Fifty years to the day that American U-2 planes photographed startling evidence of Soviet missile bases in Cuba, American History TV was live from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in Boston. A gathering of historians, scholars, filmmakers and journalists came together for a 50th anniversary retrospective of the historic 13 days that came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Participants included Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev—President Kennedy’s counterpart in a military and political confrontation that tested the young Kennedy administration and threatened to lead to nuclear war.

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50 years ago on October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy delivered an address from the Oval Office on the Cuban Missile Crisis.  He stated that "It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union."

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The Cuban Missile Crisis is the subject of this ten minute Universal Newsreel from October 1962.
 
On October 22nd, 1962 President John F. Kennedy announced the United States had discovered Soviet missile bases in Cuba.

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History Professor James Hershberg lectures on the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

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In this program from our 1999 "American Presidents: Life Portraits" series we focused on James Garfield's life and career. Historians discussed Garfield's military service, his election as president and assassination shortly after his inauguration. Suzanne Miller, the site manager at Garfield's home in Mentor, Ohio, talked about several of the artifacts and documents that Garfield left behind. 

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C-SPAN’s Local Content Vehicles take American History TV on the road. Throughout the weekend of May 18-20 we feature the history of Columbia, South Carolina.

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Thousands of colonists rejected the War for American Independence and many fled to the British stronghold of New York City. San Jose State University History Professor Ruma Chopra discusses the situation in the city and the perspective of those who looked upon the British as natural allies in religion, language and blood and thought the violence of rebellion was unnecessary and unlawful.

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American History TV visited San Francisco’s Chinatown to follow historian Charlie Chin as he tells the story of the Chinese in America to a group of college students. This is part one of a three-part series on San Francisco’s Chinatown. This portion of the series was recorded in the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum.
 

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Metropolitan State University professor Douglas Rossinow teaches a class on the Iran-Contra affair, which took place in the mid-1980s during the Reagan Administration. The Iran-Contra affair stems from Reagan administration officials funding the Contras - who were fighting against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua - with money from the sale of arms to Iran. The arms were being sold to Iran in the hope of gaining the release of American hostages held in Lebanon - hence the reason the affair is sometimes called as the “arm-for-hostages” scandal. Metropolitan State University is in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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