Early on the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese submarines and carrier-based planes attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. This month marks the 70^th anniversary of the attack. Hear eyewitness accounts of Pearl Harbor veterans and survivors in this collection of interviews from an oral history project of the National Park Service.

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Early on the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese submarines and carrier-based planes attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Hawaiian site of one of the principal naval bases of the United States. This month marks the 70th anniversary of those attacks. We'll hear eyewitness accounts from a National Park Service oral history project with Pearl Harbor veterans and survivors, describing what they saw that day.

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Housing roughly 2.5 million historic artifacts, the Museum Resource Center collects, catalogues, and maintains items from National Park Service sites in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. Director Bob Sonderman took American History TV on a tour of the warehouse to describe the holdings and the science behind historic preservation.

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Chief Historian of the National Park Service Robert Sutton discusses how his organization is telling history in new ways by including more information about civilians and non-military events.

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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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Forty years ago, in May 1973, a U.S. Senate Select Committee began its nationally televised hearings on Watergate. James McCord was one of the five men arrested a year earlier attempting to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. McCord was security director for the 1972 Committee to Re-elect President Nixon, and was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in January 1973. In this portion, Committee Chair Sam Ervin questioned McCord about his January 1973 conversation with Jack Caulfield, a former White House aide.

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Mary Elizabeth Bowser was a former slave who became a Union spy in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. She was part of a pro-Union underground spy ring run by Elizabeth Van Lew, the daughter of a prominent Richmond citizen. In this program, authors Elizabeth Varon and Lois Leveen talk about the life and story of Ms. Bowser, as well as her relationship with Ms. Van Lew. The two authors also discuss how they wrote and researched their books. The event took place at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.

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Saul Cornell discusses his book "A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America."  He explores the opposing sides of the gun control debate, arguing that both base their opinions on a flawed understanding of the second amendment.

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