History Bucket List

Five Hungarian Jews return to the places they were deported from in 1944; Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation.

The ten thousand children Britain took in before the war, told by the children themselves at eighty.

A Nigerian village builds a maternity hospital, filmed by the British Crown Film Unit at the end of empire.

The week after Dallas, seen entirely from inside Jacqueline Kennedy.

A Brooklyn insurance lawyer negotiates a Cold War prisoner swap on a bridge in Berlin.

Black maids in 1963 Jackson, Mississippi tell a young writer what the job is actually like.

Spike Lee's three-hour life of the man from prison to Mecca to the Audubon Ballroom.

The Washington Post decides whether to print the Pentagon Papers, with Streep as the publisher who says yes.

The 54th Massachusetts, the first Black regiment of the Civil War, marching to Fort Wagner.

Houston, we have a problem: the 1970 rescue told with slide rules, duct tape and no music cue to spare.

Moses against Ramesses, with the ten plagues staged as natural disasters.

Austerlitz and Waterloo hung on a marriage; Phoenix plays him as a sulk.

Two Napoleonic officers keep meeting to fight over an insult neither can remember; Scott's first feature.

One accusation told three ways, ending in the last judicial duel France allowed.

The archer before the legend: Crowe comes back from the Crusades to a bankrupt England.

A blacksmith becomes a knight and holds Jerusalem against Saladin; watch the director’s cut, not the release.

Two women give birth on the same day, and Spain digs up a Civil War grave.

The Apollo missions cut from NASA footage with the astronauts' voices; Brian Eno's score.

Ken Burns' nine episodes of photographs, letters and Shelby Foote; the documentary miniseries as form.

Ava DuVernay on the loophole in the 13th Amendment and mass incarceration.

The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival footage found after fifty years; Questlove's Oscar.

A Kentucky coal strike in 1973, filmed from the picket line; Barbara Kopple's Oscar.

AP journalists inside the besieged city in 2022; Ukraine's first Oscar.

The moon landing from newly found 70mm footage and no narration.

Thirty-two minutes on Auschwitz made in 1956; Resnais' film every French school shows.

An optician confronts the men who killed his brother in 1965; the companion piece.

Nine and a half hours of witnesses, no archive footage; Lanzmann's Holocaust.

Moore on Bush, Iraq and the seven minutes with My Pet Goat; the highest-grossing documentary.