IDS 101: Can It Happen Here?: The History of Fascism in the US: Image & Video Databases

The C-SPAN Archives records, indexes, and archives all C-SPAN programming for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. Every C-SPAN program aired since 1987, now totaling over 160,000 hours, is contained in the C-SPAN Archives and immediately accessible through the database and electronic archival systems developed and maintained by the C-SPAN Archives. Coverage: 1987 - present

Provides access to thousands of award-winning films, thought-provoking documentaries, latest festival hits, classic films, television series, and more. The collection of films support a wide variety of subject areas including the Arts, Media Studies, Politics, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, LBGTQAI+, Psychology, Business, Sciences, Health, Education, and History.

Provides videos with curricular relevance: documentaries, interviews, performances, news programs and newsreels, and more. Includes more than 70,000 video titles spanning a range of subject areas such as anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more.

A Frontline program investigating the rising threat of far-right violence in America

A piece of long-forgotten American experimental cinema from 1936. Unhappy with the limited structure of league newsreels, NYKino, a splinter filmmaking collective, produced a March of Time-type series under the banner “The World Today”. This one, like Native Land, addresses fascism in America. (7 minutes)

Inspired by the 1938 report of the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee’s investigation into the repression of labor organizing, Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand’s biting and beautiful Native Land (1942, though largely shot between ’37 and ’39) combines documentary footage with staged reenactments to depict the struggle of trade unions against corporations, their spies and contractors. Legendary singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson narrates the film through words and song, lending the work a sense of powerful gravitas.
In part a progressive response to the patriotic newsreel series The March of Time, Hurwitz and Strand (alongside their documentary filmmaking collective, Frontier Films) divided the majority of the film into four parts, all based on real events: the murders of a union farmer in Michigan and a labor organizer in Cleveland; the shooting down of two Southern sharecroppers (one black, one white) by deputies; a brutal Ku Klux Klan rally in which members tar and feather progressive political candidates; and the Republic Steel Massacre of 1937. Interwoven with these sequences are dramatizations of the workings of labor union spies, as well as slice-of-life montages meant to illustrate the themes of liberty, freedom, and industrial modernization. (1 hour 29 minutes)

An award-winning documentary about the original performer-president’s role of a lifetime. Teasing apart the spectacle at the heart of finger-on-the-button global diplomacy, the film follows Ronald Reagan’s rivalry with charismatic Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. (1 hour 14 minutes)

A riveting, jaw-dropping view of America's white supremacy movement. Rare archival footage, darkly humorous interviews, and their own promotional materials bring to light the inner workings of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, the Aryan Nation, The Order, and other radical right groups. (1 hour 17 minutes)

Photos from the WPA Federal Theatre Project in New York 1935-36 Experimental Theatre Unit production of It Can't Happen Here.

Youtube slideshow about the Federal Theater Project (1934-1937) and the 21 simultaneous productions coast to coast of It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis and John C. Moffitt.