and movies like Bessie Smith's "St. Louis Blues". Wild Women recreates the gutsy stories of these pioneering women who left an indelible mark on the music and heart of America.