History™ Announces Production On Groundbreaking Event
America The Story Of Us
Twelve-Part Series Brings To Life The Epic Journey Of Our Nation Coming In 2010
HISTORY™ has greenlit production on a groundbreaking initiative of epic proportions, a 12-part series called, America The Story Of Us, it was announced today by Nancy Dubuc, EVP/GM, History. America The Story Of Us, coming in 2010 from acclaimed, Emmy Award winning producer/director Jane Root, is an exuberant, unprecedented look at America – how events, small and large, are intrinsically linked to the taming of the wilderness, leading us from the frontier to 21st Century cities, from the Mississippi to the moon, from Jamestown to 9/11 up to present day. America The Story Of Us will move though time and space linking key events, people and locations, capturing the vast sweep of American history.
The series tells the extraordinary story of how America was invented, looking at the moments where technology overcame the environment - from the rigors of linking the continent by transcontinental roads and railways - the internet of its day - to triumphing over vertical space from steel structured buildings to putting a man on the moon. This is history with roots in the physical world: wilderness, animals, weather, the sea. America The Story Of Us is also a story of conflict – Indian wars, slavery, the revolutionary war that birthed the nation, the civil war that divided it and the great world wars that shaped its future. The series is an immersive look at the forces - the people, places and things that created this most astounding country. It’s a tough and thrilling adventure.
“There has never been a time when people are thinking so fervently and passionately about History. Now is the moment to tell the most epic, essential and groundbreaking story of America in a new way for a new generation,” says Dubuc. “AMERICA THE STORY OF US is not only the biggest project HISTORY has ever undertaken, it is the definitive event of the genre, underlining History’s ownership. This series is bigger than us, it is far broader than TV and we are thrilled to embark on this journey. With this series, we will watch America literally grow before our eyes, as we celebrate the individual stories, the people and events, and the incredible landscape that have become the America of today.”
Each hour of the series will help answer pertinent questions while exploring key events, interspersed with interviews from top flight historians. Beginning with a sense of the wild vastness that was America as the first colonists arrived, and with unprecedented CGI technology, viewers will see villages become towns; the spread of habitation and forest clearance from stockades, along river valleys to inland hamlets; a tree- covered Manhattan, with Europeans clinging to the tip of New Amsterdam, behind the slave-built wall of Wall Street. There will be vast herds of buffalo making their way across the plains, railway tracks slowly crossing the Rockies.
These stories will be told in the immediate and present tense, through drama-documentary powered by narration, visualized in the moment as never before – this is history before it knows it is history.
Says Dubuc, “A complete television history of America has not been attempted since Alistair Cooke in the 1970s. This is a new kind of landmark television. This will be a national television event.”
America The Story Of Us is produced for HISTORY by Nutopia, a new production company started by Jane Root, former President of Discovery Channel. Prior to that Jane ran BBC2, and was a founder of the production company Wall to Wall Television. Jane Root is Executive Producer and Ben Goold is Series Showrunner. For HISTORY, David McKillop and Julian P. Hobbs are Executive Producers.
