10 That Changed America

It's a whirlwind tour of 10 streets that change the way we get around. 10 Streets that Changed America begins and ends on Broadway in New York. We'll trace the street's 400-year evolution: from Native American road, to Dutch trading route, to the home of America's earliest public transit, to an electrically-lighted theater district known as the "Great White Way." At the end of program we'll see how Broadway has become the poster child for the "complete streets" movement, in which automobiles take a back seat to more sustainable forms of transit.

Elsewhere in this episode we'll ride from Boston to New York on a dirt "highway," which was created for the nation's first mail carriers. In New Orleans we'll take America's oldest streetcar line out to some of the nation's first suburbs, and in Detroit we'll drive a Model T along America's first mile of concrete-paved road. We'll explore a car-friendly street created by a 1920s entrepreneur who predicted that Los Angeles would be dominated by the automobile, and take a horse and carriage on a Brooklyn parkway that was built on the proposition that streets should be scenic. It's an episode about how streets have connected the nation, divided communities, and changed the way Americans live, work, and shop.

It's a whirlwind tour of 10 wholly-original American monuments, and the historical moments that inspired them. We'll visit little-known locations like the Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial, a sculptural masterpiece dedicated to one of the first African-American units to serve in the Civil War; and we'll explore the surprising stories behind American favorites like the Statue of Liberty, which was devised as a propaganda piece by French republican politicians.

It's an episode full of epic battles over how to remember our past: from Maya Lin's fight to design the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, to the ongoing controversies over confederate monuments across the South. We'll discover pivotal moments in the evolution of American monuments when daring artists found new ways to honor our history.

It's a whirlwind tour of 10 engineering feats that made our civilization possible. 10 Modern Marvels that Changed America is a show about engineers who've scoffed at the laws of nature. They've defied the naysayers — and sometimes even gravity — by undertaking amazing feats of engineering. Each story in this episode includes a fun physics lesson and a tale of human folly.

We begin at the Erie Canal, a 363-mile-long man-made waterway that was built in the 19th century by thousands of laborers using primitive hand tools. Then we'll show how professional engineers connected our growing nation by building magnificent bridges, intricate rail networks, and a continent-wide system of freeways. And we'll discover the extreme measures that engineers have taken to deliver water from distant rivers to our kitchen sinks. It's easy to take these modern marvels for granted. After all, we usually access our roads, bridges and drinking water effortlessly. But behind many of our daily conveniences there is a clever engineer, and a remarkable story.