Special Features:

Q&A: Read an insightful interview with series historian Dr. James Oliver Horton

Individual Stories, Individual Heroes: Learn more about the slaves profiled in the series

From 91FM:

Black History Month specials

Radio Times programming on slavery.

Marking Pennsylvania History series:

First Protest: Four Pennsylvania Quakers openly condemn slavery

Pennsylvania Hall: A short-lived meeting place for Philadelphia abolitionists

Slavery and the Making of America

Actor Morgan Freeman narrates this groundbreaking four-hour production chronicling the institution of slavery in America, from its origins in 1619 through the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Reconstruction in the 1860s. Using dramatic sequences, the series focuses on the remarkable stories of individual slaves, acknowledging the integral role these men and women played in the development and growth of the entire United States. Leading historians offer new perspectives and facts about slavery to help dispel some of the common misconceptions long perpetuated in school textbooks, including the ideas that slavery was strictly a southern institution and that all slaves were passive victims of their unfortunate situations.

Wednesday, February 16 at 9 p.m.

Episode 2: "Seeds of Destruction" & "The Challenge of Freedom"

The documentary continues by exploring the period from 1800 through the start of the Civil War, during which slavery saw an enormous expansion and entered its final decades. These years saw an increasingly militant abolitionist movement and a widening rift between the North -- which had largely outlawed slavery but continued to reap the vast economic benefits of the system -- and the South, now home to millions of enslaved black men, women and children. The final hour follows the life of South Carolina slave Robert Smalls, who joined the Union Navy, bought the mansion in which he had been enslaved and entered a successful political career, and examines the periods of the Civil War, Reconstruction and beyond. The program also looks at the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and militant opposition to black rights, the end of the Reconstruction and its replacement with a whole new kind of legalized oppression.