American Experience - Season 24 (2012)

Clinton wins the 1996 election in a landslide, pulling off one of the greatest turnarounds in political history. But events have been set in motion that will soon divide the country and nearly destroy Clinton's presidency.

Lyrical and meditative, The Amish answers many questions Americans have about this insistently insular religious community, whose intense faith and adherence to five hundred year-old traditions have by turns captivated and repelled, awed and irritated, inspired and confused for more than a century. With unprecedented access to the Amish built on patience and hard-won trust, the film is the first to deeply penetrate and explore this profoundly attention-averse group. In doing so, it paints an extraordinarily intimate portrait of contemporary Amish faith and life. It ...

When Grand Coulee Dam was being built during the depths of the Great Depression, everything about it--generators, powerhouses, pumps--was the biggest in the world. Grand Coulee was more than a dam; it was a proclamation: America could still do great things. The mile-long behemoth was the largest hydroelectric power-producing facility in the world when it was completed in March 1941--just in time to power the nation's defense plants and the atomic reactors for the Manhattan Project.

On April 2, 1936, when the 22-year-old son of a sharecropper entered the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, he was barely able to control his anger in the face of Nazi racism. But instead of letting himself be distracted, the young athlete channeled his raw emotions into one of the most remarkable achievements in athletic history: four gold medals in two days.