Ken Burns

America and the world are seeing more changes than at any time in history. And so is baseball. Free agency, multimillion-dollar salaries, the designated hitter, a shocking gambling scandal, a new all-time home run champion, a World Series victory for Canada. And yet, paradoxically, the game remains timeless-still played the same way it was in our fathers' and grandfathers' time.

The 1920s begin with America trying to recover from World War I and baseball trying to recover from the scandal of the 1919 World Series. America finds relief in the boom market and the Jazz Age. George Herman "Babe" Ruth is one of the best pitchers in baseball. But he loves to hit even more. In 1919, he hits 29 homers for the Red Sox, more than any player has ever hit in a single season.

A frail, asthmatic young Theodore Roosevelt transforms himself into a vigorous champion of the strenuous life, loses one great love and finds another, leads men into battle and then rises like a rocket to become the youngest president in American history at 42. Meanwhile, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, brought up as the pampered only child of adoring parents, follows his older cousin's career with worshipful fascination and begins to think he might one...

Robinson uses his fame to speak out against injustice, alienating many who had once lauded him for "turning the other cheek." After baseball, he seeks ways to fight inequality, but as he faces a crippling illness, he struggles to remain relevant.

Murder brings Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency, but in the seven years that follow, he transforms the office and makes himself perhaps the best-loved of all the men who ever lived in the White House - battling corporate greed and building the Panama Canal, preserving American wilderness, carrying the message of American might around the world. FDR courts and weds Eleanor Roosevelt, the shy orphaned daughter of Theodore's alcoholic brother, Elliott....

Frail and failing but determined to see the war through to victory, FDR wins re-election and begins planning for a peaceful postwar world, but a cerebral hemorrhage kills him at 63. After her husband's death, Eleanor Roosevelt proves herself a shrewd politician and a skilled negotiator in her own right, as well as a champion of civil rights, civil liberties and the United Nations. When she dies in 1962, she is mourned everywhere as the First Lady...

FDR brings the same optimism and energy to the White House that his cousin Theodore displayed. Aimed at ending the Depression, his sweeping New Deal restores the people's self-confidence and transforms the relationship between them and their government. Eleanor rejects the traditional role of first lady, becomes her husband's liberal conscience and a sometimes controversial political force in her own right. As the decade ends, FDR faces two grave...

As scientists learn to read the genetic code, they grapple with the dangers inherent in increasingly sophisticated and easily available methods of intervening in the very essence of what makes us human, our DNA.