In Pursuit: Philadelphia and the Making of America

NEW DATE DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER:

Please join us for a film and conversation examining how Philadelphia’s past and present continue to shape the American story:

Episode 1 of In Pursuit: Philadelphia and the Making of America examines the earliest foundations of freedom in the region that would become Philadelphia. Long before the city’s founding, the Lenape, known as the “the Original People,” lived at liberty along the forests and inlets of the mid-Atlantic coast. Their way of life was profoundly disrupted by decades of European encroachment, displacement, and disease.

The episode then turns to the arrival of Quaker visionary William Penn, whose pursuit of religious freedom promised coexistence and tolerance. Yet in a colony already entangled with slavery, this program asks a critical question: could ideals of freedom truly take root in compromised soil?

Through film and conversation, Episode 1 invites audiences to reconsider how America’s earliest freedoms were imagined and who they were never meant to include.