Amelia Earhart
Monday, April 7
at 8:00pm.

Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the first to cross the North American continent alone. Her exploits as an aviator, her beauty and intelligence, her independence and charm made her a national heroine. Seemingly invincible, Earhart tirelessly traveled and lectured, a champion of aviation and equal opportunity for women. But her cheering public didn't know the cost of her courage. The record-breaking flights, the aerial exhibitions and races, the interviews to support her favorite causes, the endless speeches and promotional commitments, together with household responsibilities, health problems and financial worries, combined to push Earhart to the point of exhaustion. In 1937, she set out to accomplish yet another first: to circle the earth along the equator on an east-west flight. Friends warned that her preparations were hurried, even careless. When her plane disappeared without a trace, the “First Lady of the Air” was instantly transformed into an American legend.

Walt Whitman
Monday, April 14
at 8:00pm.

On a hot summer day in 1855, a 36-year-old writer emerged from an undistinguished printer’s shop in Brooklyn, New York, carrying a slim volume of his work. To family, friends and neighbors, Walter Whitman Jr. may have been just a too-old bachelor who lived in his parents’ attic, but as he walked the city streets that day, he knew something of himself they could not imagine. With his book of a dozen poems, Leaves of Grass, he was about to introduce America to a savior. Ominous events were on the horizon and Walt Whitman offered up his poetry and his persona as a reflection of the America he saw; it was daring, noble, naive, brutish, sexual, frightening and flawed. He hoped his work could heal a fracturing country. In his own time, his poetry was as contested as the idea of America itself. This program tells Whitman’s life story, from his working-class childhood in Long Island to his years as a newspaper reporter in Brooklyn, when he struggled to support his impoverished family, then to his reckless pursuit of the attention and affection he craved for his work, to his death in 1892 at the age of 72.

Roberto Clemente
Monday, April 21
at 8:00pm.

Baseball great Roberto Clemente’s talent and inimitable style drew legions of fans, but as this AMERICAN EXPERIENCE production reveals, he was more than an exceptional baseball player. He was also a committed humanitarian who challenged racial discrimination and worked for social justice. Through interviews with relatives, childhood friends, former teammates and journalists, this biography tells Clemente's inspiring and tragic story, focusing on a man whose career sheds light on larger issues of immigration, civil rights and cultural change.