The American Revolution and Ken Burns
- Anastasia Stanmeyer
- Aug 25
- 15 min read
Updated: Aug 26
THE RENOWNED DOCUMENTARIAN SAYS THE 12-HOUR SERIES ON THE FOUNDING OF AMERICA IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FILM HE’S MADE
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
Ken Burns is beside himself. His latest film is the most significant work he has done to date, he tells me. This from a prolific filmmaker who has created some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, with over 40 films whose topics range from baseball to the Civil War, from the life of Leonardo da Vinci to the Shakers, and many others. His films have been honored with 17 Emmy® Awards, two Grammy® Awards, two Oscar nominations, and more. His latest film, The American Revolution, is a new six-part documentary series that explores the country’s founding struggle and its eight-year War for Independence. It premieres Sunday, November 16, airing for six consecutive nights on PBS stations, as well as streaming at PBS.org and on the PBS App.
The film’s promotional tour began in Richmond, Virginia, on March 23, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of Patrick Henry's famous “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech. And Burns hasn’t let up since. His team has been purposeful about the dates and locations of his tour stops, some coinciding with a historical event. On April 16 at Symphony Hall in Boston, Burns was joined by Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, his fellow directors and producers of the new series, for a preview, discussion, and performance by a chamber ensemble that included Rhiannon Giddens and Johnny Gandelsman. The next day, Burns visited Lexington and Concord for more panel talks. The events coincided with Patriots’ Day, and then he was off to his next destination.
Burns will come within range of us on September 10 at the Palace Theatre in Albany. He and Botstein will present clips and share stories from the nearly ten-year journey of creating the 12-hour series. The film is an expansive look at the virtues and contradictions of the war and the birth of the United States of America, following dozens of figures from a wide variety of backgrounds—the rank-and-file Continental soldiers and American militiamen, Patriot political and military leaders, British Army officers, American Loyalists, Native soldiers and civilians, enslaved and free African Americans, German soldiers in the British service, French and Spanish allies, and various civilians living in North America.
As I write this piece, the 250th anniversary of our country’s formation is already well in motion, and there is no better person to take up the challenge of telling this complex story than Burns. There are no photos, no newsreels to bring that point home. There are writings, paintings, and reenactors who breathe life into the birth of our nation. Burns spoke with me from his home in New Hampshire.
Stanmeyer: I’m very excited that you will be coming to the Palace Theatre, Ken.
Burns: It’s very, very important that we share the story that the Revolution is so central in the Albany area.
Stanmeyer: Can you tell me how important this region is?
Burns: We’ve already passed the 250th marker of the beginning of the American Revolution, at Lexington and Concord on April 19, and for the next eight years, we will be passing other milestones. One of the most important and really wonderful stories is the fact that early in our second episode of The American Revolution, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, along with a prickly but very talented general—not quite a general at that point named Benedict Arnold—captured Ticonderoga and, more importantly, British cannon. After Lexington and Concord, it's realized that those cannon are needed to drive away the British who have been encircled and can't get out of Boston except by sea. If we were to mount some cannon on hills surrounding Boston, they would be forced to leave. That job fell to a bookseller named Henry Knox, whom Washington took a liking to. And Knox went all the way to Ticonderoga and moved the cannon overland to the top of the Lake George, floated it down, and then got sleds with oxen and took them over the Berkshires and got them all the way to Cambridge, which was one of those amazing feats of engineering.
George Washington and 3,000 men got them up on top of a hill, and the British suddenly realized they were out of there and left Boston for good. It’s one of the great, great stories. The Capital Region is central to this. The Hudson is one of the great highways of the Revolution. The Revolution is basically fought on or next to water. There were a lot of important posts, of course—West Point is where Benedict Arnold will try to surrender to the British and sabotage as a traitor. More importantly—probably the single most important victory of the Revolution by the Patriots besides the surrender at Yorktown which ends the war—takes place at Saratoga. It's this huge defeat; an entire British Army surrenders. It's the thing that convinces the French to get involved on our side, to not just surreptitiously send us material, but to form two treaties—one a kind of commercial treaty and the other is a military alliance, which will prove the difference, offering their navy and their army to our services in our Revolution. And it’s the Battle of Saratoga [on September 19, 1777] and the drama that takes place. And then, of course, to the west, there is a lot going on in Native American territories, where settlers are invading. The tensions within and between Indian tribes is a huge part of the Revolution that most people don't represent. Some of it is quite tragic, and all of it is just unbelievably interesting.
Stanmeyer: We were talking to the Freemasons here in the Berkshires, and they're creating a cannon as we speak. Henry Knox was a Freemason, and they're going to follow that trail themselves this summer. It's interesting how other organizations also are taking that path for the 250th.
Burns: It's so important that we reclaim our history, not just from our own inattention or distractions or the fact that history isn't as emphasized as I believe it should be in schools, but because the American Revolution is such a central event in world history. I can't think of a more important event since the birth of Christ than the birth of the United States. Its founding is sort of smothered in the barnacles of sentimentality. It’s really important that you tell the whole story because of what's going on now. Of course, part of the reason why it's so inaccessible to us is that there's no photographs, there's no newsreels, and so what we get and inherit are paintings and people in powdered wigs and stockings and breaches. We don't understand the dynamics of women, and we don't understand the dynamics of free and enslaved Black people and, of course, Native people and all those who are involved in this unbelievably dramatic story. One of the more amazing feats is this trek across the Berkshires that Henry Knox does. Our task was finding reenactors, finding the sleds, finding the oxen, giving this impressionistic sense of what it must have been like—it gives all the reenactments a little bit of documentary newsreel flavor. If you combine that with paintings and drawings and maps and voices—not just a third person narrator but literally hundreds of voices read by the finest actors in our country and Britain and elsewhere—you can really make this story come alive and begin to remind people that it may seem distant to us in the past, but it is as topical as today's headlines.
Stanmeyer: How was the Knox Trail segment done?
Burns: I’ve worked with the same cinematographer for more than 50 years, Buddy Squires. He was wrangling the oxen, wrangling the sleds, getting a sense of what it was like, making sure there was snow on the ground and having people in period dress walk a little bit of the way so that we can combine it with the paintings of the men hauling the cannon at various stops. There's a famous stop at Westfield where nobody in Westfield had ver seen a cannon before. They were very interested in it. As we were showing one of the soldiers our cannon, they were sharing with us the virtues of their hard cider and whiskey. People are people, no matter what age they are. The Bible, the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes, says there's nothing new under the sun, meaning that human nature doesn't change. What you find once you remove the sentimental and the superficial are very, very complex people who seem a lot like us in their motivations, a lot like us in their inclinations and in their contradictions, and that's really surprising.
So you'll get to know all the more or less famous people, like Henry Knox, but you'll also know his wife, Lucy, who loses because she becomes a Patriot and the rest of her family remain loyal to the Crown. She loses her father, her mother, her brother, and her sisters who stay in Boston and disavow her, and she ends up married to this guy with an improbable and not guaranteed future. He was a officer in the Continental Army, she has a child and travels with him from Boston once British leave there, then to New York, where the next great battles will be, and onward. You begin to understand characters. In many ways, the Continental Army, at the end, is filled with teenagers and felons and ne’er-do-wells and second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance, recent immigrants—German as well as from the British Isles. It was a very motley crew and not the sort of sturdy land-owning militiamen that our folktales led us to believe. They’re there, too, but the reliable folks who stay for the duration are this ragtag group of people who are then going to want some of these highfalutin rights that people are talking about, as well. It's just an interesting dynamic. Democracy wasn't the object of the Revolution. It was just one of the consequences of it.
Stanmeyer: Did you come to the Berkshires for the filming?
Burns: Not me. I was shooting in another place at that time, but Buddy Squires and our co-producer, Megan Ruffe, supervised the shooting there in very difficult circumstances, I must say. But the footage is gorgeous, and we look forward to sharing it when we get to the Capital region.
Stanmeyer: What have you found that has been interesting in your travels in promoting the series?
Burns: No matter where we go, no matter who we talk to, people are flabbergasted and constantly say, “I had no idea.” We've been to West Point and received the shouts and huzzahs of 1,500 cadets. We've been in Boston, we've been in Lexington, we've been in Concord. We've been with students. We've been with historians. We've been to social studies teachers. They had a convention in November in Boston. We went to New York for the American Historical Association. We've been to Colonial Williamsburg and Yorktown and Jamestown and Richmond, coinciding with the moment that Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” 250 years later. We had 3,600 people at the Altria Theater in Richmond. We had 6,000 people on the governor's lawn at Williamsburg under a threat of rain and a drizzle who stayed to watch clips from the film. And so, I think there's a real pent-up exuberance for knowing the story. Our tour is essentially across the whole country. People in Honolulu and Fairbanks, Alaska, have as much interest in it as somebody in Boston or Albany or Charleston or Williamsburg. It may be more present for them, but the story of the American Revolution is our story, and we plan to bring it to as many markets as we can from now until November and then, actually, beyond our broadcast and streaming, we're going to be working on this and talking about it right up to July 4, 2026, and beyond. Because, of course, it won't be until 2033 that it will be the 250th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris and the final cessation and the last British troops leave New York and Charleston and Savannah.
Stanmeyer: What happens at these talks?
Burns: We show a few clips everywhere that are exactly the same. But of course, in Albany, we’re going to be emphasizing the Battle of Saratoga and, of course, Henry Knox's trip. Everywhere we go, not just the former 13 colonies, but anywhere we go in the country, we'll be sharing clips that I think will be of interest and add dimension and complications of familiar characters like Washington, and also introduce you to literally dozens and dozens of people that probably you've never heard of. They are read by people like Meryl Streep, Laura Linney, Claire Danes, Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Sir Kenneth Brown, Alan Damian Lewis, Liev Schreiber, Paul Giamatti, Josh Brolin, and many others.
Stanmeyer: I understand that you’ve been thinking about doing this film for a while.
Burns: We’ve been working on it for nine years and six months. It'll be nearly ten years when we broadcast. I made a film 35 years ago that was broadcast on the Civil War, and I sort of said, “No more wars.” Then I was irresistibly drawn to the fact that lots of kids thought we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War and committed to a nearly ten-year project on the history of the Second World War called The War, which came out in 2007. As we're finishing that in 2006, I said we're doing Vietnam next. Ten and a half years later, in the fall of 2017, we brought out our history of the Vietnam War. A year and a half before it was done, as we were locking the various episodes in December of 2015, I said we're doing the Revolution. I was looking for stories that are spectacular mirrors of who we are. I realized that as daunting as it is to tell a story without photographs, without newsreels of a war, it was nevertheless a challenge that I wanted to undertake. I'm really glad I did. I won't work on a more important film than this.
Stanmeyer: How important is this film to you?
Burns: It’s not so much to me; it’s the subject matter. For the first time in human history, people are going to be citizens and not subjects. That's a big, big deal, and we kind of don't appreciate it. We've allowed our own awareness, not just in general history, but of the makings of our country, to atrophy, and that's a dangerous thing that makes you susceptible to all the things the founders were worried that we would be susceptible to. There's a virtue—as the word that they use all the time—in a knowledge of what's going on because they were looking for a virtuous population that would be worthy of citizenship. They saw this as sort of the highest ideals of humankind, and they were right. This changed the course—as the Declaration suggested—of human events. I just wanted to understand it in a way that I never fully understood it before, to understand the tick tock of the battles, to understand the major characters, and to discover all the other interesting people who were part of it.
Stanmeyer: It’s pretty incredible that the American Revolution even succeeded.
Burns: The odds—if Las Vegas was around when it started—are zero. There's no way. And I can go on and on about why it happened, but a lot of it has to do with the idea that what started off as sort of arguments between British citizens over their rights—taxation and representation and whether they were going to go over and take over Indian land, or whatever it would be—suddenly got broken out into natural rights. This was the Enlightenment. So, it isn't just how come we're not getting the same rights as British citizens have in England, it’s these are natural rights, so that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Then you've let the genie out of the bottle, and you create a revolution that will be, for centuries to come, a model for the aspirations of humankind around the globe. That's a pretty big deal.
Stanmeyer: Obviously, you're drawn to history instead of fiction, and in a general sense, with all of what you've created. Why is that?
Burns: There's as much drama in what was and what is as anything the human imagination can dream of. In fact, you find stuff taking place in history—at least the American history that I've covered—that you would tell to a Hollywood producer, and they'd say, “Get out of here. No one would believe that.” People say, “What's the most surprising thing?” Every day for the last nine years and six months has been revelation after revelation after revelation. Sometimes, it's the twists and turns of a battle. Sometimes, it's the genius of a general to know not only the courage and the strength of one part of its troops, but the weakness and the cowardice of another, and to take advantage of that. Another time, there's a victory that Washington has that would have just been glorious, and it's just through some unbelievably impossible twist of fate, that the tide of battle turns and it shouldn’t have. This is Germantown in Pennsylvania. Instead, it's yet another defeat. And yet, he gets away, he doesn't surrender. He realizes that he doesn't have to actually win; he just can't lose. The British have to win, and it's getting more and more impossible for them to do that because they're 3,000 miles away from the home islands. The time it takes for information to get back and forth is impossibly long. Weather, which we know is coming for weeks in advance, sneaks up on people overnight, and the distances are gobsmacking. On their maps, they just look like it as though it's the difference between Surrey and Essex, and it’s not. The distance between Boston and Charleston is the distance between London and Venice. That's just a big deal.
Stanmeyer: Is your approach to this film different than other pieces that you've worked on?
Burns: I think only that we're missing the still photographs and the newsreel. But after years of collecting all of this newsreel footage—I mean, all of the reenactments and the live cinematography—it was like we stumbled on an archive of newsreel. The same with the paintings and the drawings and the maps. We just treated them like they were photographs, and we treated the reenactments as if they were impressionistic newsreels. We never went to a group of reenactors and said, “Okay, we need you to be this part of the battle of such-and-such.” When we started editing, we'd say, “Okay, do we have any guys shooting a volley, a musket, in the middle of fog?” And someone would say, “Yeah, I think we have it from the shoot we did four years ago.” And we go look, and there it is. And then all of a sudden, those muskets go off, and we happen to have a painting from the battle we're trying to bring alive in which you see a volley of muskets going off. We have hundreds of sound effect tracks. We treat it like a feature film. There'll be times, I guarantee, when you're watching, you’ll jump. That cannon will go off and you will say, “Whoa, that's a little bit too close for comfort.” And, of course, these first person voices make it real.
I've been very loath to use, in the past 50 years, any reenactments. A little bit in our Lewis and Clark films so that you knew that it wasn't just two guys, a dog, and an Indian girl, but it was a military operation, at some points up to four dozen people and very complicated, using keelboats initially and then portaging canoes. You had to have, maybe out of the four hours, two or three minutes of the reenactment so you know what they looked like, so that you could show what they saw. But here, we have lots of it. It’s all impressionistic. You're not reading faces. You're not wondering what that guy's real job is. You’re there. You’re handing it off to a map, or to a painting, or to a first person voice. Sometimes it's just a tabletop with a candle on it and a map and a set of spectacles, and it's George Washington's camp. We have his tent, and we filmed it at night, and we filmed it at day, and we filmed inside of it, and we filmed it with candles. You can just imagine. The only thing that's not there is him.
Stanmeyer: I understand that you attended Hampshire College in Amherst?
Burns: Indeed I did. You wouldn't be talking to me if I hadn't gone to Hampshire College. I don't recognize the person who went in and the person who came out. They just transformed me in every way possible. I was taught by still photographers, and so I've always had a healthy respect and use of the still photograph. I’ve added the cinematic dimension to it, but it's still rooted heavily in the power of an individual image to convey complex information without lots of explaining.
Stanmeyer: The American Revolution opened the door to advance civil liberties and human rights. Have we lost sight of that?
Burns: In some ways, we’ve lost sight of it. But in other ways, we haven't. We're very much part of it. It's too difficult with a country as big and as complicated as ours to make a blanket statement. We don't teach enough history. People are not steeped in it. We've said that it doesn't have value. Civics and humanities are being removed from places. All to our peril, we can feel the ways in which the connection to that Revolutionary spirit—the idea that we would be citizens and not subjects—has waned. At the same time, there's a ferocity of those who wish to keep it, who wish to understand it, who wish to celebrate it. And I think everybody has a measure, whether they know it or not, of pride in the United States. As one of the historians says, you look at these third world countries that are rebelling and overthrowing. We forget that we were the original anti-colonials. We invented that. We started that. At that time, we were rebelling against the best form of government on Earth. The constitutional monarchy of Britain at the second half of the 18th century was the best form of government. We just happened to have an even better idea.
For more information on
The American Revolution, check out pbs.org. To get tickets to the screening and talkback event at the Palace Theatre in Albany on Wednesday, September 10, go to