In Pursuit of History Film Festival

In Pursuit: Philadelphia and the Making of America is the first multi-part documentary series to explore the history of American democratic life through the experience of one city. 

No documentary project has included such a sweep of voices in chronicling a single American place. No place can tell the American story like Philadelphia. 

Featuring more than 200 scholars, journalists, artists, activists, and everyday people, including Grammy nominee Ursula Rucker, Lincoln Prize winner Allen Guelzo, Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough, renowned sociologist Marcus Anthony Hunter, Lenape/Delaware educator Jeremy Johnson, groundbreaking historian Sophia Rosenfeld, and legendary journalist Andrea Mitchell.​

In Pursuit dramatizes the perilous situation of a border city amidst the Civil War, the aspiration of Reconstruction, the hope and disappointments of the Great Migration, and the transformative power of railroads and robber barons in one of America’s leading industrial cities. The series follows Philadelphia’s ambitious urban planners into the twentieth century, chronicling the vision and reality of Urban Renewal, the challenges and consequences of deindustrialization, the struggles for civil rights, gay and lesbian rights, and women’s rights in a city striving to define its own future.

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