Josh Edge, Alaska Public Media

Soul food is a quintessential American cuisine, with a rich history and an abiding significance for black cultural identity. But with its celebration of all things fried and smothered, it has also had lasting effects on the health of African Americans. TV: Monday, 1/14 at 9:00pm

An early season win for Four-time Yukon Quest and Iditarod Champion Lance Mackey has the Fairbanks musher in good spirits. Mackey says his kennel is once again living up to its name and making a ‘Comeback.’

THE REAGAN PRESIDENCY, a three-part series produced by the same team behind PBS' Herbert Hoover: Landslide, focuses on the critical domestic and foreign policy decisions President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) made during his two terms in office. This complex, thoroughly researched portrait of the nation's 40th president covers the Iran-Contra affair, the end of the Cold War, runaway inflation and rising employment, the air traffic controller strike of 1981, the Lebanese Civil War and the invasion of Granada, among other topics. TV: Thursday, 1/10 at 9:00pm

Watch The Abolitionists Extended Preview on PBS. See more from American Experience.

Vividly bringing to life the epic struggles of the men and women who fought to end slavery, THE ABOLITIONISTS tells the intertwined stories of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown. Fighting body and soul, they led the most important civil rights crusade in American history. What began as a pacifist movement became a fiery and furious struggle that forever changed the nation. Black and white, Northerners and Southerners, poor and wealthy, these passionate anti-slavery activists tore the nation apart in order to form a more perfect union. The series, which tells the story largely through period drama narrative, airs 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in January 1863. TV: Tuesday, 1/8 at 8:00pm

A note from the Founder and Editor of America's Test Kitchen, Christopher Kimball: If you are anything like me, you watch Downton Abbey on Masterpiece with a particular keen eye for the kitchen scenes, to suss out the techniques and the cookware, to look over the array of pastries, to watch Mrs. Patmore instruct Daisy in the finer points of baking, and to soak up the warm, enviable world of the Downton Abbey kitchen. I can feel the heat from the coal stove and the enshrouding warmth from the staff as they go about their jobs, side by side. It reminds me of why I love to cook – hard work and lessons learned result in immediate gratification and, of course, dinner. Good cooking satisfies on many levels.