‘America in Color’ refreshes 20th-century history

You might not learn anything new about 20thcentury U.S. history from “America in Color,” a docuseries on the Smithsonian Channel, but the program might make you feel differently about that history. A few splashes of color will do that.

The five-part series, which began Sunday night, is being promoted as “one of the most ambitious colorizing projects ever undertaken.” It is made up of film clips from various sources that depict events and periods we’re conditioned to think of in black and white, since they occurred before color film became commonplace.

Admit it: You have a hard time connecting to the fellow humans you see in rickety old black-and-white footage, with their ancient cars and longout-of-fashion clothing and hairstyles. Not here, or at least not as much. Something about the color images makes clearer, on an emotional level, that these ancestors felt fear and uncertainty, just as we do, and were fallible and sometimes cruel, just as we are.

Each episode covers a decade, beginning with the 1920s. It is in the first two installments, especially, that you can feel the gap being bridged, whether it’s in the treatment of a much revisited event like the 1929 stock market crash, or of a less-remembered one like the catastrophic flooding along the Mississippi River in 1927. These days, it seems, there is news footage of raging water somewhere in the United States just about every week, high-definition stuff that looks and sounds terrifying. Colorizing the images of the 1927 flood helps it compete, as it were, with these presentday inundations, helps define it as what it was: one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.

Although the series follows the familiar American narrative — Roaring Twenties to Depression to war era to Elvis and civil rights — that history is freshened by clips that have rarely been seen. There is footage, for instance, of Franklin Delano Roosevelt walking haltingly into a baseball game, which was shot by a pitcher for the Washington Senators — unusual because the effects of Roosevelt’s paralytic illness were hardly ever shown by the mainstream press.

The series is at its best when it uses these home-moviestyle vignettes, many of them poignant in their ordinariness. Big events make up much of each episode, but when the series goes small, it finds the real humanity behind the march of history.

In Part 1, for example, there’s a segment on the dawning of the automobile age, which happened faster than people and society could adjust to.

“Accidents become common as pedestrians have to learn to watch out for cars, and vice versa,” the narration, read by actor Liev Schreiber, says, as a police officer picks up an inattentive woman and carries her out of the way of an oncoming vehicle on a city street.

“There is no such thing as a driver’s test,” Schreiber continues, as we watch a car back into a pedestrian with a thump.

Embracing conveniences without completely understanding the consequences — yeah, that’s the human race all right, then and now.