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Liberty in the Air
Part 2 traces slavery’s expansion—and building anti-slavery movements—between the 1740s and the 1830s. Particularly in the South, it was “an extraordinary goose that laid the golden egg,” says Duke historian Peter Wood. It also produced a unique black culture and in whites an ambivalence that’s explored in a profile of Thomas Jefferson’s valet, Jupiter. By the time of the Revolution, whites spoke passionately of liberty and slaves, says narrator Morgan Freeman, “could see the paradox.”
