Common returns to his hometown of Chicago - a city on fire in the aftermath of the brutal police killing of teenager Laquan McDonald. With thousands of people in the streets, Chicago has become the epicenter of national debates around police violence, racism and accountability. Working with community activists and whistleblowers, Common discovers a decades-long pattern of police corruption and sophisticated cover-ups that stretch all the way to the...

The planning and construction of Mount Rushmore took nearly two decades. In this episode, meet the minds and sculptors behind one of America’s most iconic landmarks..

The author of the Declaration of Independence, a strong voice for the defense of liberty, and the architect behind the largest territorial expansion in United States history, this episode examines Thomas Jefferson’s rightful place on Mount Rushmore..

The construction of Mount Rushmore was looked upon unfavorably by Native Americans who were promised the Black Hills in a treaty later broken by the United States. In order to honor the legacy of the Native Americans who lived in western South Dakota, an even larger monument of Crazy Horse is currently under construction..

"Let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were. Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and the rain alone shall wear them away." - Gutzon Borglum, Sculptor of Mount Rushmore. Towering above the Black Hills of South Dakota stands America's most treasured monument...a crowning testament to the great leaders who symbolize...

The global cyberwar is heating up and the stakes are no longer limited to the virtual world of computers. Now, thanks in part to secret documents released by Edward Snowden, the true scale of the National Security Agency's scope and power is coming to light. Besides spending billions of dollars to ingest and analyze the worlds' electronic communications, the NSA has set out to dominate a new battlefield—cyberspace. NOVA examines the science and...

See what measures the American government took during the Cold War to prevent our devolution into a Stasi-like state. While the CIA and the FBI had several unauthorized surveillance programs in the 1950s and 1960s, Congress and the Supreme Court stepped in to oversee the intelligence world with several powerful measures in the 1970s.

How does an inner city African American kid with a self-proclaimed violent temper, become a world renowned brain surgeon, an inspiring role model for disadvantaged youth, a medical innovator and achieve success... against all odds? In 2001, CNN and Time Magazine named Ben Carson one of the nation's 20 foremost physicians and scientists. His mother was his most influential inspiration, changing Ben from worst to first. He gained respect as he soared...

A man shoots down a drone that is flying over his private property. A retail store uses predictive data analytics to send pregnancy-related advertising to a teenager who has not told her parents about her condition. A police officer places a GPS device on a suspected criminal's car to follow him and build a case against him..The news is full of such stories, in which new technologies lead to dilemmas that could not have been imagined just a few decades...

The democratization of newsgathering and the expansion of the surveillance state have amplified tensions over the transparency of government operations. Trace the recent history of the news media from the Pentagon Papers to Wikileaks, and draw your own conclusions about what information should be published and who should be allowed to publish it.