A (4:17)

I think the American Revolution is the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ, and it just changed it. Everybody before that moment is a subject, and a few people clinging to the eastern seaboard of the United States are citizens. A new thing, brand new thing in the world. That's a big deal.

B (4:36)

Today I talk with Ken Burns and his producing partner, Sarah Botstein about the making of their new PBS documentary, the American Revolution. How did they go about revisiting a story that had been told so many times it almost feels like a myth? And how does that myth fit into our world today? All right, Sarah Botstein and Ken Burns, welcome to History this week.

A (5:06)

Thanks for having us.

C (5:07)

Happy to be here.

B (5:09)

So you have noted in the past, Ken, that you and your team have not approached American history in chronological order. You have already covered the Civil War and the Vietnam War. I'm curious, why was it that you decided nearly a decade ago that it was time to turn to the American Revolution?

A (5:26)

Well, we tell our stories chronologically, but we choose them in the most elemental way. You know, what hits your heart, what hits your gut, and make decisions based on that. And we were in the middle of finishing In December of 2015, our series, Sarah and I, on the history of the Vietnam War. And I said, I just looked up with all conviction and said, we're doing revolution next.

B (5:54)

What was that conviction? Where did it come from?

A (5:56)

Well, I think it's got a built in anxiety because there are no photographs and there's no newsreel anxiety producing for a filmmaker. Yeah, I mean, I've dealt with a lot of stuff in the 18th century. In fact, our previous film was on Leonardo da Vinci, and that was two centuries before that, in the 16th century. But there's something huge and mammoth about the American Revolution, and it's our story. And the problem is that the absence of photographs, obviously, and newsreel make our relationship to it a little dissonance. We don't want to touch the bloodiness, the hand to hand guerrilla fighting, civilians, killing civilians. Aspect of our revolution. In part, I assume maybe that we're afraid that those big ideas in Philadelphia will be diminished. And they're not. They're only made more impressive by telling a much more accurate story. And they're those people in buckles and hose and breeches and waistcoats and powdered wigs art any longer unfamiliar people to us. They are real and very much like us, filled with the same quantities of greed and generosity, venality and virtue that we find among our own populace and within individuals. That's the thing. It's not just white hat, black hat. These are struggles within individuals. And it isn't just the famous names. It's also a bottom up story that involves Native Americans and Black Americans enslaved and free and Spanish and French and Ger. And women is left out almost entirely from the revolution. This film is populated with women that are at the center of this story. Children as young as. There's a 10 year old girl from Yorktown that we follow throughout the war. There's Abigail Adams, who may be amidst a crowd of really great writers, maybe the best writer of them all. There's a woman probably you haven't heard of, Mercy Otis Warren, who is a philosopher and historian of the revolution, who is a friend of Abigail's, but very much in the thick of the discussions about this that somehow get winnowed out of our standard histories of this period. And so we try to restore them. And it really helps if you've got Meryl Streep reading Mercy Otis Warren and you've got Claire Danes reading Abigail Adams to help them seem less inaccessible.

B (8:17)

Yeah, it goes a long way getting over, I mean, as you say, the sort of buckled shoes and stockings problem. It really is a problem. We feel quite distant from those people.

A (8:25)

There's a wonderful quote when John Adams, Abigail's husband, arrives in Philadelphia for the first time and describing how Philadelphia's laid out. It is so cute and wonderful and anybody who's ever been anywhere near Philadelphia knows exactly what he's talking about. And yet here's a guy from the 18th century who's like, you know, some people don't like it. I do. And there's a kind of sense that there are real people involved in a story that we tend to turn into these, you know, statues, you know, out collecting pigeon, you know, what. And not real human beings.

B (9:00)

Sarah, let me ask you a bit about that because it's so true that the revolution, it's so mythologized, it's really hard to believe it really happened. It's really hard to believe that it was contingent, that it could have gone a different way. I'm curious, Sarah, were there parts of it that you encountered that you felt. This is a part of it that I've never heard of, where you really felt that you were turning over new stones.

C (9:24)

It's a great question. Goes to the heart of, I think, why telling history before photographs and newsreels and contemporaneous reports and living witnesses is hard. And to then go back to our origin story that is so wrapped in mythology and is kind of bloodless, and it's this complicated thing of big ideas, when I don't think we even understand sort of culturally, the difference between the Declaration and the Constitution, how long it took to go from one to the other. And then endlessly complicated. Nearly decade long, very bloody war fighting 18th century war is really, really, really, really gory and awful and unmechanized and so far away. And then you want to, I think, for us, find stories that our audience 250 years later can latch onto, which is a combination, as Ken was just talking about getting to know the founders, I think Hamilton has been successful in some ways because it presents those founders as young, hip, energetic people you really want to get to know.

B (10:32)

Right. Hamilton, the musical, it takes a certain approach of putting these people in a totally different context, so you see them afresh.

C (10:38)

And one thing that it does is it reminds you that they were really young. Jefferson is in his early 30s when he writes the Declaration. Ben Franklin is an old, stodgy guy. He's in his 70s. Everyone's somehow like 30 to 45. George Washington is 43 when he takes. I mean, these are young people trying to figure stuff out. They weren't famous and the story wasn't told. And we use the word complicated all the time. It was complicated, but it was really surprising. It is so unlikely that we were going to win the war, and it was unlikely we're going to win the war for all kinds of reasons I don't remember being taught.

B (11:23)

Ken, I want to pick up on something Sarah was just saying about the idea that the war might have been lost. We're actually going to be opening our episode with Washington's retreat from Manhattan. And that's a moment when it really feels like the Americans are on the brink of defeat. And it is so hard to remember that it was not a preordained outcome. What were some other moments where it really felt like the Americans were gonna lose?

A (11:45)

That's the revolution in a nutshell. So if you're at Lexington Green On April 19, 1775, more than 250 years ago, the chances of success are zero, right? And it ebbs and falls. And I think the word that you used, Sally, earlier, about contingency, this is what you have to do, is put people in good history is watching because you think it might not turn out the way you it does. So obviously, the terrible mistake, strategic, tactical mistake that Washington makes at Long island, leaving his left flank exposed, which causes the rolling up of his army. And if it isn't for the sort of hesitancy of General Howe and for a fortuitous rain and then a really fortuitous fog, maybe the whole thing is over again. And then even after we've won a major battle, Washington not involved. He sent his best guys, Daniel Morgan, and one of his best general generals, Benedict Arnold, to Saratoga, and they win. And they take a surrender of a British army, and the French say, yes, we're in wholeheartedly. Even then, it doesn't seem, because there's a whole other series of battles and Charleston is lost. And so it's really not until Cornwallis chooses Yorktown. It's not really until the French fleet finally arrives at the right place at the right time and engages. Doesn't block the entrance of Chesapeake, but Gowels engages the British army. That permits the big guns from the French fleet that have been in Newport to slip by and then up the James river so they can be, you know, loaded at Williamsburg and then carried over for the siege of Yorktown. That you go, whoa. Wow. All of this stuff, I mean, it just, it's. It's, you know, Yogi Berra said, it ain't over till it's over. You can be losing 10 to nothing in the bottom of the ninth inning if you're the home team with two outs and two strikes, and you can still win.

B (13:42)

One thing that struck me, watching excerpts from your film is that it really, really was a war of ideals. What were those ideals, and why was that so important?

A (13:50)

Well, the ideals are expressed. You know, Jefferson says all experience has shown that mankind are disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. Meaning we choose this state of being under an authoritarian rule for all of human history. And we're actually inventing this new thing. We don't really know what it's about, but it's gonna require virtue. It's gonna requ. Require lifelong education. That's pursuit of happiness. It's going to require all this stuff that we're not even sure that anybody has the ability to do it. And we don't mean it for everybody. We mean it for us elite. You know, the sort of Republican ideal of aristocracy, of talent, of landowners, white, male. And all of a sudden, you've opened the doors. And even for, as Maggie Blackhawk, a scholar, says in our film, even for people at the margins, the Declaration is deeply significant because no one's ever said this. And all in the buildup, the run up to the war, people are talking about liberty, they're talking about freedom and the opposite of being slavery. And the people who are tending them and serving them, many of them enslaved people, are going, there's a choice that I can also have. And so despite the limited scope and we always focus on how limited it was and what it means, this is big ideas being let out. It's the opposite of Pandora's box. It's not ills being released. It's great ideas into a world that has been suffering from the miasma of not big ideas. And the big ideas is that human beings can govern themselves. They do not need to be under an authoritarian rule. And that eventually, as vague as the. Thank God, as vague as the language is, it's going to mean not just men. And as Jefferson meant white men of property free, of debt free, it's going to mean everybody. And that cat is out of the bag, and everybody knows it. At the time, the great historian Bernard Bailyn, who passed away before we finished our film, says on camera, you know, before the revolution, slavery was not talked about. There were a few people, he said, who made an argument about how evil it was, and they made. But nobody talked about it. Once the revolution started, that's all anyone talked about.

B (16:04)

When we returned, we dive into the process, how Sarah and Ken decide what to keep, what to lose, and how to tell the story.

D (16:22)

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B (18:49)

Sarah, I'm gonna put it to you. You mentioned the fact that Native people are an important part of this story and it's a striking thing. At the beginning of your film, you turn to the Iroquois Confederacy and sort of make the comparison. Point out the ways that sort of, you know, there was a democratic society on this land before. That's so interesting to me. Why? Why did you do that? Tell me. Tell me about that choice.

C (19:16)

Look, I think the Native American story is central to the American Revolution. That is another piece of this war that I don't think is as infused into the history that we're taught as it should be. And the Native populations, north to south, they split themselves during the war, whether they were going to side with the British or with the Patriots because of their history in the Seven Years War and that prologue I think works for a number of reasons. One is it talks about land. Land is important to this war, to the American Revolution, to the prize for North America, which everyone on the global stage was thinking about. Right. Land. It's about democracy. Who is representing you? How do you solve problems? How does your government work? How does your community work? Who is in charge in your community? And how were the founders in America thinking about those things and understanding them?

A (20:10)

That's exactly it. We had a scene about the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, a little bit later in episode one. And I said, we got to move this to the beginning. If Franklin looks at this and goes, wow, we could do this too. That is to say the five and then six nations that make up the Haudenosaunee, that is to say the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida and Mohawk. They have for centuries had a sort of democracy, a union of their separate nations that allowed a degree of autonomy within those nations, recognized borders, recognized independency and autonomy, but also had a kind of common defense against enemies. Franklin says, this is a great idea, right? And he, you know, he convenes in Albany, New York, seven of the 13 colonies and they pass Albany plan of union. He does a picture of a snake cut into pieces representing the various states and says, join or die. It's 20 years before the Revolution. Everybody goes back to their individual states to try to sell it and nobody wants it. Not a single state wants to give up an ounce of autonomy. So it dies. But join or die becomes the war cry, as we say in the introduction, the prologue in the greatest revolution in history, the most consequential revolution in history. So it seemed important to do that. So if you go into a school and you say, why do the revolution. Taxes and representation. Very, very true, really important. But the number one thing, as Sarah is saying, is land. The prize of North America is great, except the North America is not there for the taking. It is 300 different nations, right? And so you've got people that have already been absorbe in the couple hundred years that we've been there and are living among and intermarried with and coexisting and not coexisting. And then on the western borders you have lots of different native nations, as different and as important as say Virginia or France. And we tend to say them, but the Shawnee or the Cherokee or members of the Iroquois, you know, say the Mohawk, they're as important a figure on the world global economy stage as Virginia is.

B (22:31)

I Want to turn and ask you a bit more about the filmmaking process. We've talked about how it takes a decade. We've already touched on some of the challenges with this war in particular. Ken, I'm curious. This is clearly a long process. The finished product is a long documentary. What are the first steps? When you first start approaching a new topic, what do you do?

A (22:53)

It's really important to know that most processes begin with a set research period, three weeks, three months, whatever it is, followed by a set writing period, three weeks, three months, out of which is produced a script that looks like it's inscribed tablet from Mount Sinai. And then it is shot and then edited. We never stop researching and we never stop writing. By the time we're done, we're on draft 15 or 20. And a draft changes because you've marked it up and crossed it out so many times that you actually need a new draft in order to see and read the changes that you made before. And it is a process that goes over and over. It requires extraordinary patience and trusting to that process. You know, we're reading, we're talking to scholars, we're interviewing them, we're filming, we're collecting archives, we're talking to reenactment groups. We're saying, yeah, we don't want you to reenact the Battle of Long island or the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse, but we want to film you and then use it as grist for our mill so that it's more impressionistic. What are the paintings? Can we film this extraordinary landscape? For many remain to Georgia, what's happening there? Even Canada, because there's a failed invasion of Canada hoping to make it not the 51st, but the 14th state. There's just so much you have to collect. So it'd be understandable to think that this is an additive process, but it's actually subtractive. We collect. Like I'm talking to you from New Hampshire. You make maple syrup here. It takes 40 gallons of SAP to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. And we have a shooting ratio of at least 40 to 1, maybe 50, maybe 60 to 1. And so what you're doing is if you boil it really easily and fast, you get rock candy. And that's like quick and dirty production. If you evaporate it, which is keeping the temperature just below boiling, then you get the elixir. And so Sarah and I and our colleagues have worked for years, nearly a decade, to try to distill all of this stuff. Stories that are cutting room floor is filled with unbelievable stories that you'd look at and go, whoa, what's wrong with you? Why isn't that in there? And they just didn't fit. And when we're in the last days of editing, it's basically me saying, open it up two frames, that's a twelfth of a second. Close it up two frames, that's A twelfth of a second. And it makes a difference across 12 hours, six episodes. And so the process is really long. It's exquisitely torturous. And also, there's nothing I know better than the love of my family than making a film better in a day. And you can walk in the next morning and go, what idiot thought that meaning me? And then start all over again. But somehow to figure something out like, Sarah, we had this situation. We'd already locked and we had had for the year. The introduction, the prologue and the introduction were running just the way it was. And I was on the Upper east side of Manhattan at an appointment. Sarah was down in Lower Manhattan. And I called her and I said, I'm not happy. And she goes, with the introduction. I go, right. And within, like, maybe 20 minutes, we had blown both the prologue and the.

C (26:18)

Introduction up, which is like, editor really almost killed us. But it's okay. She recovered.

A (26:25)

She recovered and then added extraordinary things to it. But we moved a quote that was in the middle of the introduction to before the prologue. We kept the prologue exactly as it. But we had to protect it now because we had something in front of it.

B (26:37)

What problem were you solving, Ken? What was it that made you sit up and say, we have to change this?

A (26:41)

There was a didacticism in a couple of paragraphs, which we lost entirely. Like, we'll get there. We don't have to put everything into the introduction as if it's like, you know, those old 19th century novels wherein Sally interviews Ken and Sarah, wherein Sarah discovers that, you know, Ken is talking too much. Right. Ken finally realizes it's time to shut up. I mean, we just were doing a little bit too much of that. And there was.

B (27:08)

You were like, don't tell people what to think. I just, like, let it unfold.

C (27:11)

That's a real role. We definitely follow that whenever.

A (27:14)

We never want to tell people what to think. But we just had loaded it with just a little bit too. You know, our cart was too full and that it was okay to just have a more emotional thing. We even imported a quote, the back half of a quote that we had just recorded and put at the very end of the film. The next little last moment of the film. Record Abigail Adams quote to follow, not immediately, but to follow. Her husband John, talking about, we're in the middle of a revolution. It's the biggest thing ever. And the lives of millions unborn are at stake, which is exactly right. And she's saying, you don't want to get into this overthrow of empire business too lightly because it's about blood, it's about sacrifice. It's really a bad business. And the American Revolution, as Sarah was saying, it's a bad business. A lot of killing is done with a bayonet, which is.

C (28:05)

Because.

A (28:05)

Let's not even go there, right? It's really, really, really bad. And so all of a sudden, we had an energized and revitalized prologue. And it was one of the more glorious moments of this production.

B (28:22)

We talked earlier in the conversation about the problem of not having archival footage, not having photographs. Is there a moment where you feel that you all solved that problem particularly well? Is there anything in the film that you're really proud of in terms of bringing this alive with the visual sources that you had?

C (28:44)

We started, I mean, Buddy Squires, who's been working with Ken for literally almost 50 years.

A (28:50)

51 years.

C (28:51)

51 years, right.

B (28:53)

Wow.

C (28:53)

We really wrestled with, okay, are we going to shoot. We don't want to see people's faces. We don't want it to be hyper realistic. We want it to be somewhat impressionistic, and we don't want it to be going from A to B in a script. We don't have the script with us whenever we're shooting. It's kind of an imagination. Let's see what would will work. And so we started shooting through old glass and through smoke. And we would always have sometimes actually two drones along with Buddy on sticks or Buddy dressed like one of the reenactors in the line with them so that you could just. We wanted to be moving and feeling and have it be beautiful, but not too literal.

A (29:33)

We had a total eclipse last year. Remember that? We got a beautiful scene on a total eclipse.

C (29:39)

Yeah.

B (29:39)

You filmed that actual eclipse. It's amazing. We did, yeah.

C (29:42)

That was an insane shoot because you're dealing with time, space, and weather in a. A really fun way to make a movie.

A (29:52)

So I take a walk every morning with my dog Chester, three miles. And it's in an area that's a little unchanged from the 18th century. So I took along my phone and maybe 40 images, maybe 35 images in the final film or off my phone. And looks like the period. I mean, we're using much more professional Equipment. But it's. It was exciting and exhilarating because I go at dawn and it's atmospherics that are beautiful and they appear throughout the film. And I think also for me, you know, we're not. We don't have Steven Spielberg's budgets, but there's some people with their hands over a fire and it's cold and you know it's cold and you feel it's cold. Or you see just the shimmering heat at the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse, where men died of heat exhaustion. And then when the battle's over and the British have protected their supply wagon so they left. And even though it's a draw because they've left, we can claim it as a victory. And we do. The next thing you see are women and children's bare feet, because you think of all of this as an utterly male, masculine exercise war. But women are accompanying this army, their children around there. And the first job after the battle is to go there and tend to the dead and tend to the wounded and to, you know, and there are these little feet, women and children over the battlefield, and it's stunning.

B (31:20)

Ken, as you mentioned, you've been doing this for a long time. You've been making these documentaries for over 40 years. And, you know, you have a specific style, of course, that you've become quite known for, that you've retained over that time. At the same time, I'm curious, because media has changed a lot over that time. People's attention spans have shortened. Are there ways that you feel like your style has evolved that are important to you? And what are the things that you feel it's important to be consistent about, to sort of never let go of?

A (31:52)

So let's define a term. Style might be the authentic application of technique. You okay with that?

B (31:59)

Sure.

A (31:59)

Lots of ways to skin the cat. Lots of ways to tell the story. So we haven't really changed. It's just each thing is an adaptation to the exigencies of that particular project. No photographs, no newsreels. You know, in Vietnam And World War II, we could say no, no experts, just people who were there. That's it. We're waiting for somebody to come back. That's it. You know, but you have to have experts here because there's no living witnesses. And while there may be a handful of first person voices in World War II and even fewer in Vietnam, there's. This whole film is first person voices. Hundreds of them, hundreds of them, personifying not just George Washington, but, you know, Betsy Ambler, 10 years old in 1775 from Yorktown. When the war begins and all of a sudden you're bringing in the new archives, you discover something new, you find a new quote, you record that, you bring Claire Danes back in to do that last Abigail Adams quote. You know, you get somebody to read this, somebody says, I go, I don't like that painting of. I don't think that's a good Benedict Arnold. And then all of a sudden, after months and years of we find a better Benedict Arnold, right? And so he's a really important character. He's not Benedict Arnold until our last episode. By episode two, he's like one of the best generals. And so we, there's this constant, constant working on it that we just love to get in there and we're dedicated to making it better. No egos. The lowest intern has the right to say something and, and contribute just as the most senior producer does.

B (33:38)

When we come back, what the American Revolution means now in the same country, 250 years later.

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Payment $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first 3 months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com Sarah I mean this is A historical documentary, of course, from sort of a craft perspective as you're putting things together. How, if at all, are you thinking about the present as you're making decisions about how to frame this information and what to put in?

C (35:40)

So people have a hard time believing this, but we really don't really. We really do not. I mean, I shut the noise of the current moment out entirely when starting a project. You know, every film we make, I think, I think the thing that keeps us up at night is just, do we get the story right and does the film stand the test of time? And if it does that, then we're. Then we're doing a good job. But what about now? Okay. You're going to find it's going to feel different two years from now.

A (36:07)

I'm telling you, we'd rather, we'd rather expend a good thing than think that, oh, you put this in because of.

C (36:15)

Today there's a map of smallpox. If we hadn't had Covid. Every kid's going to know what a map like that. And think about inoculation and vaccines. Okay. But again, like, I think when it feels too much like that, we feel like, oh, something's not right.

A (36:29)

Yeah.

C (36:29)

And we.

A (36:30)

And we take it out.

B (36:31)

And yet the film does come out at a particular time. It happens to be coming out in the year 2025, and it's coming out in a really divided time. Like, it's hard to imagine the country coming together for something as collaborative and huge as the Continental Congress. How do you think this story speaks to our moment?

A (36:52)

Well, we've always been divided. That's what one of the aspects of the story will remind people. And in that alone, believe it or not, is a. What's the right word? It's something refreshing, Sally, to know that we have been this place before. I mean, the Civil War killed 700,000 people of our own, and Vietnam, which Sarah and I worked on for years and years, we've been divided. And so I think this possibilities of a good story sort of not disarming that division, but reminding us actually how close we are in the midst of that division, that many things that people say are dividing points. Part of it is the Internet, and I'm not sure that attention spans are done. People binge. My kids binge. They watch something for 28 hours. I've never made a 28 hour film. You know, they'll just binge. So I just think people like cats playing with balls of yarn in two minutes, and that's great. And people also know that all meaning accrues in duration. So we've got a complicated story. And then I think when we started it, you know, Barack Obama had, you know, 13 months to go in his presidency. Now we're in a completely different place and we feel a kind of existential threat. And maybe going back to an origin story permits you to reacquire the things that distinguished us in this most important moment in world history. That is to say, the creation of the United States of America. Does it have bad stuff? Is it violent? Yes, in the extreme to all of those stuff. But it has the very best ideas that human beings have come up with. And that the story of not just the United States, but of the world has been the continual expansion of that. You know, the novelist Richard Power says the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. We're not into prescribing what that point of view is. We're just saying, look at this complicated story. It's possible now to disarm all of this binary red state, blue state. I'm right, you're wrong. None of that binariness exists in nature or in human nature.

D (39:09)

There's a.

A (39:10)

There's a. There's a momentary humility that we all need to have in the midst of our certainty. Right now, everybody's certain. My way or the highway. And what this tells you is it's so much more interesting and so much more complicated. And it's really beautiful too. It's ugly, it's brutal, it's horribly gory, but it's also really beautiful.

B (39:37)

Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

A (39:39)

Sally, really great questions. Really great questions.

B (39:42)

No thanks. The American Revolution is a 6 part 12 hour documentary now premiering on PBS. The series is directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt. It's also narrated by a guest from one of our recent episodes, Peter Coyote. Check it out. History this Week is a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel. To stay updated on all things History this week, sign up@historythisweekpodcast.com and if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email@historythisweekistory.com this episode was produced and sound designed by Ben Dickstein and also produced by me, Sally Helm for Back Pockets Studios. Our executive producer is Ben Dickstein from the History Channel. Our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler. Don't forget to follow, rate and review History this week, wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week.