The Untold History Of The United States

The Untold History of the United States (2012) is Oliver Stone's documentary series, available to watch online on iFILM. Across ten hour-long parts, the director re-reads the American twentieth century from the underside of the official story.

Stone narrates it himself. He opens with the Second World War and a pointed question: why did Truman, not the left-leaning Henry Wallace, end up as Roosevelt's vice president — and how that single switch bent the postwar road toward the atomic bomb and the Cold War. From there it moves through Hiroshima, McCarthyism, Cuba, Vietnam and Reagan, all the way to Obama. Archival footage is cut against blunt authorial commentary, and the usual textbook heroes get a far less flattering frame.

Made with historian Peter Kuznick and paired with a book of the same name, the series is openly partisan and meant to argue — Stone never pretends to be neutral about the standard account. If you can take history as a polemic rather than a tidy summary, there's a full evening of it here. Stream The Untold History of the United States (2012) online on iFILM.