Harvard historian Thomas Patterson looks at political participation and America's two-party system in presidential elections.

Listen Now:

George Mason University professor Rick Shenkman looks at presidential debates and their impact upon elections.

Listen Now:

NPR news analyst Daniel Schorr and American University historian Allan Lichtman discuss the role of the party conventions in 2008.

Listen Now:

Harvard University sociologist Orlando Patterson places Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign in the context of Democratic Party history.

Listen Now:

At the height of the Great Depression, more than 250,000 teenagers were living on the road in America.

Listen Now:

Historian Dan Carter places John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign in the context of the American conservative movement.

Listen Now:

MIT historian Meg Jacobs examines the impact of economic issues during election years.

Listen Now:

After eighty-two days as Vice-President, Harry Truman became the thirty-third President of the United States.

Listen Now:

In March 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office and gave hope to a nation in crisis.

Listen Now:

John Jay College historian Blanche Wiesen Cook looks back at Eleanor Roosevelt and discusses the role of the First Lady.

Listen Now:

Filmmakers Austin Hoyt and Callie Taintor Wiser discuss the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.

Listen Now:

Filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz discusses his biography of baseball's first Latino superstar.

Listen Now:

New York Yankees pitcher LaTroy Hawkins discusses the legacy of Roberto Clemente.

Listen Now:

Contemporary writers and poets read excerpts from Walt Whitman's signature work, Leaves of Grass.

Listen Now:

International relations professor Ernest May from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and history professor Kristin Hoganson from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign describe foreign policy, presidential leadership, and elections.

Listen Now:

When Arctic explorer Robert Peary returned from Greenland in 1897, he brought with him a seven-year-old boy named Minik.

Listen Now:

From the day that a 14-year-old Ansel Adams first saw the transcendent beauty of the Yosemite Valley, his life was, in his words, "colored and modulated by the great earth-gesture of the Sierra." Nature and wilderness photographer Michael Frye describes following in Adams' footsteps, working in Yosemite.

Listen Now:

Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin looks back at the 1968 presidential campaign and discusses the theory of "critical elections."

Listen Now:

In the 1930s, Joe Louis crossed boxing's color line to become the most famous and influential black person in America.

Listen Now:

As the American frontier was disappearing, William Cody transformed himself into a master showman named Buffalo Bill.

Listen Now:

The legendary trapper, scout and soldier was fluent in Spanish and five Indian languages. When the West was a mystery to most Americans, Kit Carson mastered it.

Listen Now:

Boston University historian Bruce Schulman, author of The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, looks back at the 1976 presidential campaign and finds parallels to the 2008 campaign.

Listen Now:

Walter J. Freeman was an ambitious neurologist that invented a radical surgery to combat mental illness: the transorbital lobotomy. A patient of Doctor Freeman and families of lobotomy recipients describe how the procedure changed their lives.

Listen Now:

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963 left a psychic wound on America that is with us still today. Filmmaker Robert Stone discusses his deconstruction of the assassination and how this single event forever changed the face of American culture.

Listen Now:

Executive producer Mark Samels and filmmaker Michael Epstein discuss an upcoming American Experience film on New York's Grand Central Station.

Listen Now:

In 1975, the U.S. sponsored Operation Babylift, evacuating war orphans from Vietnam. Author Aimee Phan talks about the AMERICAN EXPERIENCE program DAUGHTER FROM DANANG, which tells the story of a Babylift evacuee's troubled reunion with her Vietnamese birth mother.

Listen Now:

Meet the men of the Black Lions battalion. Forty years ago, they walked into a Viet Cong ambush.

Listen Now:

On October 4, 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. Roger Launius, curator at the National Air and Space Museum, describes Sputnik's impact on the Space Race.

Listen Now:

World War II veterans describe the brutal conditions and deadly combat faced on the battlefronts of Europe and the Pacific.

Listen Now:

In the mid nineteenth century Chicago emerged as an industrial metropolis, fueled by a diverse work force. Historian Dominic Pacyga describes Chicago's prominence in the national labor movement and its reaction to the Labor Day holiday. Their organized efforts were emblematic of a growing national labor movement that was marked by century's end with a new national holiday: Labor Day.

Listen Now:

Former Commissioner of Major League Baseball Fay Vincent talks about one of the greatest sports heroes ever. Joe DiMaggio joined the New York Yankees in 1936 and quickly rose to become the star of baseball's golden age.

Listen Now:

In the summer of 1967, thousands of young people from across the country flocked to San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district to join in the hippie experience, only to discover that what they had come for was already disappearing.

Listen Now:

In tape recordings from the 1970s, Jim Jones describes his church, the Peoples Temple.

Listen Now:

Filmmaker Stephen Ives details the challenges of making a documentary about New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Listen Now:

In early 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt received an alarming intelligence report: Germany and Japan were developing biological weapons for potential offensive use. In response, the U.S. and its allies rushed to develop their own germ warfare program.

Listen Now:

A veteran pilot describes his experiences during the first battle of the Cold War and the largest humanitarian campaign the world had ever seen.

Listen Now:

Filmmaker Randall MacLowry brings to life the story of The Gold Rush in this American Experience film.

Listen Now:

Three physicians discuss the past and future of yellow fever, a disease that terrorized the United States for more than two hundred years, killing an estimated 100,000 in the nineteenth century alone.

Listen Now:

Produced by Blackside, Eyes on the Prize tells the definitive story of the civil rights era from the point of view of the ordinary men and women whose extraordinary actions launched a movement that changed the fabric of American life.

Listen Now:

Carol Willis, the director of New York's Skyscraper Museum, reflects on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and plans for Ground Zero.

Listen Now:

Filmmaker Stephen Ives spent a year making a PBS documentary on the history of a unique American city New Orleans.

Listen Now:

Rising more than 700 feet above the raging waters of the Colorado River, it was called one of the greatest engineering works in history.

Listen Now:

Meet the daring workers and the temperamental artist who created the world's largest piece of sculpture, Mount Rushmore.

Listen Now:

At the turn of the 20th century, a tiny spit of land at the foot of Brooklyn had become the most extravagant playground in America.

Listen Now:

Historians David McCullough and Joseph Ellis discuss the amazing circumstances surrounding the deaths of former presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4th, 1826.

Listen Now:

American Experience executive producer Mark Samels discusses viewer emails about two of the past season's most popular programs.

Listen Now:

American Experience executive producer Mark Samels and German filmmaker Michael Kloft discuss "The Man Behind Hitler," a new documentary based on the 7,000-page diary kept by Nazi Joseph Goebbels.

Listen Now:

Workers and historians describe the construction of the world's longest suspension bridge above the dangerously churning waters at the entrance to San Francisco Bay.

Listen Now:

Annie Oakley thrilled audiences around the world with her daring shooting, a sport that was traditionally a male domain.

Listen Now:

A conflict in Texas pitted brother against brother and devastated the community.

Listen Now:

In the late 1960s, Native Alaskans sought a land claims settlement from Congress before work began on the Alaska Pipeline.

Listen Now:

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 remains a point of reference for earthquake science and building safety even today.

Listen Now:

Carol Anne Vetter Demaret, the mother of a boy born with severe immunodeficiency who was placed in a protective bubble, talks about the events leading up to her son David's birth.

Listen Now:

Actor Christopher Plummer brings Eugene O'Neill's words to life in a new documentary on O'Neill, America's greatest playwright.

Listen Now:

In 1906 Harry Thaw murdered Stanford White over the beautiful showgirl Evelyn Nesbit. The gripping New York society scandal was reported "to the ends of the civilized globe."

Listen Now:

Executive producer Mark Samels previews two new programs coming to American Experience this spring, Monday nights at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings).

Listen Now:

September 6, 1970 gave birth to a new era of terrorism.

Listen Now:

After the Civil War, North and South had to reconcile. And four million former slaves had to be brought into the life of the nation. Kate Stone of Louisiana and Fan Butler of Georgia were two young women who found their family plantations in ruins.

Listen Now:

After the Civil War, North and South had to reconcile. And four million former slaves had to be brought into the life of the nation. John Roy Lynch, a former slave from Mississippi, was elected to Congress, where he challenged whites' deepest beliefs about race and class.

Listen Now:

A Confederate partisan of expansive ambition, unbending politics and surprising cunning, Jesse James helped invent his own legend.

Listen Now:

At the end of World War II, the Allied victors tried Nazi war criminals for crimes against humanity. The trials set historic precedents for international law.

Listen Now:

The letters of John and Abigail Adams provide us with an intimate account of the early days of the Republic. They also tell the story of a great American political and romantic partnership.

Listen Now:

In July 1940 Eleanor Roosevelt makes a compelling speech and unites the party at the Democratic National Convention.

Listen Now:

In October 1986 President Ronald Reagan met Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev for a summit at Reykjavik. While no agreement was made, the summit was a historical breakthrough.

Listen Now:

In 1966, when Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California, his opponent derided his lack of experience and Hollywood background.

Listen Now:

American Experience executive producer Mark Samels and documentary filmmakers Elizabeth Deane and David Grubin discuss two of their presidential biographies, "John & Abigail Adams" and "LBJ."

Listen Now:

Every year the historic events of April 19, 1775 are reenacted by a committed band of historical actors.

Listen Now:

Book author David Margolick and documentary producer Barak Goodman discuss the process of working together on the same story.

Listen Now:

Bite-sized nuggets of positive thinking from two post-war success stories: Earl Tupper, inventor of Tupperware, and Brownie Wise, home party sales genius.

Listen Now:

A deadly flu invades North America -- killing over 600,000 people in the worst epidemic in American history.

Listen Now:

American Experience executive producer Mark Samels and documentary filmmakers Stephen Ives and Austin Hoyt discuss their work on city biographies of Las Vegas and Chicago.

Listen Now:

In the 1960s, Las Vegas was a segregated city. But the color line was about to turn green: the color of money.

Listen Now:

During the cold war, Las Vegas used nearby nuclear testing grounds as a tourist attraction.

Listen Now:

In early 1945 Japan knows it cannot win World War II, but it will not surrender. The U.S. launches a major bombing campaign.

Listen Now:

Apollo 8 was the first manned flight to the moon. The crew made many important visual observations, including mankind's first glance at the moon.

Listen Now:

An Indiana University biology professor was an unlikely "revolutionary" in the field of human sexuality.

Listen Now:

Executive producer Mark Samels and filmmaker Robert Kenner discuss viewer emails regarding Two Days in October.

Listen Now:

The famed Black Lions of the Army's First Infantry Division are ambushed in the jungles of Vietnam.

Listen Now:

A peaceful student protest on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison descends into violence and brutality when town police are brought to intervene.

Listen Now:

Executive producer Mark Samels previews the upcoming season of American Experience on PBS.

Listen Now:

The story and music of the Carter Family: Sara, her husband A. P., and sister-in-law Maybelle.

Listen Now:

The bizarre saga of heiress, kidnap victim, and sometime urban guerrilla Patricia Hearst.

Listen Now:

A story of greed, power, and race during a terrible natural disaster.

Listen Now: