The American Dream.

Everyone thinks they know what it means, but in fact it means different things to different people.

In this program, I'll be looking at the history of the term, Americans perceptions of it, and how its meanings have changed.

To help in that endeavor, I traveled to New York to talk to writers and historians about what it means to them.

Hitting the ceiling, hitting the ceiling,

breaking through to the sky.

One of them was Financial journalistist Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of Too Big to Fail, and

co-creator of TV series Billions in his office at the New York Times. I think about the American dream as actually three separate dreams.

I think there's one dream which is very much being represented by the voters who supported Donald Trump, which was an American dream

that I think developed in the late 40s, 50s, and 60s.

It is a dream that if you go to school and you grow up and you try to do some of the

right things, you don't necessarily even need to go to college, but you will get a job, you will get a house, you might have some kids, a dog, a picket fence,

and you might be able to retire in your early 60s and it will all just kind of work out.

There's another American dream, which you might call it the Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg

American dream, which is that anybody with an idea possibly in their garage can go off and

shoot the moon and do stupendously well.

The American Dream, as it's commonly understood,

relates to questions of economic opportunity,

the chance of upward social mobility in exchange for hard work.

There is an idea about self-fashioneding,

about making of ourselves what we will,

that's at the heart of what all Americans think our country means.

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