Haiti and Dominican Republic: An Island Divided
In the Dominican Republic, Professor Gates explores how race has been socially constructed in a society whose people reflect centuries of intermarriage, and how the country's troubled history with Haiti informs notions of racial classification. In H...
Cuba: The Next Revolution
In Cuba, Professor Gates finds out how the culture, religion, politics, and music of this island are inextricably linked to the huge amount of slave labor imported to produce its enormously profitable 19th-century sugar industry, and how race and ra...
Unleashing the Power: Creating Chemical Compounds and Splitting Atoms
Once scientists succeeded in identifying and organizing the 92 naturally occurring chemical elements, the challenge then became how to manipulate them into amazing new configurations—and how to tap their essentially limitless energy. A tale of str...
Mysteries of Matter: Chemistry and the Elements, from Hennig Brandt to Humphry Davy
Until the 17th century, the building blocks of the natural world were a mystery. Of elements there were believed to be four—air, earth, fire, and water—and the science of chemistry had yet to be born. This program identifies some of the first ch...