America celebrates its 100th anniversary with a world’s fair in Philadelphia, as engineers manufacture a machine utopia.The French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi exhibits the arm and torch of his unfinished Statue of Liberty and industrialists present the first tastes of a consumer economy offering new kinds of freedom.

Susan B. Anthony spends the summer in Philadelphia campaigning for the fulfillment of women’s rights for equality before the law, the right to vote and the freedom granted to all citizens by the Constitution. When a former Confederate officer, Richard Henry Lee, is asked to read the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1876, Anthony and other suffragists leap to action, disrupting the official celebration that has left them on the sidelines. At Independence Hall, they issue a call for the Declaration of the Rights of Women of the United States.

In this episode of “In Pursuit: Philadelphia and the Making of America,” the American city becomes a vanguard, where Black Americans taking part in a “great migration” from the South race to freedom from Jim Crow, and European “huddled masses” put all their hope in an American future. Featuring Andrea Mitchell, W.E.B. DuBois expert Amy Hillier, Black Star Film Festival founder Maori Holmes, legendary Marian Anderson accompanist the late Blanche Burton-Lyles, and poet Thomas Devaney on the emerging concept of childhood and W.C. Fields.

Mother Jones’s melancholy march of child laborers to President Theodore Roosevelt’s estate, artist Frank Taylor’s ode to the vast industrial capacity of the “Workshop of the World,” and the visual genius of DuBois’s maps of Black life at the turn of the century make this the most emotionally charged episode of the series so far.

Director: Andrew Ferrett

Writer: Nathaniel Popkin

Executive Producer: Sam Katz

Producers: Wendy Cox, Andrew Ferrett, Jonathan Kohl, Nathaniel Popkin, Eva Roben

Editor: Rachel Sophia Stewart

Director of Photography: Paul Van Haute

Narrator: Michael Boatman

Composer: Daniel Slatkin