Rum, Sodomy and the Lash

In an age when women were incapable of joining the artistic dialogue, Lilias Trotter managed to win the favour of celebrated critics.

In California's Bay Area, a painful memory lingers of the Port Chicago disaster of WWII, when hundreds of the Navy's first Black Sailors perished, and the White officers in charge were protected by the chain of command.

Classified "Top Secret" by the Navy and banished by the Department of Defense, this is the true account of a unit that the government denies every existed! Staffed by members of the Navy's top secret SEAL team 6, Red Cell used their skills to carry out successful terrorist attacks against American military bases, assets and personnel worldwide. This documentary tells the shocking truth about "Red Cell" in the words of insiders who created, implemented and operated this covert operation.

Take a technological thrill ride The Magic of Flight takes you on a technological thrill ride faster, higher and wider than modern science or even your imagination! Relive the first flight of the Wright Brothers, then soar with the Blue Angels as they defy the laws of gravity. Narrated by Tom Selleck.

The film looks at men and women of color in the U.S. Merchant Marine from 1938-1975. Through chronicling the lives of these men and women who, with a median age of 82, are beset with a host of life-threatening illnesses, the movie tells how they navigated issues of racism, disparities in the workplace, gender and familial relations.

Jack the Ripper was a prince, a pauper, a mason, a madman... A host of more and more bizarre theories have surrounded the unexplained killings in Whitechapel since they hit the headlines in 1888. This film dispels the grisly fiction, revealing for the first time the true contents of the police and Home Office files on the case, drawing on the expertise of historians and of those who have encountered today's killers - on the street or behind bars.

One of the greatest engineering feats in history, the modern US nuclear carrier is a masterpiece of technology, and the flagship of a fleet.

Equal parts documentary, essay, and narrative,"Captain Elliot's Circle" is mostly a poetic interaction with an obscure corner of Chinese and British history. Constructed using primary source documents about the taking of Zhoushan, Britain's first choice for a seaport, in the late 1830s,this movie uses Captain Charles Elliot's reluctance to brutalize the Chinese to reflect on the cyclical nature of history and the power structures that move it. The long takes used throughout function to illustrate the dramatically different ways in which people who lived in the mid-19th century perceived time. Additionally, it represents the psychological effect of living on an island regardless of what era you were born in.The last third of the movie focuses on a young woman whose strange day job has taken her far away from the island of Zhoushan generations after Captain Charles Elliot was last there. "Captain Elliot's Circle" was shot on location in Zhoushan and Hangzhou.

At the end of the Victorian era, E. W. Barton-Wright combined jiujitsu, kickboxing, and stick fighting into the "Gentlemanly Art of Self Defence" known as Bartitsu. After Barton-Wright's School of Arms mysteriously closed in 1902, Bartitsu was almost forgotten save for a famous, cryptic reference in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Empty House. Hosted by Tony Wolf and featuring interviews with Harry Cook, Emelyne Godfrey, Mark Donnelly, Graham Noble, Neal Stephenson and Will Thomas, Bartitsu: the Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes relates the fascinating history, rediscovery and revival of Barton-Wright's pioneering mixed martial art.

This World War II documentary rests on an unusual thesis: it argues that, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the actions precipitated by the U.S.A.F. that truly helped turn the tide were perpetrated not by the widely-ballyhooed U.S.N. aviators or aircraft carriers, but by the American submarines - silent warriors beneath the deceptively placid ocean surface. The subs, after all, were responsible for gravely wounding Japan's industry, all but destroying the Japanese merchant fleet, and therefore preventing reinforcement of Japanese military garrisons. In relaying this story, the program draws on a series of interviews with military veterans, and endless archival footage of naval battles that chronologically tells the gripping story of the Pacific Front of the war.

Sixty-years after setting sail on the PT 658, a group of World War II veterans reminisce about their extraordinary experiences on the boat while attempting to restore it to it's original condition in a documentary that has a little something for war buffs and amateur historians alike.