With his election to the New York State Senate in 1910, Franklin D. Roosevelt sets out to make a name for himself in Albany, much as Theodore Roosevelt had done twenty-nine years earlier. He joins forces with reform-minded Democrats to fight against the powerful bosses of their own party, and battles for state government and labor reforms - but to the dismay of many, his support is sometimes unreliable. For Eleanor Roosevelt, distance away from her...

By the late summer of 1939, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is halfway through his second term in office. Both he and Eleanor are tired and looking forward to retirement, but when Germany invades Poland on September 2, 1939, everything changes. Although the United States is poorly prepared for conflict, and a majority of his countrymen resist involvement, the President is determined to help the Allies by building up the army and bolstering the production...

Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt are the most prominent members of one of the most important families in American history. Theodore and Franklin occupy the White House for nineteen of the first forty-five years of the twentieth century, years during which much of the modern world - and the modern state - is created. They share an unfeigned love for people and politics and a willingness to defy class prejudices to help create a true democracy...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1933 presidential inauguration comes during the nation's worst economic crisis - the Great Depression. Banks have failed and savings accounts have been wiped out, so to explain the banking system and how it works, Franklin Roosevelt gives his first "fireside chat" to the American people. In fourteen and a half minutes he calms the public, and by the next Monday people begin to redeposit their money, thereby averting a crisis....

It was not inevitable that World War II would end as it did, or that it would even end well. 1944 was a year that could have stymied the Allies and cemented Hitler's waning power. Instead, it saved those democracies -- but with a fateful cost. 1944 witnessed a series of titanic events: FDR at the pinnacle of his wartime leadership as well as his reelection, the planning of Operation Overlord with Churchill and Stalin, the unprecedented D-Day invasion...

An extraordinarily vivid and personal portrait of America's greatest political family and its enormous impact on our nation--the tie-in volume to the PBS documentary to air in the fall of 2014.

Profiles Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, three members of the most prominent and influential family in American politics. It is the first time in a major documentary television series that their individual stories have been interwoven into a single narrative. This seven-part, 14 hour film follows the Roosevelts for more than a century, from Theodore's birth in 1858 to Eleanor's death in 1962. Over the course of these years, Theodore would...