get out of that plane, bailout. >> that movie and the acclaim for it led to wyler wanting to make a different movie about another kind of bomber called "thunderbolt." filming ofng the extra footage for thunderbolt, a little more footage he wanted to get of the italian coastline, that he experienced this personal tragedy. plane and hadthe gone deaf in the air. wyler was shooting in unpressurized cabins. it was freezing cold up in the air. the noise from the engines was eardrum shattering. he finally ultimately lost his hearing. with that, literally overnight, his army service was over in this unexpected way. the completion of "thunderbolt" became terribly important to him, even though by the time he was recovered enough to finish the movie the war was over and there was no use for this kind of propaganda film anymore about u.s. military might. that is why you have the anomaly "thunderbolt," which was intended for wartime consumption not being shown until 1947. even then being barely seen. when wyler fished the print and took it to washington and showed it to army brass, the generals stood up and said, what is this movie for? he had no answer because the timeline of world war ii had outraced him. so, you have your picks to give an deceive -- receive affection. in return, [indiscernible] as always in affairs of the heart, some have peculiar tastes. >> ♪ this is what the germans fear most. we don't blame them. this is the way rommel got it. he is not the only one. when you clobber a highway, you burn plenty of ammo. 800 rounds a minute of fire. you have eight guns, 106 bolts a second. now you can keep in touch with current events from the nation's capital using any phone any time with c-span radio. simply call to your congressional coverage, public affairs forms, and today's "washington journal." listen to a recap of events at 5:00. you can hear audio of the five network sunday public affairs programs beginning at noon on sunday. call now. long-distance or phone charges may apply. weekend, american history cable partnersur to showcase the history of st. louis, missouri. to learn more about the cities on our tour, visit c-span.org/localcontent. this is american history tv on c-span3. >> we are in the museum of westward expansion, the main museum at jefferson national expansion memorial. it basically tells the story of the settlement of the west. -- the settlement of the american west during the 19th century. we are underground, directly below the st. louis arch. originally, there were going to be surface buildings that would have housed museums, restaurant complexes, and things like that. but the museum that runs the -- the national park service and architect thought the arch would be better served to stand alone and be unrivaled by anything else. they decided to put everything underground, all the infrastructure to run the arch, all the visitor facilities would be beneath the ground. that is how this museum came to be located where it is. beneath where the arch is. in terms of what the museum has to offer, the current museum tells a story of westward expansion during the 19th century. it is laid out with rings of time above our heads, concentric rings that are almost like ripples in a pond as though you have dropped a stone into the pond and the ripples emanate outward. that is the same thing here starting with our statue of thomas jefferson and extending through the 19th century. the first ring is 1800. the last one is 1900. our current museum is not going to be here much longer, and then in the next few years, it will reconfigured so it will tell a slightly different story than this one tells. right now, our story gives a -- our museum tells a story that gives a general overview of westward expansion in the western united states. what we want to do is focus on st. louis's role, specifically. there will be a shift. another shift will be that when this museum was created, it was more telling the story of anglo white males going from the eastern part of the continent to the western part, which is the way that historians have looked at westward expansion. it has been look that in a different way. and we have started to see that that is only telling part of the story. we want to tell the story of other cultural groups. we want to tell the story of native americans and hispanics, especially the story of st. louis, which already had existed for 40 years by the time the louisiana purchase was made when thomas jefferson authorized lewis and clark to go into the west. immediately after the louisiana purchase, lewis and clark made a famous journey of exploration to the west coast. they opened a new era in american history where there was an idea that the government would have explorers, mostly people in the military, go into the west and tried to identify important things that were located in that area. it was something that the 18th-century mind of thomas jefferson felt was important. it became a legacy, so even after jefferson was long gone, there were groups of explorers going into the west. there was a whole section of the army founded in the 1830's with a specific goal of trying to map and described the entire geographical area of what the united states considered to be its territory. the exploration kept going on through the 1870's and 1880's. there was still explorers trying to quantify and qualify everything they were seeing. whether that needed to happen before people went out to settle or before some of the exploitation of the west for commercial purposes took place, is an open question. it was away the orderly mind of the 18th-century looked at things. they felt this was the logical first step, to send people out to explore. unfortunately, we do not have many items from these early explorers, none from lewis and clark. in our new museum, we hope to show artifacts used on the in 1819long expedition and 1820 which we think are significant. the thing visitors will enjoy seeing those. we do have a number of scientific instruments that the explorers would have taken with them, instruments that would have helped map the areas they were seeing. we have other instruments that would help them find their longitude, their place on earth at any one time. this would help them draw maps of where they were going, what they were seeing, that type of thing. that is mostly what we have, the scientific instruments that would've been used by the people we call went into the west to trap beaver fur in particular. a lot of them are actually involved in large companies. they were employees. but they stayed in the mountains. they lived there year-round. by virtue of the fact that they were trying to find areas where beavers were located, they went into areas that only native americans had seen before them. it just happened that by virtue of this commercial enterprise, these guys found probably more than the official voyages of exploration did, that were funded by the government. this part of the museum tells the story of pioneers who started to grow west in large -- go west in large numbers in the 1860's up until the transcontinental railroads started to be built. the idea of going west to during this time was an idea of trying to acquire free land, most of it in oregon. as time went on, of course the finding of gold in california opened up a whole new chapter in the rush for people to get to the west. the idea in these early days was to get from an area like missouri all the way to the west coast. they were not really interested in settling in the areas in between. so, they had to find, first, a way to get there, and that ideal way was through self pass in -- south pass in wyoming, and in then -- and then the best conveyance to get them there, and that turned out to be a wagon like the one you can see over my shoulder. this type of wagon was usually built as a farm wagon, but a lot of people took existing wagons on their farms or bought one like this to go west in. it is smaller than a lot of people expect to see. a lot of people think of the famous wagons that are huge compared to this one. but they were really too large to take over the terrain that the people were going to encounter. it became kind of a system or a science, going west. you can kind of romanticize the trip because it was very dangerous. a lot of times in the hollywood movies, we see them circling the wagons and the indians, and attacked. very rarely did that happen. there were very few deaths along the trail that had to do with the indians. the indians actually helped the pioneers more than hurting them, but the dangers came in, first disease, which probably killed about 10% of the people who went -- cholerly colorado a, and things like drowning and accidental death by gunshot, being run over by a wagon, that happened to a lot of kids climbing on the wagon. they fell off and the wheels would roll over them. there was a grim side to this mass migration. really unprecedented mass migration. we are talking about over 300,000 people who packed up everything and literally went west. in our new exhibit, we hope to take the covered wagon and tell the story more from the point of view of st. louis. there are a lot of places in the west to told the story of the pioneers. there are visitors centers on the oregon trail for you to learn about that. we feel that people coming here the overlanders got ready for the trip. a lot of them came through st. louis purchasing their wagons, their oxen, the food they were going to need, all of their supplies. that is what we are going to dwell on a little more. we will still have the covered wagon on display, and then we will have the items they would take with them, real artifacts. real artifacts people can look at and talk about how they would pack a wagon and cram these things in for the long journey they would take. by the 1850's, st. louis was the third busiest port in the united states. the levee just outside where the arch is today had hundreds of steamboats lined up outside cargo andd unloading passengers, taking goods to all different parts of the country. it is kind of an exciting part of the st. louis story and one of the reasons it was so central to the settlement of the west. the object you see behind me is a pilot's wheel. it is a real wheel. i guess you would call it a steering wheel that was on a riverboat. say it is huge, how did you steer? the way we have it displayed is a little -- it gives a false impression because where the hub of the wheel is would actually be where the floor was of the pilot house. only one half of the wheel stuck up above the level of the floor, and it was still rather large. you were were still grabbing onto the wheel pretty high up, but you would not see the entire wheel. most of it was below deck of the pilot house. of course, this recalls the days when mark twain was a riverboat pilot. he actually got his license here in st. louis to be a pilot on the mississippi river. by the 1860's and 1870's, river transportation in st. louis started to decline because railroads were taking up so much of the slack of moving things place to place. there were so many places in the american west that really were only accessible by railroad. the rivers were too wild or went in the wrong direction. some areas could still be supplied by riverboat. but a lot was done by railroad after a certain point in time. today.is is still a port the difference is there is a long series of barges taken up and down the river rather than dealing with the riverboats that they used to have. steam driven riverboats. instead of having the port where it was, which is in front of the arch on the levee, today, the port of st. louis stretches for 18 miles along the mississippi river, going on either side of the city center itself. so the port is where everything -- is everywhere but where it was at the time and deals with the different type of boat than would've been dealt with in the 19th century. the designer of the museum but -- put the museum together in the early 1970's and he found when he created the layout that you see today, with the time rings telling a chronological story, he sort of painted himself into a corner because how do you end it. where does it end? of course, it does not end anywhere. time keeps marching on. united states history keeps going on. that is one more reason why in the back of the museum there are pictures of things like the moonwalk and the atomic bomb and all those kinds of things, to show that history did not stop. the main thing that was what to do with the back wall. it was his wife who came up with the solution to that problem. it was the thought that they could commemorate the lewis and clark trail and the idea it is still there today. to paddle, walk, or drive the trail, you can still do that. they sent a photographer along the trail to take images during the same seasons the explorers would have been there. that is what resulted in these floor to ceiling murals at the back of the museum. the lewis and clark trail and the west becomes the alpha and omega. it is what the explorers first saw when they went out there. it is also what you can still see today. >> throughout the weekend, american history tv is featuring st. louis, missouri. our local team recently traveled there to learn about its rich history. learn more about st. louis and other stops at c-span.org/localcontent. you are watching american history tv all weekend on c-span3. >> this haunting likeness of a partly dressed man like he sold the parting the body is a product of the women's titanic memorial association. lives were lost when hms titanic went to the bottom of the north atlantic after striking an iceberg on the night of april 14, 1912. half of the female passengers perished, a number that would have been even higher but for numbers -- hundreds of men that yielded seats on the woefully inadequate lifeboats. that is why the women's titanic memorial is explicitly dedicated to the men of the titanic. whom never reached new york. the figure a sacrifice that towers over channel park is the creation of a female sculptor and patron of the arts. gertrude vanderbilt whitney is probably best remembered today as the founder of new york's whitney museum of art than she is for her leading child custody34 case involving her 10-year-old niece gloria. in a strange twist of fate, she lost her brother alfred in another tragedy at sea when a german u-boat in 1915 sank the passenger ship lusitania off the coast of ireland. 16 years later, helen taft, who has been -- whose husband had been president at a time of the titanic disaster officially unveiled the titanic memorial. carved from a single block of an elaborateit is stone bench attributed to the designer of the lincoln memorial. memoriald-1960's, the was moved from its original site to make way for the john f. kennedy center. for the performing arts today it stands close to the waterfront in southwest washington. week, american art of ands take you to museums historic places. up next, a visit to new york city, the theodore roosevelt national historic site with a tour by the lead park ranger. >> his legacy still impacts us today weather around conservation or federal regulation, trust busting, foreign policy. we don't debate whether it is good or bad here at the birthplace. america given his time was extremely progressive. it is something that affects everyone 95 years after his death. tons of still documentaries and books written because he was endlessly fascinating and dynamic. he is a guy who overcomes the tragic death of his wife and mother. he went on to achieve great things. that is a story that never gets old. we give tours of the rooms. they are guided tours only. if you want to see the house, you have to go with a guy. we give them throughout the day. tell begins in 1853 . cornelius and his wife margaret had five sons. in 1853, 2same time of their sons were getting married, robert and theodore. what better marriage present to than the house opposite this wall. opposite was our president's father's house. born october 27, 1858. he lived here for the first 14 years of his life. his parents decided it was time for the family to move. they decided to move to the country. the country was 5th avenue and 57th street. hard to imagine that today. kind of hard to imagine now today what they did was travel traditional upper class fashion. they travelled through europe. he sails the nile in egypt and all of the worldly experiences, he's 14 years old