The little known story of Philo T. Farnsworth, a Utah farm boy who first sketched out his idea for electronic television at the age of fourteen. An eccentric genius, Farnsworth spent years battling corporate giants to receive acknowledgment for his invention.

Recalling the life of Carl Fisher, the entrepreneur who “sold the glamour of Florida” and turned a swampland into Miami Beach. Included: how he developed the resort town using topsoil from the Everglades and sand from Biscayne Bay.

Children of 1930s Plains farmers recall the Dust Bowl, the eight-year drought that was made far worse by the 30 years of aggressive farming that preceded it. "A lot of people thought it was the end of the world," one survivor says.

Recalling the tidal wave of racial conflict that followed in the wake of the surging Mississippi as it inundated the delta town of Greenville, Miss., in April 1927. Greenville's leading planter, LeRoy Percy, was a racial moderate, but he joined other planters in refusing to allow their black workers to be evacuated for fear of losing their labor supply. Those workers were placed "at the end of the line" for Red Cross supplies, as one remembers, and tension grew.

A moody two-part biography of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-85). Part 1, "Warrior," quickly sketches his largely unsuccessful pre-Civil War life and ends on Good Friday 1865, when his wife told him to turn down a theater invitation because she didn't like the company of Mary Lincoln. During the war, Grant owed his success to his ability to treat his often unruly troops as he did his horses: calmly, firmly, quietly. But if he was a hero at Fort Donelson and Vicksburg, he's also described as being a "butcher" at Shiloh and Cold Harbor.

The conclusion of this biography of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-85) covers the last 20 years of the life of "the most popular man of the 19th century," as historian Donald Miller calls him. Grant's presidency (1869-77) wasn't the reason. "Military uniforms kept the sides straight on the battlefield, but in Grant's new world it was not so easy to tell friends from enemies," says narrator Liev Schreiber, and some of Grant's political "friends" were crooks. Add to that the intense opposition of white southerners to his Reconstruction policies. Then the U.S. economy went south during the panic of 1873.

Mathematics genius John Nash recalls his bout with schizophrenia (the subject dramatized in the Oscar-winning film "A Beautiful Mind"). Nash is joined by his wife, Alicia; son John Stier; colleagues; and author Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the book from which the movie was adapted. They (and narrator Liev Schreiber) recall Nash's prodigious intellect, arrogant demeanor and odd behavior. He developed his "equilibrium point" theory as a student, but then lost his own equilibrium. It would take 30 years, but the theory would come to revolutionize economics and win him the Nobel Prize. And Nash would regain his mind.

"The Living Weapon" explores the history of America's biological-weapons program, which began in 1942 with a group that worked parallel to the Manhattan Project, and continued to 1969, when President Nixon terminated it. Included: comments from Bill Patrick, the program's chief of product development; bioweapons historian Norman Covert; biowarfare expert Martin Furmanski; historian Brian Balmer; Jeanne Guillemin, senior adviser to MIT's Security Studies Program.