Philadelphia: The Great Experiment

Philadelphia's population is decimated by an outbreak of yellow fever in 1793. As the city's physicians and civic leaders are fight back, they define our modern conception of public health, and establish some of the city's fundamental institutions that still operate today.

Philadelphia celebrates its founder more than any other American city, but who exactly is William Penn? For many, he is a statue atop City Hall, but Penn's busy life reflected an era of chaotic upheaval and conflict. He is at once a radical Quaker, political prisoner, visionary city planner, absent landlord, and a slaveholder. His ideals, contradictions, and ambitions cast a long shadow across American history.

Benjamin Franklin is Philadelphia's most iconic citizen, but how did William Penn's city shape the man often called "The First American"? This episode follows Franklin from his arrival as a fugitive indentured servant to his emergence as a leader of craftsmen, civic innovator, media pioneer, politician, and the force behind America's greatest Enlightenment city. But all around Franklin, slavery drives the city's prosperity. Sampson, enslaved to Governor James Logan, strikes out for freedom, forcing Quaker power brokers to wrestle with the great evil of their times. And soon, Philadelphia's peaceful charter will face its greatest test, as a violent frontier conflict threatens to explode in the city's streets.

Discontent among Philadelphians rises with every new British tax, and with it, tension between the wealthy and working classes. As the largest and most diverse city in the colonies, Philadelphia attracts the powerful and passionate, and quickly becomes the headquarters for the American Revolution. Once independence –and war—is declared, revolutionaries seek out Loyalists, who they see as dangerous, and traitorous. Now, the city is at war with itself. Who will fight? Learn the real stories of iconic Philadelphians like Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross, Thomas Paine, and Charles Willson Peale, and how their actions defined the Philadelphia, and nation, that would emerge.

Philadelphia's population is decimated by an outbreak of yellow fever in 1793. As the city's physicians and civic leaders are fight back, they define our modern conception of public health, and establish some of the city's fundamental institutions that still operate today.

In the decades before the Civil War, the city we know as Philadelphia was divided into 29 independent towns and districts. With no unified police, fire, or political authority, chaos ruled the streets. Riots over slavery, jobs, and religion became the norm during the most violent period in the city's history. See the dreamers attempting to hold on to the revolutionary past, the firebrands who challenge the city to rise up against slavery, and the mobs who threaten to destroy it all. Whose Philadelphia will survive?