Grant (Season 1)

Grant (2020) — watch this History Channel documentary series online on iFILM. Directed by Malcolm Venville, it rebuilds the full arc of Ulysses S. Grant's life: a quietly struggling Ohio soldier who came within weeks of leaving the Army, then rose to lead the Union forces through four years of brutal Civil War, and afterward tried to hold a shattered country together during Reconstruction. Justin Salinger plays Grant in the dramatic recreations.

At his death, Grant ranked alongside Washington and Lincoln in American public memory. Then decades of political enemies, selective historians, and Lost Cause revisionism quietly rewrote him into a corrupt administrator and a mediocre general. The series pushes back with documents, battlefield testimony, and portraits of the people around him — Sherman, Sheridan, the politicians who worked against his presidency, the Black Americans whose civil rights he fought to protect.

If you know the Civil War mainly through Lee, this is a corrective worth your time. Stream Grant (2020) online on iFILM.