He’s taken on baseball, World War II, antisemitism in America, and so much more. But in a way, for Ken Burns, all were prelude to The American Revolution, the six-part, roughly 12-hour documentary that will debut on PBS next Sunday. It was, Burns says, “a 10-year labor of love” for him and co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. We “won’t work,” Burns said, “on a more important project than this one.”
The striking thing about the documentary is the granular complexity of the story it tells, and the multiplicity of viewpoints from which it is told. Naturally, we hear from the Founders and other patriots who launched the war. But we also hear the loyalists’ side of the argument, as well as the British, French, and German perspectives. We learn about how the war looked to Native Americans. We hear how Black Americans, free and enslaved, experienced the war. The perspective of women presented in this docuseries is fascinating.
And perhaps most interestingly of all, we learn a great deal about the people who actually fought the war—often “teenagers,” says Burns, whose stories don’t figure prominently in most tellings of this war but were crucial to these filmmakers. Botstein: “Who’s doing the fighting and the dying? Who are their parents? Who are their siblings?”
The documentary certainly celebrates the Revolution’s triumphs. But it does so much more. “It is a wonderful story about these big ideas which are even more inspiring,” said Burns, “but it’s also about a host of unintended consequences.” The American Revolution will air next week on PBS and be available for streaming for free. It will be rebroadcast often in the run-up to next July Fourth and the 250th anniversary of independence.
Michael Tomasky: Well, hi everybody. I’m Michael Tomasky. I’m the editor of The New Republic and I am joined by Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein. They are the directors of their new documentary series, The American Revolution. I’ve watched it. It’s great. You’ll like it too. And we’re gonna have a great chat here for about half an hour. Ken, Sarah, welcome.
Ken Burns: Thank you.
Sarah Botstein: Thank you for having us.
Michael Tomasky: Oh, I’m delighted to be able to chat with you.
Why don’t you start, Ken, by just telling people where, when and how they can watch it, which can be a confusing question these days.
Ken Burns: Yeah, right. It’s actually gonna be hard to miss it. I’m happy to say that on November 16, PBS will begin broadcasting our six-part, 12-hour series. Each evening, they’ll play each episode twice—so episode one will go at eight, and episode one will go again at 10.
It’ll be simultaneously streamable for free. And there are also DVDs and Blu-rays—if you know what that is—that are available. And then after the first run, that will go through Friday the 21st, they’ll begin to do marathons and stacking and all for the next, you know, seven or eight months until July Fourth, which is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration—that they will be playing it and constantly replaying.
It’ll be hard to miss. And because it’s available for free for streaming, people can look at it at their own leisure. And it’s a 10-year labor of love. Sarah and I won’t work on a more important project than this one. We hope other films we’ve done and will do are as important, but nothing could be more important than getting at the heart of our origin story, which has been sort of smothered by sentimentality and nostalgia—a sort of bloodless, gallant myth.
And to come to understand it as the bloody civil war it was. Those big ideas that we normally associate with it are not diminished in any way by, you know, lifting up the rug and showing the cast of characters—not just the opaque but familiar top-down people, but a host, literally scores and scores of people you’ve never heard of before, who populate this story.
Necessarily populate this story because it is a wonderful story, in some ways. At the heart, it’s about those big ideas, which are even more inspiring—but also about a host of unintended consequences that end up making the difference not only for us, the United States, but for the world.
Michael Tomasky: Well, you’ve begun to answer my first question before I even ask it, but I’m gonna ask it anyway—and go back to you, Ken, and then to Sarah to get your thoughts on this as well.
You do not, in any way, as you just indicated, diminish the fact that this was a historical event—that this was, in one sense, a very happy ending: the creation of a democratic republic in which the governors derived their authority from the consent of the governed.
And it was the first time that that had happened in human history—in a world full of monarchies and dictatorships. And that’s a great thing.
But underneath that top-line fact—boy, there are a lot of layers here.
Ken Burns: Yes, indeed.
Michael Tomasky: So tell that story, Ken.
Ken Burns: I mean, there—well, you know—it’s the, the biggest thing you have to understand is that, you know, human experience is not a binary thing. It’s not on or off. It’s not red state or blue state. It’s not right or wrong. It’s—it’s always a complex mélange.
And what great stories do is they help to remind us how superficial and fraudulent those binaries that we spend most of our lives attending to—whether it’s the one and zero of our computer world or the binaries of a political dynamic—just how inadequate they are to, as Lincoln would say, the stormy present.
And so what we have is a process story. We have people—a nation—in the process of becoming. We are in pursuit of happiness. We are for a more perfect union. The second that these arguments between British people break out into natural laws, and somebody who is an owner of hundreds of human beings can articulate and distill a century of Enlightenment thinking into one remarkable sentence that has in it that all men are created equal—it’s done. Slavery’s done. Women’s suffrage is gonna happen.
As Yuval Levin, a conservative philosopher and critic, said, The word “all” just does it. That’s—that’s the foot in the door. Once you’ve said “all,” it’s over. And let’s remember, through all the hypocrisies—that the big planters are saying that the British are treating us like slaves while they themselves own slaves—all those hypocrisies are there and on full display. And there’s nothing new about that.
I mean, this is just the way human beings operate. What’s new is the fact that everybody is hearing these things—Native Americans, enslaved and free Black Americans, women are hearing these things—and it is going to be transformative. But the important thing is—it’s going to be transformative.
And so if you want to say, Yes, but it wasn’t like this, you’re absolutely right. But it is still not like this. And nowhere on earth has it been quite the right way that people would want it to be. And people just don’t operate that way. They just don’t cooperate with our best intentions.
And so this is a war in which we had to—as we’ve done in all films—just be umpires calling balls and strikes. We don’t make loyalists wrong. We see them as essentially what you might call a conservative—someone who thinks, correctly, that the British constitutional monarchy is the best form of government heretofore on earth. And why do I want to rock that boat?
That’s a perfectly legitimate thing. We want to understand why a Black American might choose to go with the British—who are cynically, in some cases, offering freedom only to enslaved people of rebels. They wouldn’t say the word patriots—and not to their neighbors who might be loyalists.
And the entire British Army—the British Empire—is dependent on slave labor. There aren’t 13 colonies; there are 26 in North America. And we’re the least profitable. The most profitable are those colonies that depend on slave labor in the Caribbean, like Jamaica or Barbados, that are 90 percent enslaved people.
So you’ve got all these roiling things. You have women who’ve been central to the resistance in the 10 years leading up to it. You have all these Native peoples within the 13 colonies and on the borders who are themselves—not them, but separate, distinct nations—the way France and Belgium are distinct. And they’ve had a role on a geopolitical, global scale for 150 years. They’ve got diplomats, they have foreign policy, they’re big economic players, and they ought to be treated with that kind of distinction.
And the whole impulse is: Do we go with the British—who seem to be telling the colonists not to go into our territory only because they can’t afford to protect us after winning the French and Indian War, which is a global struggle called the Seven Years’ War? We don’t like to think about it that way.
And our Revolution is another global war—in which not only France comes in on our side, but Spain and the Dutch—and it’s happening in Gibraltar, and it’s happening in the subcontinent of India and what’s now the Philippines. It’s super, super interesting and complicated.
But we want to make it just about, you know, us sturdy militia—who tended to fold in most battles—and it’s the ragtag Continental Army, made up of teenagers (many of whom you’ll meet), and recent immigrants and, you know, ne’er-do-wells and second and third sons who make up and win this.
So you’ve already got a story that we think we know—which we don’t know. And we ought to know the underpinnings of how it is. But it’s all based on this idea that we’re, you know, looking for a more perfect union. That we’re in pursuit of happiness. We haven’t gotten there.
Michael Tomasky: Sarah, I’d love your thoughts on this as well. I mean, Ken just talked about a lot of this, but you know, this is a story that traditionally is told largely from one perspective—the perspective of the Founders.
This story—your story—is told from their perspective, but also from the perspective of Native Americans, particularly in a string of villages and towns in upstate New York who were assaulted savagely by an American general; Black people, both free and enslaved; women—very interesting. I didn’t know that. I think I know this history—I didn’t know the women who traveled with troops.
The perspective of Loyalists is given its due, as Ken just said. The French—just—it’s fascinating, the many ways that you come at this story.
Sarah Botstein: Look, this is a complicated, unusual, surprising story that involves all kinds of people in all kinds of nations. I think we reduce the American Revolution to Lexington and Concord—maybe Yorktown—British and Patriots, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution.
There’s a decade in there of a whole lot of really interesting things that happen on the political stage, militarily, and many, many, many millions of people who are affected by this war. For me, working on it, the first thing I had to do was rearrange my head and go, OK, this is a global war. This is not just 13 colonies in North America throwing off a cartoonish king. It’s way more complicated than that—and that seems fairly obvious. It’s like one layer of the onion. But it’s a world war, and then it’s a civil war.
And what does that mean technically? What is a civil war? What is the language that the colonists are using about the monarchy—and that they are British subjects? I think of slavery as Americans enslaving people—not us thinking of ourselves as slaves of the crown. So you have to really peel another layer back.
And then, you know, I’m really fortunate—this is the third big film about a war that I’ve been lucky enough to work on. And I think anytime you do a story about a war, it is your obligation to a viewer to make sure that as they are beginning to understand what the politicians and the military leaders are doing, who that impacts—who’s doing the fighting and the dying? Who are their parents? Who are their siblings? What is their community?
This is community against community. And to your point, it’s an eighteenth-century, very brutal, very bloody war that is not a mechanized army. So they’re moving on foot and by four-legged creatures and wagons—and the women are going with them unless the women are staying home and taking care of their properties.
So it’s a kaleidoscope of people. It’s like America. We know our neighbor is different from the neighbor down the street, from the person who lives fifty miles from you—and so is your family. And we’ve always been that way.
We have a lot to be, I think, inspired by in terms of how this has gone in the last 250 years—and a lot to learn from what we’ve not done well in the last 250 years. And you can hold both those things. And for me, the surprise, 10 years later—Ken and I talk about this a lot—is, you know, it’s a deeply patriotic, inspiring story, with all of our bruises and warts.
Michael Tomasky: Yeah. I’d like to ask you both, maybe Sarah first this time a little bit about the method. Ken, I remember when we met four or five years ago, you mentioned that you were working on this, and you just said a few moments ago that it’s been a 10-year project. As I was watching, I was just thinking to myself over and over about hours and hours and hours of research and archival research that had to be done into records, into paintings. You must have had somebody who spent 10,000 hours looking at paintings. You staged set pieces, that you had to film, I take it. So like, just talk a little bit about that, the, just the monumental work that went into this. Right.
Sarah Botstein: Well, any big series is like that, and any big series is just a monumental task of incredible people sitting 10 feet from me who—um—most people don’t get the pleasure of talking to every day.
You know, for me, I work backwards instead of forward. So if we know we’re gonna broadcast in 2025 or 2026 and it’s 2017 or 2018, OK, that gives us—how many?—let’s just take the live cinematography. How many seasons do we have to shoot? And how is the weather gonna cooperate? And how many places do we have to go?
And we literally build out a six- or seven-year shooting plan based on the seasons, weather contingencies. We had the pandemic, which ultimately was a friend to us in terms of the live cinematography, because when we couldn’t do a lot else, we could do that. And that’s one whole group of us—figuring out where to shoot and how to shoot.
And we—I mean, Ken and I talked every morning about how to film this. We got better as we went. Some of it’s very impressionistic—sometimes we’re shooting through smoke, through glass. Sometimes we’re hyperreal, sometimes we’re way up high in the sky.
We made a film about the U.S. and the Holocaust. Also, the end of that we shot during the pandemic, and so we were directing via WhatsApp in Poland with extraordinary drone operators. And those drone operators kind of rearranged how we thought about using the technology of the drone. And we use that here, where the drone is very high up in the sky, kind of at eye level, very low down.
So we would have very traditional, old-fashioned—a guy on sticks. Buddy would get a Continental soldier’s uniform and embed with the reenactors. I mean, we did all kinds of live cinematography.
And then, really seriously—I think viewers love to hear—we are really studious students of history. And we make history films, and we become an archive. So there’s a team of three extraordinary producers, and all they did for five years was figure out what has been rendered about this event, this person, this community, this part of the world—how close to a piece of documentary evidence from that day, to a watercolor that we’re gonna commission 250 years later.
And we have it all. We have hundreds of tracks of music. We built—with a cartographer over four years—an actual rendering of what eighteenth-century North America looked like from a map. Because the maps are this extraordinary archive of the time, but also really helpful in telling a military story and a political story.
And we were able to use all that material, and then all the archival voices and all the books and all the—I mean, it is—we are an archive for a big part of the project. And then we really turn into a filmmaking organization, and we are always doing everything.
So people are surprised—we’re shooting till the last day we hand the tape over to PBS and fussing with every comma and quote and interview bite and fact.
Michael Tomasky: And Ken, with baseball, you had film footage and with the Civil War at least you had photographs. Here you just had paintings and maps.
Ken Burns: But we’re like baseball—we’re just umpires calling balls and strikes. You know, we want to be fair and ecumenical.
Yeah, the important thing about what Sarah said—it’s really important—is that we did use reenactors. And we have not been very friendly to reenactors in the past. We’ve just felt like, if you’re gonna do that, you might as well make a feature film—and we don’t do that.
So we found ways to do it. And because we had subjects that were rarely in the eighteenth century, we were OK. We could use photographs and then later photographs and newsreels. But what we collected was a critical mass of them doing what they do—in French uniforms and German uniforms and British uniforms, in militia, in Continental, and Native American, Black soldiers—whatever it might be—women attending to the stuff.
And so we would just film them—not with the idea, Can you reenact the Battle of Long Island for us, and then we’ll do that in a live scene? No. We are going from paintings of the Battle of Long Island to generic footage that we have of people turning a cannon around once the Americans are surrounded, to a musket volley that cuts into the next painting—a live musket volley.
And it may be from Long Island, it may not be from Long Island—and it doesn’t matter. What we were looking for was a kind of impressionistic sense.
And then we also had lots of live cinematography that didn’t have a human being in it—because the real star is this extraordinary continent, the East Coast of this extraordinary continent, which was the prize in this, the fourth global war over that prize.And so in all the seasons that Sarah was talking about—and then, you know, the maps, you know, as Sarah said—we’re recreating them. Some of them we just leave alone. We just show a beautiful map from the period. Sometimes we take a beautiful map and add the arrows of the movements of troops. Sometimes we actually create our own maps that show—
I mean, if Boston today—what we call Back Bay—thousands of people live in Back Bay. Back Bay was a back bay. Yeah, it was underwater. And so the Boston of today does not look like the little head at the end of a narrow isthmus that goes down to where the Roxbury area and Dorchester are. But they’re hugely important to the military as well as the geopolitical realities of Boston in that particular time.
And we are putting a fine line—as Sarah said—not only are we shooting up until the last moment, we’re editing up until the last moment. We should be locked and finished, but we’re changing it. We’re rearranging words. We’re taking a “perhaps”—even though five historians insist that it’s 16 months or ships or dead or whatever it might be—we find a seventh historian who says, not quite sure. So we take a “perhaps” from the narrator and move it in and say, perhaps sixteen. That happens all the time.
Yeah. And some of our scripts have footnotes that are—some pages—the footnotes are longer than the writing on it, because we have to prove to ourselves that we’ve got it right.
And I think the most important thing is all the voices—bringing alive, taking off a little bit of the opacity of the famous people, but adding dimensions of new people who may not exist. They didn’t have their portraits painted, so they may exist only as a gravestone. They may exist as a line in an enlistment roll. They may exist as a casualty report. They may have just written a letter.
And so you find ways to help these people, who are as important to this story, come alive.
Michael Tomasky: There’s so much I’d like to ask, but I know your time is tight. I’m just gonna ask two more questions. Um, Ken, you first, George Washington. Let’s just talk about George. Father of our country, as you know, he did a remarkable thing. He said no to power two times. He could have been the dictator of the United States, and he resigned his military commission and then he chose to serve only two terms as president, the American Cincinnatus, one of the most admirable acts that a political leader has ever made. At the same time as you also note, not only did he own slaves, but at the end of the war, he ordered that enslaved people be returned to to the plantations where they had been property. So it’s a complicated picture that gives him his due. But it says this is who he was. Uh, Ken, if you wanna speak to that.
Ken Burns: I think that Babe Ruth, you know, strikes out a lot—yeah—along with the home runs. He only comes up once every nine times at bat. Sometimes it’s gonna be somebody else’s gonna do.
The way George Washington’s the perfect thing for us—I don’t think we understood. We come in with a modern sentimentality of imposing a little bit of the presentism, as it is criticized, as being, you know—there were many people of the time, including George Washington, who understood that slavery was wrong. And he ends up freeing a number of his slaves before the end of his life.
Yeah, he’s flawed. I have yet to meet a person who is not. He makes unbelievably rash moves out on the battlefield—rides out risking his life, and therefore the entire cause—because without him, he’s got this strange presence and this ability to lead men in the dead of night, and to pick really smart people as his subordinate talent, and to work with Congress, and to say to Georgians and folks from New Hampshire, You’re not that, you’re Americans.
And he does it. And he puts down mutinies. And, as you said, Michael, you know, resigns his military commission when everybody’s happy to have him be essentially what Napoleon will be, and then later resigns the presidency when they’re happy for him to be like George III—and he’s not.
And George III—who’s not the crazy person that we think he is—says that he’s the greatest character of the age, and he is.
But it is important that we call those balls and strikes. And it is important that we have a complex picture of it, because when we live in a superficial media culture as we do today, where in our computer world everything’s a one or a zero, or everything’s good or bad, whatever it is, you think heroism is perfection. And so we’re constantly being disappointed.
Heroism is something we’ve inherited from the Greeks. It’s a negotiation—and sometimes a war—between a character’s strengths and weaknesses. And it is that negotiation that is what we are about as human beings. That process of how you deal with your inner demons and strengths—Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great powers. So Washington is no different. Nor is Babe Ruth, for that matter. Nor is anybody that you take.
And I think it is the sadness of our time, in which we assume that something has to be all one thing or all the other. We have in our editing room a neon sign that says, in lowercase cursive—it’s been there for years—‘It’s complicated.’ And it means that no matter how good that scene is, if you learn new, complicating, destabilizing information, you are obligated to change it.
And so you just want to, without fear or failure, call the balls and strikes for everyone involved.
And what is so remarkable—and I think will be, as Sarah likes to say, this film is deeply patriotic—is that you can have a relationship with George Washington that is in full knowledge of all of these faults and realize, Oh my God, we ought to thank ourselves every single day for that sign that we laugh at that says “George Washington slept here,” because if he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have the country that we have.
If he’d run—as he did, he ran out on the battle at Princeton, and an aide put his hands over his eyes, certain his commander was gonna be killed—if he’d been killed, we’d be speaking German, we’d be speaking Spanish, we’d be speaking French, we’d be speaking English—you know, English-English.
We don’t have a country without him. He is literally, as you said in your introduction, the father of our country. And to be able to hold that at the same time you can hold the contradictory stuff is to be human.
Michael Tomasky: I wanna move to what ... I know we’re short on time. This will be the last question. The very last line of the sixth episode of the last episode is, Benjamin Rush, one of the Founding Fathers. So you could have chosen to end this in a thousand different ways. You chose to end it with Benjamin Rush saying this revolution is not over. Sarah, explain to folks why you ended it that way.
Sarah Botstein: Well, I think how we begin the film and how we end the film are usually the last two things we finish—the things that we talk amongst ourselves about the most. And for me, I can’t really talk about the end of the film without talking about the opening of the film. They go together to me, both visually and in terms of what they’re trying to say.
But I think the film is trying to do two things: It’s trying to tell the story of the American Revolution—the war—and it’s trying to tell the story of the American Revolution—the great revolution of ideas and a democratic republic.
We’re 250 years old next year. We’ve done a lot of things right. We’ve done a lot of things not so well. We have a lot to learn from that history. And I think Benjamin Rush is saying: The war is over, but the revolution isn’t. And it is incumbent upon you—the people who live here—to make good on the promises of both the Declaration and on all the people who lost their lives and fought for us to have this really interesting experiment do better.
And I hope it’s an inspiring way to say: This is living, breathing history, and it’s in our hands to make good on that promise.
Ken Burns: It’s a process thing. It’s again—he’s saying, you know, we are a nation becoming. We’ve won the war, but we are in the process of becoming. We are in pursuit still of that happiness. We are looking for a more perfect union. And that has to be what it was.
And it doesn’t let anybody off the hook. It actually, I think, re-galvanizes a sense of commitment—and particularly when we’re supposed to be so divided right now, the sky is falling, and we have always been divided. The sky’s always been falling, according to whatever contemporary journalist there is at the time—we’ve covered it.
That we have the opportunity, as Sarah is saying, is to take—not just from Benjamin Rush, but from all that’s gone on—a sense of the fact that this is the most consequential revolution in history. We’re the original anti-colonialists. We started it. We set in motion revolutions around the globe. And they are all about this unbelievably new idea: that people could be citizens and govern themselves and not just be subjects.
You know, Jefferson says in the Declaration, “All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.” It’s not a hard thing—it’s just that most people accept being under the sway of an authoritarian. And that we’re—it’s gonna take some extra energy to not be that. And that extra energy we’re gonna call the pursuit of happiness, which is not the pursuit of money or objects in a marketplace of things, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas.
If you do that—if you’re constantly improving yourself—you have the possibility of achieving a kind of virtuous state that makes you worthy of this new gift called citizenship. And that gift is replicated every generation. And as Sarah’s saying, there’s an obligation for every generation to reinterpret and understand the magnanimity of that gift, and how big that gift is, and how important it is, and how fragile it is—and to take it.
In whatever way you say it—whether you’re on the left or the right, from the West or the East, the North or the South, young or old, male or female, gay or straight, rich or poor—you’ve got some connection. Came here on the Mayflower or arrived yesterday—you’ve got some connection to these ideas.
And this story is about as good a story as we’ve ever come across.
Michael Tomasky: I think we’re more aware today than we were a decade ago that these things are fragile and and take constant work.
Ken Burns: We began this when Barack Obama had 13 months to go on his presidency. Yeah. So we know the kind of arc across the time we’ve taken to make this film.
Michael Tomasky: The American Revolution. It drops on November 16 on PBS, after which you’ll have many opportunities to see it. Sarah Botstein, Ken Burns, very grateful for your time.
Ken Burns: Thank you, Michael. Good to see you so much. Really nice to see you.
Sarah Botstein: Thank you.
