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Zena is 11 years old and loves history. Today the 30 members of her 6th grade class begin with French and then study Lebanese crafts.
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Mauritania is on the west coast of Africa; 12 year old Hakim lives in a tent and walks a half mile to school. Islam is the official religion of Mauritania. Both Arabic and French are spoken. Boys and girls must share the same classroom because of lack of space but they sit on opposite sides of the room.
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Because of a school shortage, Khadija attends classes for only half a day. Some classes are taught in French because Morocco was once a colony of France. Writing exercises are done on slate boards. At home her father helps her prepare for a test in dictation by citing portions of the Koran.
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In the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa lies Reunion Island. Fabienne is in the 6th grade and her school is located in the middle of the village with no fences, but no one leaves the school grounds. Today her class is doing a photo study of the village labeling various locations.
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On Bute Island 10 year old Edward prepares to leave his family's sheep farm to attend a boarding school on another island. Classes begin with geography.
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Didai's school was founded by missionaries and is in session 6 days a week. Class begins with geography; Tanzania lies on the east coast of Africa and includes Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. Swahili is the official language.
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12 year old Viron is an apprentice monk who lives in a temple area. Much of his time is devoted to study and meditation.
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Discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1498, Trinidad is in the Antilles Islands in the Caribbean, and home to 8 year old Kemba . Though the school is a public one, the students wear uniforms. Trinidad's population is comprised of Muslims, Catholics, and Anglicans and English is still the official language.
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Celine usually travels by tram to the Steiner school, a private school which is founded on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner and is located in Geneva. The same teacher stays with each group of students from grades 1-8 where classes are taught in French.
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Would-be superstars come to the most famous tennis school in the world here in Florida; among them is 11 year old Alejandro from Venezuela. At St. Stephen's Episcopal school mornings comprise various traditional classes and computer studies and are succeeded by afternoons devoted to tennis.
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Hitler's background is traced. The humiliation and the economic collapse of Germany by the end of World War I. The instability of the Weimar government. The Nazis drew support from the industrialists,the military and the lower middle classes who responded to Hitler's promises of employment.
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The planet's oceans are rapidly becoming the world's trash dump. Every mile of ocean now contains an average of 74,000 pieces of plastic. A "plastic soup” of waste, killing hundreds of thousands of animals every year and as chemicals trickle slowly up the food chain. In California, conservationists are seeing increasing numbers of whales and dolphins die agonizing deaths. Their intestines blocked with plastics and other trash.
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Years after the 9/11 terror attacks, Osama Bin Laden, public enemy number one, is still not in American hands. This film helps us understand how the most wanted man on the planet was able to slip through the net of Western powers. Retrace the trail taken by the leader of Al Qaeda since October 2001, the beginning of the American offensive.
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Eight centuries after the Turks emerged from their homeland in the Steppelands of Central Asia, they captured the Byzantine city of Constantinople, changed its name to Istanbul and made it their new capital, which has lasted for four centuries.
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The Ottomans continued the theme of borrowing from, or adapting the work of their Byzantine predecessors. The two dominating buildings of historic Istanbul are the Blue Mosque and Haghia Sophia. The latter is a converted Christian cathedral, still containing the images of Jesus and Mary alongside the motifs of the early caliphs. The man mainly responsible for the conversion was the pre-eminent architect of Islam, Sinan. He was lucky enough to win the patronage of Suleiman the Magnificent, one of the richest and the most powerful of Ottoman rulers.
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Presents the Fischer Thesis. Kaiser Wilhelm II anticipated only a short war and was not expecting British participation in such a conflict. Mobilization was ordered knowing it could cause a general war. A limited background of Sarajevo is also provided.
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Paris, a capital playing on the contrast between tiny popular streets unknown to tourists and the beautiful buildings along the Seine.
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Examines the argument that nations as well as protest movements should look to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, two great advocates of non-violence. Costa Rica was the first country in the world to abolish its armed forces. The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and ex-president of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias, makes a passionate plea for countries around the world to take similar measures.
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As the Allied armies swarm into the collapsing Third Reich, the disagreements of Roosevelt and Churchill allow Stalin to gain effective control of Eastern Europe. The British military favors a sweep through the north of Germany to take Berlin. But Eisenhower opts instead to leave that region to the Red Army. The Americans effectively yield Poland to the USSR to gain Russian support for the ongoing war against Japan.
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Profiles the origins and early developments of the Cold War, the end of World War II, the development of the atomic bomb, the Russian subjugation of Eastern Europe, the Korean War, the Marshall Plan, containment, and related developments in the Middle East. It also chronicles the creation and development of nuclear weapons and strategies.
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This film was shot in Africa and the Middle East, and it introduces some of the basic ideas of Islamic civilization. It includes scenes of the enormous annual Pilgrimage to Mecca, probably the most ancient and certainly the most impressive collective human activity in the world. Other sequences show the trading pattern and the great caravan routes, the attitude to warfare, and the need which Muslims feel for a private inner world
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The Chinese developed intricate crossbows far ahead of their time, fleets of paddle boats, curving iron plows, wheelbarrows, folding umbrellas, conveyor belts, restaurants, golf, chess, kites, hot air balloons, and parachutes.
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Takes us to the Sumerian archaeological sites in present day Iran, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, to see the influence of cuneiform, the oldest known writing system in the world. Its development brought about a cultural renaissance,and Sumer's rise in the Mesopotamian region. The influence of these Sumerian wedge characters did not end with the fall of Sumer, but also provided a literary foundation for civilizations that followed. Cuneiform influenced Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian writing, evolving over time from rudimentary pictures to standardized symbols.
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This program tells the fascinating story of how China made the transition from a medieval empire to a modern state in less than a century.
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China was a world unto itself, cut off from foreign contact by its geography. This program examines China's relationship with its neighbors and with European nations. It reports on how, in the early 20th century, China's ancient glory gave way to a new form of government, as it finally adapted to the outside world.
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Impressive achievements included a device for indicating the direction and force of an earthquake, odometers, the compass, gimbels, intricate differential gears, double action piston bellows, continuous flamethrowers, and rudders, bulkheads, and fore and aft sails to enable a ship to sail against the wind.
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The nomad and the city are the two poles of Islamic civilization, and the tension between them has always been a feature of its life. The nomads bring fresh and unspoiled energies, and the capacity for renewal. The cities provide stability and continuity, and are the home of the arts, crafts and learning. Scenes of nomadic life feature the Berber, Bedouin and Turkoman peoples, and the Bahktiari of Iran. These are contrasted with two cities - Sanas in Yemen, a beautifully preserved example of the early cities of Arabia, and Fez in Morocco, which with its narrow streets, inward-looking houses, and hundreds of busy craftsmen, typifies the more usual type of Islamic city
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Covers the launching of Sputnik and its impact on America; the U2 flights and the capture of Gary Powers; the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Wall, and the gradual development of detente; and the origins and early stages of US involvement in the Indo-China conflict.
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Focuses on heart-warming scenes of family reunions. It outlines the background for the huge ideological breach which has separated North and South Korea for half a century. Are there indications that the ice is finally beginning to melt between the two?
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The horrors of the death camps are exposed to the world with prisoners' liberation by the Allies; the loss of human lives in the forced marches, and in the flight in the east from the Russian steamroller is enormous. Political maneuvering among the Big Three began in earnest as they sought to segregate Europe's nationalities; the division of Germany into occupied zones is determined, but the fates of other nations are determined by the momentum of the Soviet's drive to the west.
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The Endless Challenge focuses on ancient Persia, a vast empire that stretched across western Asia into Europe and Africa. The blending of cultures in ancient Persia left a number of artifacts that show how prolific writing systems came to be. The program centers on how the century-long task of deciphering these writing systems produced a greater understanding of ancient Persia and its influences long after, even on Western civilizations.
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Examines the causes of genocide and ethnic conflict in parts of the world with widely differing cultural traditions. The 20 years of bitter ethnic strife in Sri Lanka have taken the lives of 100,000, but young people from both sides work together for tolerance. In Cambodia the survivors of Pol Pot's genocide struggle to create a democratic state -from a nation that was victim of a murderous radical "social engineering project" which killed 2 million men, women, and children.
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After experiments with sundials, water and candle clocks, the Chinese developed the world's first accurate clock involving an escapement device. Their mathematicians calculated pi; their astronomers recognized the egg yolk shape of the earth and developed an accurate system for measuring the movement of the stars.
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Millions died of starvation and other effects of the war. The broken promises and implicit threats between the Big Three created an arena for the confrontation of the two new superpowers as exhausted Britain lost its preeminence. Britain repudiated Churchill's dreams of restored imperial grandeur, and the USSR and the US went in twelve months from being allies to enemies.
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Follows the US struggle to reach a consensus concerning American involvement in Vietnam, the efforts of Kissinger and Nixon, and the presidency of Carter, and the heightened conflict in Third World countries.
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Describes dramatic change brought about by the evolution of writing from simple letters to entire alphabetic systems. This program both examines the reasons the alphabets were developed, and traces how the use of alphabets spread around the world, changing the cultures they touched. Letters of a sphinx discovered on the Sinai Peninsula in 1905 reveal how the characters found there were in a very different style from earlier forms of writing and suggest the beginning of an alphabet.
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During the Middle Ages, Fez, once the crown jewel of Moroccan civilization, was the core of Islamic Culture and education. At the Mosquee Qaraouiyne University some of the great scientists, mathematicians and mullahs studied and subsequently awakened Europe out of the darkness of the middle ages with their discoveries and inventions. Today, Fez is a bustling city with roads so narrow that donkeys are the only method of transportation.
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Chinese inventions and discoveries include gunpowder, bombs, shrapnel, underground and sea mines, aerial bombs and muskets (fire lances), rockets, cannon, immunization, paper, printing with movable type, modem books and bookstores, civil service exams and playing cards.
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The concluding portion presents the Soviet fiasco in Afghanistan, the unprecedented peacetime US armaments build up under Reagan, "Star Wars," the reforms of Gorbachev, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, (and the USSR) and the terrorism which confronts the US today.
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Deals with the legacy of Serbian "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, an area where peace seems possible only when imposed by an outside power. There are thousands of scores to settle, atrocities to be avenged, and deep religious divisions between Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslims to overcome. The same savage tribal instinct manifested itself in Rwanda in the 1990s as the Hutu massacred Tutsi and over a million died. Yet amid the ruins of a once hopeful nation tentative steps are being made towards healing and preventing a recurrence of such dark forces.
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The American embargo of supplies led Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. No hesitation marked the decision to utilize the newly-developed atomic bomb on Japan. Experts deemed that it was the quickest way to get the Japanese to surrender. When the war was won in South East Asia and the Pacific, the US was forced to utilize British troops to restore order. They in turn used Japanese forces to quell growing calls for nationalism in the region; this combustible mixture led to the Korean, Vietnam and Cambodian wars.
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Examines a phenomenon that truly characterizes our time. The rapid expansion of the international market place and the power of those who control it is perceived to be the principal reason why the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing, not diminishing. This viewpoint was also expressed by the thousands who demonstrated against the WTO in Seattle and Prague. On the other hand, some view globalization as being the only way for prosperity to spread to developing countries.
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In 711 A.D. the Moroccan Islamic army crossed the strait of Gibraltar and reached Tarifa, a port at the edge of the European continent, and began a rule of more than 800 years. Those years of Islamic rule left unique traces of its culture in the Andalusia region of Spain. Now, Southern Spain has a complex history having absorbed the influences from not only Islam but from the Romans and Christianity. Cordoba became a symbolic city mixing the various influences and now has a culture unique to Spain. Does that cultural development continue today?
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America was now the richest nation in the world; Britain was victorious, but bankrupt; the Soviet Union had been devastated but was ideologically strong and committed to the victory of its brand of communism. The cooperation of the war years and the hopes of its continuation faded and Europe faced years of extreme hardship. The forces that were to shape international politics for the next fifty years emerged in 1945.
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Confronts the most fundamental question of all: What is the true nature of man. At one time or another, every society has glorified conflict. Does this mean that the human species is violent by nature in some deep sense that will never change? Or is it possible to claim that we are gradually moving towards that distant horizon, where better people will create a better world?
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On 11 September 2001 the world stood still, aghast at the horrendous pictures of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Henceforth the global arena will never be the same. This devastating event has aroused heightened interest in peace issues. Is it really possible to achieve lasting peace?
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What happened in Europe at the time of the renaissance and
how has it influenced modern man? This historical documentary
takes us back to one of history's most intriguing and crucial
chapters of Europe's history when doors opened to whole
new worlds; when man explored the stars, and traveled to the
ends of the earth.
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As mass media reach continues to grow, revolution is rife. The twentieth century saw two major revolutions in Eastern Europe alone. The power of one-party states in Europe collapsed along with the "Wall," and the eyes of the world have turned to the Far East. Interest is now focused on China's ambitious Agenda 21. Plans, in order to succeed, are dependent on the Chinese people having a say in their own affairs.
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A lively perspective on James II and his subjects, the ambitions of William of Orange, his fear of Louis XIV, and the residual upper-middle class English apprehensions concerning a restoration of Catholicism.
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The most agreeable city in Brazil was also the site of the most successful architectural creations of the 20th century.
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