The story of the American Revolution isn’t just one of political revolution or tax avoidance. It’s also one of distance, of the challenges of getting on foot or horseback across the 13 colonies, and how close and how far they were from Europe. Living in Paris, Benjamin Franklin didn’t find out that Philadelphia had fallen until well after the fact, while George Washington was fighting unaware that the French had signed a treaty and were sending troops. British supply ships took so long to reach the Colonies that one soldier dispatched an angry missive home: “Have ye forgotten us over here?”
Those are all details in The American Revolution, the latest series from multi-Emmy-winning documentarian Ken Burns. He is on his own long sojourn, the latest stage of which was a pothole-plagued overnight bus ride to Houston. The night before, June 4, he’d been in Austin for a panel discussion at the LBJ Presidential Library. Both were part of a seven-month, 25-city promotional tour for the upcoming six-part, 12-hour series from Burns and co-director Sarah Botstein, debuting on PBS on Nov. 16. He observed in Houston, “On these tours I don’t get my steps in, but I got my 10,000 bumps in today.”
In many ways, The American Revolution seems like the obvious counterpart to his international breakout success, The Civil War. It’s been 35 years since the series that catapulted him to the position of America’s leading long-form television documentarian. So, what took him so long to take on what he has dubbed “the most consequential revolution in history”?
“That’s a pretty good question,” he replied. Truth is, he told the Chronicle, that he’d been committed to the project “since the ink dried” on his 10-part 2017 history of the Vietnam War, and he knew that it was going to be “an enormous challenge. The other wars that we’ve done, Vietnam and the Second World War and the Civil War, benefited from huge archives of photographs and, later in the 20th century, newsreels. This, of course, has none.” However, it wasn’t just about the lack of primary sources to make interesting visuals. The images they do have are portraits of “guys signing documents in Philadelphia and people in breeches and tri-corner hats,” leading to a vision of the Revolution that is “submerged in nostalgia.” These heroic images leave out the majority of the population and their stories, “how to make it not just a Great Men, capital-G, capital-M, but a bottom-up story that engages the heroic lives of literally, in our film, hundreds of people – but of course it would be tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people.”
It’s not just about adding in more events, but recontextualizing them to be about people and their lives. In studying the conflict, Botstein said, “You want the audience to be thinking all the time about the people fighting the war, the person organizing how the war is fought, and the people in the town where the battle happened.”
That’s why, as is Burns’ signature style, the show brings in an immense number of voices: not just the Founding Fathers and the British generals, but troops and civilians on both sides, diplomats and mercenaries, colonists and Native Americans, zealots and disinterested parties, of other British colonies untouched by the Revolution, and of Europeans influenced by or fearful of these new political philosophies traveling East across the Atlantic. Burns said, “That’s one of the things that we’ve always done is try to create a circumstance, not just a film, but the circumstance of making a film that honors all these diverse perspectives.”
“This experiment is ongoing, it is always threatened.” – Ken Burns
Those individuals are given literal voice by another part of Burns’ signature style: recitations of “journals and the letters and the diaries and the newspaper reports, read by some of the greatest actors of our time,” Burns said. That overpacked roster bringing the voices of the past to life included household names and Oscar and Tony winners and nominees including Kenneth Branagh, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Josh Brolin, Ethan and Maya Hawke, Samuel L. Jackson, Edward Norton, David Oyelowo, and dozens more, with the main narration provided by regular Burns collaborator Peter Coyote. Burns audibly beams over the phone. “There’s no Hollywood film that has the cast we have making this story come alive.”
However, the diversity of voices comes from a diversity of source material, and that’s another defining element of Burns’ work.
Historically (pun intended), the academic study of past events has tended to be extremely siloed, with little communication between fields. In Europe, the postwar era saw a growth in what is referred to as interdisciplinary studies, as once-Balkanized departments look at documentation, art, literature, and archaeology as pieces of the same puzzle. “In New York,” Burns said, “That doesn’t happen.” In contrast to much of the American academy, Burns described his films as “very much about bringing the scholars together.”
Yet taking that interdisciplinary approach also shows the gaps in the scholarship. Jane Kamensky, president and CEO of Monticello/The Thomas Jefferson Foundation and a historical adviser to the series, noted that “military history has largely left the academy in most Western countries, and in the United States.”
Burns concurred, adding that this is not a new problem. “When I began my Civil War series, 41 years ago, when I asked stories about battles I was directed by scholars to go see old professor so-and-so who had retired because it was the only person who cared about what happened at the Battle of Gettysburg. So I think what we’ve done is try to restore the importance of these things to the integrated story.”
Yet that question of timing undoubtedly hangs over the show. With the Trump administration deploying armed forces into the streets of U.S. cities, court rulings flouted, and the White House promulgating a theory of an imperial presidency, there are many concerned that the victories of the Revolution are being undone, as are many gains made since then. For example, the ongoing attacks on PBS, an outlet that has provided Burns with his main platform since his debut feature, 1981’s Brooklyn Bridge. Indeed, he described the existence of public media as “the main reason we get to do the kind of deep dives that we do.”
Yet while Burns hopes to show how the past has shaped our modern world, he argues that his latest work has not been affected by the current political situation. If he had made this series earlier, the only real difference would have been that the production would not have benefited from more recent research. “We don’t pay attention to what Mark Twain calls the ‘rhymes of history,” he said. Moreover, as the revolutionaries’ French allies might have said, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Burns observed, “This experiment is ongoing, it is always threatened.” He closed, as the series does, with the words of Founding Father Benjamin Rush: “The American War is over but the American Revolution is still going on.”
Ken Burns’ The American Revolution debuts on PBS Nov. 16. A tie-in book, The American Revolution: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, will be published Nov. 11 by Penguin Random House.
This article appears in June 13 • 2025.
