The Civil War Battle of Shiloh took place April 6th and 7th, 1862 in Hardin County, Tennessee, and resulted in a Union victory over Confederate forces attempting to defend two major western railroads servicing the strategically important Mississippi Valley region. Nearly 110,000 troops took part in the fighting, which produced almost 24,000 casualties, making it the bloodiest battle to that point in U.S. history. American History TV visited Shiloh National Military Park, where Stacy Allen, the Park's Chief Ranger, gave us a tour of the battlefield.

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To mark the 150th anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter, Union Civil War re-enactors commemorate the events that took place on April 12, 1861. Park historian Richard Hatcher discusses the history of Fort Sumter and how the attack on the fort ignited the Civil War.

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Author and history professor William Shea talks about the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, which was fought on March 7th and 8th, 1862. He spoke to a group at the Saline County Library in Benton, Arkansas a few days after the 150th anniversary of the battle.

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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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Roger Davidson and Robert Sutton responded to viewer calls from Manassas National Battlefield, where the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Bull Run, also known as First Manassas, was being commemorated.

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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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“Operation Gold” was a 1950s project conducted by the CIA and the British Intelligence Service to tap into Soviet communications by tunneling from West Berlin into East Berlin, Germany. Known as “Operation Stopwatch” by the British, the 1,500 foot tunnel was active for eleven months, and netted about 40,000 hours of East German telephone conversations - even though the KGB knew about the tunnel before it was built. Retired CIA officer Lou Mehrer tells the story of the Berlin Tunnel at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum in West Branch, Iowa.

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