With other engineers, Frances “Poppy” Northcutt plotted return-to-Earth trajectories for Apollo 8. Northcutt’s team also troubleshot the Apollo 13 oxygen tank explosion emergency. She worked in the Space Program for five years.

In the 1930s, Wernher Von Braun’s rocket work was supported by the Nazi regime. At the end of WWII, the United States government enlisted von Braun’s expertise.. During the Cold War, his rocket work became valuable to America’s new space program.

Who the hell is Diane Nash?

In June 1964, at the beginning of Freedom Summer, about 100 doctors, nurses and social workers traveled to Mississippi to provide medical care to civil rights workers and local community who couldn't receive adequate medical care in the segregated South. These caregivers were known as the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), and they became the medical arm for the civil rights movement.

In 1969 off the California coast, a US Navy crane carefully lowered a massive tubular structure into the waters. An audacious feat of engineering — a pressurized underwater habitat, designed for an elite group of divers to spend days or even months at a stretch living and working on the ocean floor. The little-known story of the daring program that tested the limits of human endurance.

Watch chapter 1 of Sealab.

A daunting story of shipwreck, starvation, mutiny and cannibalism amongst a group left abandoned in the high arctic.

An American astronaut and an aquanaut, Scott Carpenter was part of Project Mercury and operated the Aurora 7 spacecraft, which orbited the earth three times. He also joined U.S. Navy’s SEALAB project and stayed underwater for a record of 30 days.

George Bond studied the bodily effects of deep sea diving and shepherded the development of saturation diving. A doctor and a navy officer, he spearheaded Sealab I, II and III.

In 1969, humanity paused and looked skyward to witness the impossible. Fifty years later, pause once again. CHASING THE MOON premieres across three nights, beginning July 8 on PBS.

Surviving the Dust Bowl is the remarkable story of the determined people who clung to their homes and way of life, enduring drought, dust, disease — even death — for nearly a decade.

The history of the Everglades is a dramatic yet little known story of humanity’s attempt to conquer nature.

Plume, an arrangement of feather as ornament, especially the prized plume from wading birds in the Everglades surpassed the price of gold. The mass killing of these birds soon led to anti-plume campaign by the Florida Audubon Society, with support from the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs and resulted in grassroots conservation movement.

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas advocated for conservation and joined the movement to make the Everglades a national park. In 1947, she published The Everglades: River of Grass and forever redefined the region as essential not only to wildlife, but to people.

In the summer of 1928, heavy rainfall raised Lake Okeechobee’s water level three feet above normal. That fall, a hurricane smashed the coast of Florida, and the impact flooded Lake Okeechobee. The inland flood obliterated 21 miles of the 47-mile earthen and an estimated 2,500 people died in Southern Florida, most of them migrant farm workers.

The remarkable story of the determined people who clung to their homes and way of life, enduring drought, dust, disease — even death — for nearly a decade.

In 1881, Hamilton Disston, a wealthy enterpreneur cut a deal to purchase four million acres of Everglades, hoping to drain the land for selling and promised to drain an additional 12 million acres. But the wet season reclaimed the lands and six years later, the state commission declared his efforts a failure.

"I can confidently tell my guardian angel that my life is CAVU; and it will be until the day I die." George H.W. Bush passed away on Friday, November 30, 2018 at the age of 94.

At age 33, Houdini began performing dangerous water escapes outdoors to promote his vaudeville shows around the country. His encore to escape not only appealed to thousands of spectators, but also brought people from foreign countries to escape from poverty and injustice.

Watch Chapter 1 of The Eugenics Crusade.