When Peter Friedman’s friends Tom Joslin and Mark Massi died, he accepted an extraordinary inheritance: 40 hours of tape documenting the couple’s bout with AIDS. His film, Silverlake Life: The View From Here is one of the most wrenching and candid documents about the epidemic. The award-winning film from 1993 will be watchable online through Feb. 22, 2009. Watch now. A 2006 postscript/follow-up to the film is here. (Originally aired: 6/15/1993)
An infrastructure megaproject, Boston’s Big Dig carved out new highway tunnels/routes to ease downtown traffic congestion. The project was greenlit in 1982, but construction didn’t start until 1991. On December 31, 2007, and costing over 14.6 billion dollars, the Dig was finally done. Read/watch more…
How is the star film composer of Hollywood’s Golden Years virtually unknown to moviegoers today? The name Franz Waxman doesn’t usually ring a bell, but the movies he worked on—“Philadelphia Story”, “Rebecca”, more…are classics. Read more about this composer’s life and work:
On December 30, 1924: Astronomer Edwin Hubble announced he believed he had confirmed the existence of other galaxies, through his research examining the Andromeda system. Read more about Hubble from WNET and WGBH:
Hubble’s Law
Hubble’s Work
Hubble’s Bio
“Cinema’s Exiles” takes an in-depth look at the hundreds of film professionals who fled Nazi Germany for Hollywood in the 1930s, and examines their impact on wartime Tinseltown. The producers have put together an extensive timeline tracking these filmmakers’ and actors’ exodus from Europe to America amidst the activities of the War. The film premieres Jan. 1 at 9:30 pm. Read more….
For the first time in years, This Old House heads to Brooklyn for an NYC renovation. The project is the conversion of a 104-year-old row house in the Brooklyn’s historic Prospect Heights neighborhood—from a 9-room boarding house to a 3-family home. See the project progress in real time here.
The camp of Tule Lake, in Newell, California was named part of the National Parks system on December 5, 2008. Tule Lake was one of sites of Japanese Internment Camps during WWII. Read more about Tule Lake and the history of the camp’s survivors.
The second bridge to span the East River (after the Brooklyn Bridge), the Williamsburg bridge started operations on December 19, 1903. At the time of construction, the Bridge was the longest suspension bridge on earth. Watch a clip from the actual opening in 1903…
“Trash to Treasure” puts viewers in a festive mood with more than twenty incredible tales of valuable treasures rescued from rubbish heaps, roadsides, dumpsters, and demolition sites. Watch all appraisals from this episode. (Originally aired: 01/15/2008).
Produced for WGBH and the BBC in 1992, this 5-hour history of computers is watchable online. It covers the birth of computing in Babbage’s difference engine, all the way through the growth of artificial intelligence and global networks.
