February 5, 2015

1000 Best Documentaries on YouTube

If you’ve not checked it out yet, we encourage you to dive into our new LearnOutLoud.com Free Documentaries Collection featuring over 2000 of the best free documentaries that you can watch for free online. You can start browsing by clicking below:

Browse Over 2000 Free Documentaries in Our New LearnOutLoud.com Free Documentaries Collection

In this collection we feature many, many documentaries from YouTube. But we didn’t just put up any documentary we found there, as there’s a lot of junk. Instead we spent weeks sifting through YouTube docs to come up with the “1000 Best Documentaries on YouTube”. We’ve compiled most of them together here:

Browse Over 1000 Free Documentaries from YouTube

In this blog we’ll try to cover some of the best documentaries that we’ve added that are available on YouTube. Where should we start? Well there are many providers that offer numerous documentaries for free on YouTube, so let’s start with some of those.

Great Museums Television – Offers a dozen documentaries on great museums in the United States.

National Geographic – Offers about 20 documentaries on a variety of topics.

New Atlantis – We’ve added 8 of their documentaries covering subjects around the World.

VICE Documentaries – We’ve added 7 of their most popular documentaries covering subjects around the World.

Other providers who feature many documentaries on their channels in playlists include:

The New York Times Documentaries

Naked Science Documentary Series

Pure History Specials

The Hollywood Biographies Collection

Treasures of New York

Truly Califorinia Documentaries

Learning Matters Documentaries

Now we’ll get into some of the individual documentaries. We’ll start with some of best longer documentary series we found:

Civilisation: Complete Series – 1969 documentary by Sir Kenneth Clark presenting an epic examination of Western European culture.

People’s Century – This twenty-six part television series, broadcast on PBS in 1995, offers new insight into the turbulent events of the 20th century through the revealing personal testimony of the people who were there.

Simon Schama’s Power of Art – 7-part BBC series covering famous artists from Caravaggio to Picasso.

Free To Choose – 9-hour 1980 PBS television series featuring Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman attempting to make people understand the close relationship between the ideas of human freedom and economic freedom.

Heritage: Civilization and the Jews – Monumental nine-part series spanning three millennia of Jewish history and culture from PBS in 1984.

Howard Goodall’s Story of Music – 6-part BBC documentary chronicling the history of music.

Cold War – 18-hour documentary examining The Cold War, narrated by Sir Kenneth Branagh and aired on CNN in 1998.

The Weight of the Nation – 4-part HBO documentary series examining the obesity epidemic in America.

And we could go on and on listing these epic documentaries, but now we’ll give you a list of some of the best feature length documentaries, generally lasting 2 hours or less. In order of year released, here is a list of interesting individual documentaries you can watch on YouTube that we’ve added to LearnOutLoud.com:

Nanook of the North (1922) – Considered to be the first feature-length documentary. Directed by Robert J. Flaherty.

Man with a Movie Camera (1929) – Voted in 2014 by Sight and Sound magazine as the best documentary film of all time. Directed by Dziga Vertov.

War Comes to America (1945) – Part seven of the orientation series “Why We Fight” called “War Comes to America” which tells the tale of a reluctant America drawn into battlegrounds of World War II.

Primary (1960) – Groundbreaking 1960 Direct Cinema documentary film following John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in the 1960 Wisconsin Primary election. Produced by Robert Drew, shot by Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles, and edited by D.A. Pennebaker, the film was a breakthrough in documentary film style.
Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965)

Mahatma: Life of Gandhi, 1869-1948 (Abridged) (1968)

The Eagle Has Landed (1969)

Malcolm X: His Own Story as It Really Happened (1972)

Future Shock (1972) – Fun doc on the effects of “too much change in too short a period of time”, hosted and narrated by Orson Welles. We feature a number of documentaries narrated by the great Orson Welles: Documentaries & Audiobooks Narrated by Orson Welles on LearnOutLoud.com.

The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner (1974) – Great documentary on ski-jumper Walter Steiner, from the great documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog. Check out more Werner Herzog documentaries we feature here: Werner Herzog Documentaries on LearnOutLoud.com

Scared Straight (1978) – Academy Award Winning documentary on inmates scaring juvenile delinquents out of a life of crime.

The Day After Trinity (1980) – Humbling documentary on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb.

Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986) – A real fun time in the parking lot before a Judas Priest concert.

The Blind Watchmaker (1987) – One of a number documentaries we feature by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

The World Within: C.G. Jung in His Own Words (1990)

Krishnamurti: With a Silent Mind (1990)

A Brief History of Time (1992) – Documentary on cosmologist Stephen Hawking, directed by awarding-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris.

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)

Philip K. Dick: A Day in the Afterlife (1994)

The Quest: Discovering Your Human Potential (1996)

Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Man and the Dream (1998)

Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil (1999) – Three-part “Human, All Too Human” BBC documentary television series on three great philosophers also includes:
Martin Heidegger: Thinking the Unthinkable
Jean Paul Sartre: The Road to Freedom

Anthony Robbins: The Secret of His Success (1999)

Philosophy: Guide to Happiness (2000) – Hosted by philosopher Alain de Botton.

Inside North Korea (2001)

A History of God (2001) – Hosted by Karen Armstrong.

Martin Luther: Driven to Defiance (2003) – Two-part PBS Empires documentary.
Martin Luther: Reluctant Revolutionary

Control Room (2004)

Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple (2006)

Zeitgeist: The Movie (2007)

HOME (2009)

Living in the End Times According to Slavoj Zizek (2010)

How Weed Won the West (2010)

The Mystery of Memory (2011)

Life in a Day (2011)

Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States: The Bomb (2012)

The Clash: Audio Ammunition Documentary Series (2013)

And there are just way more documentaries from YouTube that we’ve added. But we’ll stop there. You can continue browsing here:

Browse Over 1000 Free Documentaries from YouTube

Enjoy 1000 of the best documentaries available on YouTube!