Lionsgate

The controversial case of William Heirens, the "lipstick killer' convicted of murdering two women and a 6-year-old girl in Chicago in the late 1940s. He's been jailed ever since, but insists that he's innocent. We'll explore the troubling case, from the near hysteria of the media coverage to the inconsistencies in the physical evidence used to wring a confession from Heirens.

In this episode, we find out that size did matter in the Old West, where cowboys wanted big toys! Big profits required big equipment to dig, dredge, paddle, and plough through the wilds of America. Technology would replace the pan and the pick with massive machines roaming the forests and deserts like dinosaurs, feeding on the minerals above and below the soil. Even weaponry was super-sized! We take a look at the huge and deadly Hotchkiss cannon and the cumbersome Colt Buntline Revolver,...

Genocide on the untamed frontier? Western technology did much to help--and harm--folks heading West. We examine various incidents, like the Camp Grant Massacre in Tucson, Arizona in April 1871, when a mongrel band of Anglos, Mexicans, and San Xavier Papagos Indians, savagely slew 140 Apache men, women, and children in their sleep. The Goliad Massacre--Texas, March 1836, hundreds of Mexican soldiers executed 342 Texans in a bloody betrayal during the Texas Revolution. The Council House...

Among World War II's spectacular blitzkriegs, amphibious leapfrogs and breakthroughs, the savage Italian campaign has been all but forgotten. But this horrid throwback to the bogged-down bloodbaths of World War I featured almost a year and a half of the war's most costly fighting, huge amphibious operations and more disastrous Allied mistakes than the rest of the war combined. UP THE DEADLY BOOT is a penetrating look at the arduous campaign proposed by Churchill to penetrate "the soft...

The Civil War has been transformed over time into a kind of holy war, depicted as an era when ordinary people put aside their individual aspirations to risk their lives for a cause greater than themselves. But they were real people facing real risk, and they reacted to their situations in decidedly human ways.MORE SEX IN THE CIVIL WAR returns to the fertile ground of the epic conflict for a look at the way it affected society's views about sex and the behavior of individuals. Historians tell...

One hundred years ago, they didn?t exist. Today, they are fixtures in war, the fight against crime and the weapons of choice for terrorists and criminals. The automatic pistol combines extraordinary firepower and reliability in a weapon that can be easily concealed.AUTOMATIC PISTOLS tells the story of the weapons that are at the heart of the charged debate over gun control in America today. See some of the finest gun collections in the world, with examples of everything from the very first,...

Thirty-five-year-old Derek was once a health-conscious championship bodybuilder and a successful property owner. He had a beautiful wife and his whole life in front of him. But when he turned 30, Derek felt he was "over the hill" and began to experience severe depression. He started drinking to cope with the pressures of marriage and the responsibilities of getting older. When his wife left, Derek's alcoholism became even worse. Derek's days are all the same - sitting in his dark basement,...

In therapy The Two Coreys talk about ways to rebuild their friendship. Afterwards, Feldman invites Haim to hang out. The next day Haim arrives at the Feldmans' home to find Susie, Feldman and his good friends Pauly Shore and Todd Bridges ready to stage an intervention on him. Haim denies a problem and storms out stating that he is done with Feldman 100%. The next day the Feldmans go to Haim's house to apologize, but their plan goes terribly south as their peace offering devolves into an...

A revealing look at the untold story of Japan's atomic bomb, and how they may have detonated a nuclear device just two days before surrender. Since the end of WWII, conventional wisdom claimed that Imperial Japan was years away from building an atomic weapon--this special shatters this view. Using once secret Japanese wartime documents, we provide evidence that Japan had world-class nuclear physicists, access to uranium ore, and cyclotrons to process it. They devised an innovative way to...

The history of civilization could easily be measured in terms of our ability to make, use, and improve tools--an activity that is at least 4 million years old! At the tip of our toolmaking timeline are power tools. We'll examine today's power tool industry, which is booming thanks to more powerful, lighter, and quieter cordless tools.

In commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Allied landing on D-Day, host R. Lee Ermey takes an in-depth look at the technology used throughout the "longest day"--and travels to Dover, England, and Normandy, France for a view from both sides of the operation in a special hour-long program.

Are we there yet? Who hasn't asked that at least once? In a feature-length survey of the American family vacation, we resurrect some of life's more memorable moments, while looking through a viewfinder at a little-studied aspect of our history--the serious business of having fun! Matthew Broderick narrates our look at life's lighter side.