History .

From draft dodging to the Dayton Accords, from Monica Lewinsky to a balanced budget, the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton veered between sordid scandal and grand achievement. In CLINTON, the latest installment in the critically acclaimed and successful series of presidential biographies, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE explores the fascinating story of an American president who rose from a broken childhood in Arkansas to become one of the most successful politicians in modern American history and one of the most complex and conflicted characters to ever stride across the public stage. It recounts a career full of accomplishment and rife with scandal, a marriage that would make history and create controversy and a presidency that would define the crucial and transformative period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. It follows Clinton across his two terms as he confronted some of the key forces that would shape the future, including partisan political warfare and domestic and international terrorism, and struggled, with uneven success, to define the role of American power in a post-Cold War world. Most memorably, it explores how Clinton’s conflicted character made history, even as it enraged his enemies and confounded his friends. The program features unprecedented access to scores of Clinton insiders including White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, as well as interviews with foreign leaders, members of the Republican opposition, childhood friends, staffers from Clinton’s years as governor of Arkansas, biographers and journalists.

Watch Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 7pm.

Watch Clinton Preview on PBS. See more from American Experience.

The Kennedys: American Experience is a saga of ambition, wealth, family loyalty and personal tragedy. From Joseph Kennedy’s rise on Wall Street, through John, Robert and Edward’s successes and scandals, the family has left a storied political legacy.

Watch Thursday, May 2, 2012 at 8pm.

On April 2, 1936, when the 22-year-old son of a sharecropper entered the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, he was, he later remembered, barely able to control his anger. “I was angry because of the insults that Hitler and the other German leaders had hurled at me and my Negro teammates on the Olympic squad.” The young athlete would channel his raw emotions into some of the most remarkable achievements in the history of athletics, winning four gold medals. To tell the story of Owens’ remarkable victories in the face of Nazi racism, this film begins in the poor Cleveland neighborhood where the young athlete grew up; details his early career; describes Adolf Hitler’s outsized ambitions for the 1936 Olympics; explores the movement in Western democracies to boycott the event; and explains the pressures on Owens to attend. The film also reveals the unlikely relationship Owens struck up at the games with his German rival Carl “Luz” Long and shows, that in the end, despite his success in Germany, Owens struggled to find a place for himself in a United States that was still wrestling to overcome its own deeply entrenched racism.

Watch American Experience Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 7pm.

Watch Jesse Owens Preview on PBS. See more from American Experience.

On October 29, 1929, the lifelong dreams of hundreds of thousands of stock market investors — middle-class secretaries, clerks, small businessmen — vanished in a few hours, along with their hard-earned savings when the stock market crashed. This program examines the economic boom before the crash, whether the crash was predictable and if it precipitated the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Watch American Experience Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 7pm.

Watch The Crash of 1929 on PBS. See more from American Experience.