The names Colonel Tye, Robert Smalls and Harriet Jacobs aren't as familiar as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Betsy Ross, but they, too, are the forefathers and foremothers of America.

They also were slaves.

		'Slavery and the Making of America' When: 9 p.m. Wednesday and Feb. 16 on WQED. Narrator: Morgan Freeman.

So were Denmark Vesey, Mum Bett, Emmanuel and Frances Driggus, and millions of other black pioneers instrumental in building a barely charted territory into one of the strongest and richest countries in the world.

Yet their stories have been largely ignored in U.S. history.

"The reason we don't know what we ought to know about them isn't because these people haven't been telling their stories," says George Washington University historian James Horton.

He's among 25 scholars who provide an unparalleled look at slavery and the remarkable stories of individual slaves in "Slavery and the Making of America," airing on PBS at 9 p.m. Wednesday and Feb. 16.

"The diaries, the novels, the letters that we are finding now have been there for a couple hundred years. How come we didn't find them before?" Horton questions. "Part of the reason has to do with what we thought worthy of looking for."

Narrated by actor Morgan Freeman, the four-hour series is told through a collage of filmed re-enactments, providing a detailed visual history of American slavery.

From the early 17th century when English settlers in Virginia purchased Africans from Dutch traders, and through the next two centuries with the Civil War and Reconstruction, the documentary explores slavery as more than just an institution of evil and persecution.

Rather, the film shows how slavery became the central economic base for the entire country's development -- a base that was dependent on the labor and know-how of generations of black Americans.

"This is not African-American history, it's American history. It's the history of all of us," notes executive producer William R. Grant, director of science, natural history and feature programs for WNET in New York, which produced the series.

And while the documentary ends in late 1876, Grant contends that the story of slavery is extremely relevant today.

"President Bush said recently that Americans do not like to look in the rearview mirror, that we are a forward-looking -- not backward-looking -- people," Grant says of the president's inaugural address.

"However, as Peter Wood, one of the historians from Duke University, said in the show, 'Slavery is ground zero for race relations in America.' If you don't understand that, it's hard to get a grip on what's going on today. Or as Jim Horton said, 'Slavery wasn't the sideshow in America, it was the main event in American history.'