The people.

Format:

Video

Contributor:

Burns, Ken, 1953-

Ives, Stephen.

Series:

Academic Video Online

Ken Burns's The West ; episode 1

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

West (U.S.)--History.

West (U.S.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (116 min.).

Place of Publication:

[Alexandria, VA?] : Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 1996.

Language Note:

In English.

Original language in English.

Summary:

The West stretches from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, from the northern plains to the Rio Grande -- more than two million square miles of the most extraordinary landscape on earth. It is a land of broad rivers and vast deserts, deep canyons and impenetrable mountains, boundless prairies and endless forests, a place where towering monoliths and boiling waters rise naturally from the earth. People have come to the West from every point of the compass. To the Spanish, who traveled up from Mexico, it was the North. British and French explorers arrived by coming south; the Chinese and the Russians, by going east. It was the Americans -- the last to arrive -- who named it the West. But to the people who already lived there, it was home -- the center of the universe. They had lived there so long, their stories of creation linked them to the land itself. The Comanches said they came from swirls of dust; the Hidatsas from the bottom of a big lake. Among the sacred bundles of the Zuñis was a stone, they said, within which beats the heart of the world. Soon there would be other myths: myths of golden cities with treasure for the taking and souls in need of salvation. And another longer-lasting myth, eventually pursued by two Americans across the vastness of the West itself -- the myth of an elusive Northwest Passage that would lead them and their nation to the sea. The West is a story of conquest, of competing promises and competing visions of the land. Many peoples laid claim to the West, and many played a part in settling it. But in the end, only one nation would demand it all -- and take it. And in the end, by moving west, that nation would discover itself.

Participant:

Produced by Stephen Ives ; created by Kenneth L. Burns.

Notes:

Title from resource description page (viewed Nov. 26, 2010).

OCLC:

701796590

Publisher Number:

ASP1003003117/ahiv