The Future of America's Past

- Season 1

(2019)

At Virginia's Fort Monroe, we discover a remarkable place: the spot where slavery began in British North America, and the site where it began to unravel during the Civil War. From one of the newest National Park Service sites to a historically-minded brewery and more, we learn from a diverse cast of people engaging visitors with defining moments in our national past.

On March 25, 1911, New York City's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burst into flames, and 146 workers - nearly all young women, many of them teenage immigrants - perished. We visit the building and learn how public outcry inspired workplace safety laws that revolutionized industrial work nationwide. Descendants and activists show us how that work reverberates today.

Texas has long been a place of contentious borders and cross-cultural exchange. Six national flags have flown over Texas since the 1500s, starting with European contests for the land that followed 10,000 years of Native American history there. From Spanish missions, to a French shipwreck, to a former sugarcane plantation, historians visit to ask: How did Texas become Texas?

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military and FBI arrested more than 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry. Ed visits Manzanar, once an incarceration camp and now a National Park Service site, to meet those keeping the memory alive.