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Can Ken Burns Win the American Revolution?

October 23, 2025
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Can Ken Burns Win the American Revolution?
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It was a brilliant early fall morning in upstate New York, and Ken Burns was back on the battlefield.

He had just driven two hours from his home in New Hampshire to a rolling meadow outside Saratoga Springs, where the view has changed little since the Continental Army scored its first major victory over the British in 1777. After climbing onto the porch of an 18th-century farmhouse, he started delivering his now-familiar spiel to a small group of journalists and local officials.

“The American Revolution is encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia,” he said. But his six-part, 12-hour documentary about the subject, which debuts on PBS on Nov. 16, will aim to strip that away — and hopefully bring some healing to our own fractured moment.

“We say, ‘Oh we’re so divided,’ as if we’re Chicken Little and this is the worst it’s ever been,” he said. “But the Revolution was a pretty divided time. The Civil War was a pretty divided time. Almost all of American history is division.”

Maybe storytelling, he said, can “help short-circuit the binaries we have today.”

The remarks were pure Burns — the kind of sunny all-American optimism that thrills his admirers, and draws eye-rolls among skeptics. But “The American Revolution,” which Burns directed with Sarah Botstein and Dave Schmidt, is arriving at a moment when even attempting to bring a unifying story to a broad American middle feels like a radical act.

Since returning to office, President Trump has renewed his call for a return to celebratory “patriotic” history, blasting away at those he accuses of slandering the past. He’s moved to purge the Smithsonian of what he deems “divisive race-based ideology,” and ordered material that “disparages Americans” to be removed from National Park sites. In July, his Republican allies in Congress eliminated federal funding altogether for PBS, Burns’s longtime broadcast home.

“The American Revolution,” with its frank discussions of slavery and Native American dispossession, certainly cuts against the Trumpist view of history. But in a six-month, 32-city promotional tour across red, blue and purple America, Burns has been sticking relentlessly to a hopeful, nonpartisan, nonconfrontational script.

Whether at sold-out events organized by PBS affiliates or on bro-friendly podcasts like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, he has talked again and again (and again) about “putting the us back in U.S.,” and hailed the Revolution as “the most significant event in human history since the birth of Christ.”

At every stop, he has talked about the preciousness of democracy and defended PBS, where he is as synonymous as Big Bird. But he has rarely uttered the words “Donald Trump.”

In an interview last month in New York City, Burns acknowledged the charged moment. But when it comes to the film, he insisted, his responsibility is the same as it has always been: to tell the story of the past straight, to as many Americans as possible.

“I just really hope the film has an ability to speak to the people who are concerned about the direction of the country, whoever that might be,” he said. “This spectacularly inspiring story of our founding, as dark and complex as it is, has — I think, I hope — the ability to add something to the conversation right now that is unifying.”

Liberty For All?

Burns started working on the film in December 2015, while finishing up his documentary on the Vietnam War. Barack Obama had 13 months left in the White House, and enthusiasm for the upbeat, inclusive vision of the founding in the musical “Hamilton” was at its peak.

The filmmakers’ main concern wasn’t politics or historiography, but something more basic: How do you make a compelling documentary with no photographs, no newsreels, no living witnesses and a visual record that reads to many Americans as starchy and boring?

“The American Revolution,” which cost more than $30 million, began with the building of an archive. As the historian Geoffrey C. Ward (who has written 20 of Burns’s documentaries) dove into scholarship on the Revolution, researchers assembled more than 18,000 maps, engravings, paintings and documents, culled from nearly 350 galleries, museums and libraries.

The film makes ample use of the famous “Ken Burns effect,” with the camera panning across static images. It also uses newer tools, like the CGI maps used in some battle sequences. But the biggest departure was the use of re-enactors.

The cinematography team, led by Burns’s longtime collaborator Buddy Squires, filmed hundreds of re-enactors and costumed interpreters across the 13 colonies, in all kinds of weather. Shooting overhead with drones and up close on the ground, they captured soldiers and sailors, but also washerwomen, blacksmiths and farmers.

“We wanted to find a way to make people feel real and alive, including those who didn’t leave a lot behind that lets you figure out how to recreate them,” Botstein said.

The spine of the documentary is the military story, which is highlighted in 36 often suspenseful (and speaker-rattling) battle sequences, from the famous (Bunker Hill, Yorktown) to the more obscure. But its emotional heart is the first-person testimony of nearly 150 historical characters from all segments of society, read by 61 different voice actors.

We hear plenty from the Founding Fathers. But we also get the words of women, Native Americans, free and enslaved Africans, poor Irish immigrants, German mercenaries — all of whom wrestle with what it means to seek freedom, and often find very different answers.

That approach is very much in keeping with the latest scholarship, which depicts the Revolution as a hyper-violent civil war that divided families and communities and left many Native Americans and African Americans worse off, and less free. And the film doesn’t demonize loyalists, who were sometimes subjected to horrific retribution.

“They weren’t bad people,” Burns said. “They were just what we would call conservatives.”

The film notes that while roughly 5,000 Black people, free and enslaved, fought on the patriot side, an estimated 15,000 fought for the British, who promised them freedom (a promise that was largely betrayed).

But for many viewers, the most eye-opening part of the documentary may be the centrality of Native Americans. They are presented not as victims or bystanders, but as members of powerful nations faced with complex choices about how to defend their own liberty.

In the prologue, the film’s narrator, Peter Coyote, says the Revolution was sparked by disputes over “Indian land, taxation and representation.” It’s an acknowledgment that the colonists’ desire for unfettered access to Native lands was a primary cause of the break with Britain, which had forbidden any settlement west of the Appalachians.

That theme is echoed throughout the documentary. One of the most chilling sequences describes the Sullivan campaign of 1779, in upstate New York, where Washington ordered the destruction of all villages, crops and orchards of the Seneca and Cayuga, who had allied with the British. “You will not by any means listen to any overture for peace, before the total ruin of their settlements is effected,” Washington declared.

But the film is not an exercise in tearing down heroes. In one sequence, two historians — not a profession known for embracing the great-man view of the past — each describe Washington as the essential man of the Revolution, who kept the 13 colonies united through eight years of war.

“He was the glue that held people together,” the historian Annette Gordon-Reed says, adding, “We would not have had a country without him.”

‘Inspiration With Content’

Burns has had a complicated relationship with academic scholars, who have sometimes dismissed his films as sugary and sentimental, too quick to paper over unresolved divisions with appeals to unity. “The Civil War,” in particular, has drawn persistent criticism for what some see as a romanticized depiction of the conflict as a family feud that stemmed mainly from a failure to compromise.

For “The American Revolution,” the filmmakers drew on two dozen historical consultants, who offered extensive comments on multiple drafts and rough cuts. They include best-selling authors like Joseph Ellis and Stacy Schiff, along with leading academic scholars of three generations and multiple perspectives, from Bernard Bailyn to Ned Blackhawk.

Their differing views appear onscreen not as an argument, but as a kind of chorus — a reminder that the Revolution meant, and still means, different things to different people.

It remains to be seen what Burns’s version will mean to viewers, including ideologues who may be ready to pounce. Last January, Burns and Botstein appeared with three historians at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. When someone brought up the possibility of political attacks, there was a pause, then nervous laughter.

“We’d love your help in getting it out and making sure in the local areas it isn’t excised in a way that just favors one shocking thing,” Burns said.

That fear remains. But some scholars who worked on the film said they sense a hunger across the political spectrum for a conversation that stands outside today’s partisan polemics.

Kathleen DuVal, a historian at the University of North Carolina, calls it “inspiration with content.”

“People want to be reminded why having a republic is important and what people did to get it,” she said.

Jane Kamensky, a former Harvard professor who is now the president and chief executive at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, said the film offers a “head and heart synthesis” that leaves room for viewers to reach their own conclusions.

“The Revolution was the Big Bang of the question of what it means to be one people,” Kamensky said. “That was there in 1776, and it’s there now. But at no point in working with the team did I feel like they were forcing resonances.”

A Republic, If We Can Keep It

Still, 2025 has relentlessly forced those resonances.

In March, during an appearance at West Point, Burns received an enthusiastic response from cadets in the grand Gothic dining hall. But a few weeks later, word came that a similar event at the Naval Academy would be postponed, out of concern that Burns’s criticisms of President Trump during the 2024 campaign might draw an outcry from conservatives.

On July 4, after a swing through Georgia, the Carolinas and Texas, Burns was at Monticello, in Virginia, where he was the speaker at the annual naturalization ceremony. Before the event, in a makeshift green room in Jefferson’s front hall, someone brought up President Trump’s plans, announced the night before, for a UFC mixed-martial arts fight on the White House lawn next summer as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Burns dropped an un-Jeffersonian expletive. But out on Jefferson’s lawn, where the crowd was dressed mostly in red, white and blue, with a smattering of “I ❤ PBS” T-shirts, he kept the tone high.

Whatever it’s messy origins, he said, quoting the film’s prologue, the Revolution came to be about “the noblest aspirations of humankind.”

“That is what this special day, then and now, and every moment in between, and where we will be next July — and onward — is all about,” he said.

Still, the less uplifting historical resonances have continued to pile up. In August, after the president deployed the National Guard in Washington, the first episode of the documentary premiered at the Telluride Film Festival. When the film quoted a colonist protesting the British deployment of troops to an increasingly rebellious Boston, the audience, Burns said, “erupted.”

On the promotional trail, Burns has been careful to avoid any partisan edge. But during the Saratoga trip, while waiting between events, the author Rick Atkinson, a prominent voice in the film, spoke more pointedly.

“What did the founders fear most? What did they most fear?” He paused. “It wasn’t the British. They most feared the rise to power of an autocrat who did not share the values that the founders tried to embrace.”

So far, Burns’s insistence on both inspiration and complexity has played well with audiences, including those well outside the PBS orbit.

Earlier this month, on Theo Von’s podcast, he and Von bantered about the nation’s astrological sign (Cancer), and whether it shares the sign’s virtues (emotional, imaginative, loyal) and flaws (moodiness, insecurity, pessimism).

When Von suggested the Declaration was “kind of a love letter to the future,” Burns bounced on his seat, eyes widening.

“Oh my God, that’s the best expression I’ve ever heard!” he said, before pivoting to a favorite anecdote about Thomas Paine.

It was much the same in June when Burns flew to Austin, Texas, to record “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Over nearly three hours, he and Rogan talked about the need for heroes, and for honest accounting of their flaws. For much of the conversation, as Burns ran through his chestnuts, Rogan barely got a word in edgewise beyond “Wow.”

It’s a reaction Burns loves — proof that the audience for open-minded, fact-based history is still out there.

“That’s a very powerful thing,” he said, “when people let go of their own dialectical or polemical objectives and just say ‘Wow, I had no idea.’”

Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.

The post Can Ken Burns Win the American Revolution? appeared first on New York Times.

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