Episode 998: America 250 – The American Revolution with Ken Burns

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Newt’s World, Episode 998: “America 250 – The American Revolution with Ken Burns”

Date: June 27, 2026 | Host: Newt Gingrich | Guest: Ken Burns

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Main Theme

This episode marks the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution by exploring its history and contemporary relevance with acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. Together with host and historian Newt Gingrich, Burns delves into his latest PBS documentary series The American Revolution—discussing the emotional depth of history, the Revolution’s complexity, the enduring power of its ideals (and contradictions), and why understanding this founding event still matters today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ken Burns’ Approach to History: “Emotional Archeology”

• Burns discusses his lifelong commitment to a form of storytelling that reveals the emotional truths behind historical events, which he terms “emotional archeology.”
  • Quote: “I wasn't interested in the dry dates and facts and events of the past, but I was interested in an emotional archeology... touching the things that our founders thought could be released if you had a democratic society…” (Ken Burns, 13:07)
• He explains that nostalgia or sentimentality are “enemies of history”—what matters is grappling honestly with the complexities.

2. The Making of “The American Revolution”

• The series took nearly 10 years to create (14:21), using 250 voices and 61 actors (including George Washington and Meryl Streep as Mercy Otis Warren) to tell the stories of both leaders and ordinary individuals.
• Explores George Washington’s essential, flawed, and humble character—and why without him, “there’s no country.”
  • Quote: “We don't have a country without George Washington... Those strengths of being able to pick subordinate talent, unafraid of whether they're better than him. He shows humility... He risks his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor all the time.” (Ken Burns, 15:43)
• Highlights how war allegiances shifted frequently and how the struggle was far from a united effort.

3. Revisiting the Divisions of the Revolution

• Both Burns and Gingrich note the Revolution was a deeply divided civil war—perhaps more divided than the United States is today.
  • Quote: “We were way more divided during our revolution. Way more divided during the Civil War... This is not just a revolution. It’s a bloody civil war... we're fighting our own neighbors.” (Ken Burns, 18:55)
• Burns stresses the war’s multi-layered, global stakes involving land, empire, and diverse populations across the continent.

4. The Enduring Power (and Limitations) of Revolutionary Ideals

• They discuss how the Declaration of Independence marked a break from the divine right of kings—becoming a universal call for rights that rippled far beyond America’s borders.
• Even though “all men are created equal” had limitations (referring originally to white property-owning men), its logic would eventually be claimed by women, African Americans, and others.
  • Quote: “Once you articulate these natural rights as the Declaration does so poetically and so beautifully... you’re never going to close that door that’s been open no matter what it is.” (Ken Burns, 25:37)
• Stories like that of James Forten, an African American patriot, illustrate how people at the margins heard and responded to the call for liberty. (Ken Burns, 24:22)

5. The Centrality of Lincoln

• Both agree Abraham Lincoln re-centers the nation around the ideals of the Declaration, notably in the Gettysburg Address, which Burns calls “the Declaration 2.0.”
  • Quote: “It’s not about capital letters. It’s about being of, by, and for... We the people, e pluribus unum. This is our message to the world.” (Ken Burns, 33:16)
• Lincoln’s complexity and ability to hold moral opposites in tension is praised: “He understood that it was both things and that he could tolerate the contradictions and the undertow in us.” (Ken Burns, 33:25)
• Lincoln’s rhetoric—rooted in the King James Bible—resonated broadly.

6. Thomas Paine, The Crisis, and Sustaining Commitment

• The declaration came more than a year after armed conflict began; Common Sense (by Paine) galvanized colonists, while The Crisis was essential to rekindling morale during dark times.
  • Quote: “These are the times that try men’s souls—the summer patriot and the sunshine soldier... and they're talking about us. They're thinking somewhere along the line they're going to be having a 250th anniversary and we got to deliver them something.” (Ken Burns, 37:23)

7. Choosing and Making Historical Films

• Burns describes following his curiosity—currently working on topics such as Reconstruction, the CIA, and the Great Society.
  • “If I were given a thousand years, I wouldn’t run out of topics in American history.” (Ken Burns, 42:17)
• His production philosophy: keep teams small, never stop researching or writing, and keep the process “corrigible”—open to new evidence until the end.
  • “If we find new information, the facts always have to beat the art.” (Ken Burns, 45:46)
• He values complexity (“it’s complicated” is in neon on his editing room wall).

8. Reflections on Fame, Collaboration, and Legacy

• Gingrich and Burns reflect humorously on creative success, with Burns noting even a lengthy list of accolades is ultimately less important than how one lives and treats others.
  • “At the end of the day, the whole list of credits and Emmys and Grammys and awards really don't matter. It’s just who you are today and how you meet the world.” (Ken Burns, 48:29)
• Burns credits his access to talented collaborators (like Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep), noting the “momentum” that builds with years of hard work.

9. The Meaning of July 4th and “E Pluribus Unum”

• Burns’s own family’s July 4th tradition is to recite the Declaration before eating—a habit meant to instill the ongoing pursuit of the nation’s ideals.
• As the film is released to the public, Burns reflects:
  • “There’s only us, there’s no them... whenever somebody’s creating a them, it’s just a shortcut. It doesn’t work. Our religious faith teaches this, our political faith teaches that... Americans will never err when they understand there’s only us, the US, and know them anywhere.” (Ken Burns, 52:30)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Ken Burns on George Washington:
  “He knows how to inspire men in the dead of night to fight. He risks his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor all the time... At the height of his military power, he gives it up. And at the height of his political power, he gives it up too.” (15:43)
• Burns on the Revolution’s Division:
  “This is a bloody civil war, and we are fighting... our own brothers and sisters.” (19:44)
• Burns on the Declaration’s Legacy and Inclusiveness:
  “So democracy is not the intention of it, it’s the unintended consequence, in a beautiful way...” (23:43)
• Story of James Forten:
  “He listens [to the Declaration]...doesn’t for a second believe it doesn’t apply to him.” (24:34)
• On Lincoln:
  “It’s 2.0. The Gettysburg Address is the Declaration 2.0, saying, look, we really do mean it.” (35:45)
• On history’s complexity:
  “I have a big sign in my editing room in lowercase neon that says, it's complicated.” (45:46)
• On a lifetime of work:
  “The Shakers...had a saying: do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as you would if you knew you would die tomorrow.” (51:22)
• On “us” vs. “them”:
  “There’s only us. There’s no them. And whenever somebody’s creating a them, it’s just a shortcut. It doesn’t work...” (52:30)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:34–08:18: Gingrich’s evocative mini-essay on the invention of the Internet (skip if looking only for Burns/Revolution content)
• 10:49: Burns joins—Newt introduces him and contextualizes his career
• 13:07: Emotional archeology and Burns’s philosophy
• 14:21: Surprises from researching the American Revolution—George Washington, division, ordinary people
• 18:38–19:44: Discussion of internal divisions; the Revolution as civil war and global war
• 22:05: The revolutionary generation’s eternal and radical vision
• 23:05–26:22: Legacies, contradictions, and the impact of the Declaration
• 32:24: Lincoln’s primacy and the Declaration as America’s spiritual document
• 33:16: Lincoln’s complexity and rhetoric
• 36:53–39:45: Thomas Paine, The Crisis, and stories of perseverance
• 41:59: Burns on how he chooses/documentaries, process innovation
• 45:46: Complexity in history and filmmaking
• 51:22: Reflections on legacy and meaning of work
• 52:30: Closing message of unity, “there’s only us”

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Tone and Language

The conversation is thoughtful, scholarly, reflective, and often poetic, blending historian’s insight with Burns’ signature narrative warmth. Both men emphasize complexity, nuance, and the need for historical humility—always returning to the idealism and struggle at the Revolution’s heart, and its ongoing relevance for all Americans.

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Summary Takeaway

Ken Burns and Newt Gingrich celebrate America’s Revolution not only as a founding event but as a complex, tumultuous, and still-vital story. Through vivid stories, rigorous honesty about contradictions, and a belief in the pursuit of “a more perfect union,” they argue that the Revolution’s legacy—rooted in unity, the ideal of liberty, and the need to face history with open eyes—remains the nation’s greatest hope.

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PBS’s “The American Revolution” is streaming free through July 12, 2026.

Transcript

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[Newt Gingrich]

Welcome to Newts World podcast on the iHeart podcast network. The Greatest American Inventions Today's Invention has done more to reshape daily life in the last 30 years than any other. And it began not in a garage or a university lab, but in the Pentagon. The Internet. On the night of October 29, 1969, a UCLA graduate student named Charlie Klein attempted to log into a computer at Stanford, 350 miles away, over a network called Arpanet. He typed L. Stanford received it. He typed O. Stanford received it. He typed G. The system crashed. Those two letters, L and O, were the first message ever transmitted over what would become the Internet. Klein called Stanford on the telephone to report what happened. His colleague reportedly laughed. History doesn't always announce itself clearly. ARPANET was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, darpa. Cold war strategists worried that a nuclear attack could destroy centralized telephone switching centers. The solution? A network with no center information broken into small packets, each finding its own path through whatever routes remained available. If one path was destroyed, packets would root around it. The concept was called packet switching, and it was the revolutionary idea at the heart of the Internet. In 1974, Vince Cerf and Bob Kahn published a paper describing TCP ip, the universal language of the Internet. Before it, different computer networks existed but couldn't talk to each other. TCP IP was the common tongue, a set of rules so simple and universal that any computer anywhere could use it. Serf and Khan called their vision an Internet, short for internetwork. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Internet grew steadily, largely confined to universities, government agencies and research institutions. Email emerged. File sharing emerged. A small, enthusiastic community of scientists built the early Internet's culture. Open, collaborative, skeptical of authority. Then, in 1991, British scientist Tim Berners Lee, working at CERN in Switzerland but building entirely on American infrastructure, invented the World Wide Web, a system of pages linked by clickable hyperlinks. Browse or go by anyone. He made it free. The commercial Internet exploded in 1993. About 50 websites existed by 2000. 17 million companies were born. Amazon in 1994, eBay in 1995, Google in 1998. The.com boom was followed by the crash, but the technology kept growing. The survivors went on to become among the largest corporations in human history. I want to pause on something genuinely remarkable about the Internet's origins. It was a government project funded by the Defense Department, developed at universities, funded by government grants, built on protocols published openly for anyone to use. And then the government let it go. In the early 1990s, the National Science foundation gradually withdrew and allowed commercial providers to take over the Internet's backbone. The government did not try to own or control or monetize the infrastructure it had built. It handed it to the world. That decision to make the Internet open and commercial rather than closed and government controlled, is one of the most consequential policy choices in the history of technology. China built a government controlled Internet. America built an open one. The results speak for themselves. The open Internet, with all its chaos and creativity and disruption, generated more innovation and wealth and human connection than any planned alternative. Good luck. Today, 5 billion people are connected. A farmer in Kenya chucks commodity prices. A student in rural India takes a college course. A doctor in a remote clinic consults a specialist in London. A small business in Ohio sells to customers in Japan. All starting with two letters and a crash. Next time, Albuquerque, N.M. then a garage in Los Altos, California, where a handful of young people decide that a computer should be something anyone can own. The personal computer Coming up, I'm joined by one of America's most acclaimed documentary filmmakers, Ken Burns. We're going to discuss his remarkable career and his latest film, the American Revolution. That's next.

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[Parent Discussing Lingokids]

with my mom and dad living in Orange county, when we bring my five and seven year old to visit, we are sometimes in for a two hour drive that could feel like 10.

[Camper Discussing Lingokids]

Oh, as an avid camper, I know all about this. We'll pack up the RV and know this is either going to be the trip of a lifetime or a complete disaster.

[Parent Discussing Lingokids]

Which is why we load up the iPads with Lingokids before we even pull out of the driveway.

[Camper Discussing Lingokids]

It's what dreams are made of. Lingokids keeps kids engaged and quiet with over 4000 interactive games, songs and shows that kids simply cannot get enough of.

[Parent Discussing Lingokids]

You can pack whatever you think you'll need, but Lingokids is the only entertainment you'll need for a stress free car

[Camper Discussing Lingokids]

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[Newt Gingrich]

I am really pleased to welcome my guest, ken Burns. For 50 years, Ken Burns has been one of America's foremost documentary filmmakers. Since his Academy Award nominated film Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, he has directed and produced some of the most acclaimed and influential historical documentaries ever made. Over the course of his career, he's explored the people, events and ideas that have shaped America through films including baseball, jazz, Lewis and Clark, Thomas Jefferson, the Roosevelts, Benjamin Franklin, the US and the Holocaust, the American Buffalo, and so many others. His work has earned dozens of major honors including 17 Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, two Academy Award nominations, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and induction into the Television Academy hall of fame. Ken Plato's film the American Revolution is a 6 part 12 hour documentary series directed by Ken and by Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, which premiered on PBS in November 2025 and tells the story of America's founding struggle through the experiences of both famous leaders and ordinary men and women who lived through this extraordinary moment in our history. As our country approaches its 250th anniversary, PBS is streaming the American Revolution for free on all PBS platforms from May 25th through July 12th. Ken, welcome and thank you for joining me on KnitsWorld.

[Ken Burns]

Thank you Mr. Speaker. It's great to be with you.

[Newt Gingrich]

You have an almost lyrical ability to communicate. I mean, the best of your work is just so remarkable. It's like poetry. I'm a huge fan.

[Ken Burns]

I remember writing, trying to raise some money. I looked about 12 years old in my first film, the Brooklyn Bridge that PBS broadcast. You know, people were Delighted in turning me down, saying, this child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge.

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[Ken Burns]

But I remember writing that I wasn't interested in the dry dates and facts and events of the past, but I was interested in an emotional archeology. I wrote that. I remember it was like 77, 78, and I'm typing out before computers on a typewriter. If you made a mistake, you had correcto type or whatever it would be. And that stuck. And I didn't mean nostalgia or sentimentality, as you know, is the great enemy of anything, particularly in history, but that an emotional archeology might be touching. The things that are actually our founders thought could be released. If you had a democratic society of people could govern themselves, you'd be free to explore the question of the soul survival, your relationship to citizenship and what that meant or how we are bound to each other and how we also have to work on ourselves. It's been a kind of guiding light. It's been helpful.

[Newt Gingrich]

I think the idea of emotional archeology is actually very helpful. Makes me rethink some of my own thinking about history. Now, your most recent project, the American Revolution. 6 parts 12 hour examination of America's founding struggle. And I'm curious, after spending years immersed in this period, what did you learn that most surprised you?

[Ken Burns]

It took us almost 10 years. I began this in December of 2015. Barack Obama still had 13 months to go in his presidency in his second term. So a lot of water under the bridge as we're working on it. But it was so striking. There's so many exhilarating aspects to this story. As you know, we say in the prologue, just before we head into the introduction, it's the most consequential revolution in history. It is, without a doubt, it influences all the other 200 plus years of revolutions that took place after it. When I was out on the road promoting it in 2025, we'd say, I thought it was the most important event since the birth of Christ. Everybody up to this point had been a subject and all of a sudden they were citizens. You know, Jefferson says in the Declaration, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evil, insufferable, very easy to parse. He means that we've just put up with the boot of the authoritarian and now we have a chance. It's going to be an active thing, this democracy business. We have a chance to govern ourselves and to understand ourselves. Pursuit of happiness was not the pursuit of objects in a marketplace of things, but lifelong learning. So there's Aspects of the ideas that got reinforced, that got exponentially exploded within my heart in such a good way. But as you pointed out in your introduction, we have 250 different people, 400 different voices, 250 different people, and they're read by 60 one of the finest actors. Now, they're George Washington. But there's also ordinary folks. Joseph Plummartin, who's 15 when he signs up. Betsy Ambler, who is 10 in Virginia, is a refugee most of the war. There's a German soldier, Johann Ewald, openly contemptuous. There's the wife of a German general. There's the King of England. What I got to understand is I've been always championing this kind of balls and strikes bottom up as well as top down approach. Is that you can say with a certain amount of glee that we don't have a country without George Washington. Now, does he have flaws? Of course he has flaws. But those strengths of being able to pick subordinate talent, unafraid of whether they're better than him. And then Benedict Arnold and Nathaniel Greene's got generals that are. He shows humility. Just an un. Unbelievable humility. He knows how to inspire men in the dead of night to fight. He risks his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor all the time. He slept at Mount Vernon. Between the spring of 76 and December of 1783, he spent three nights at his home at Mount Vernon. The rest of the time he's in a tent or he's in someone else's house. And all we do today is make a joke. George Washington slept here. There are mistakes he makes on the battlefield at Long island, the biggest battle of the revolution that causes it to be an overwhelming British victory, repeats the same mistake a little bit later at Brandywine. And yet he convinces people from Georgia, where you're from, Mr. Speaker, and new Hampshire, where I'm from, we're not from different countries. We're from the same thing. We're a new one thing called Americans. And more than anything, at the height of his military power, he gives it up. And at the height of his political power, he gives it up too. And even George iii, who is fanatically devoted to try to keep the empire together. When John Adams presented his credentials at The Court of St James, the first time he met an American after the Treaty of Paris, he I was the last one meaning to give up. And George III looks at Washington, said then, he is the greatest character of the age. And he is. And we don't have a country without him. We'd be speaking British, English or Spanish or French right now, had we not had this singular person. And there's something really exciting about being able to say that, and I think prove it in the film, as well as not taking away. You know, if you call balls and strikes, that means Babe Ruth strikes out many more times than he hits home runs. But we live in a media culture where everything's just a home run. And Babe Ruth only comes up once every nine times at bat, which means who else is up to bat? And sometimes, as the last World Series seventh game proves, it's not the big high earners, it's not the famous people. It's the second baseman who's the star of the show. So you want to yield this wonderful scene, and so you populate it like an epic with all of these dozens of people. So was I excited by this 10 years? Am I grieved to not have to work on it? Yes. The only saving grace is as I get to babble on in front of you.

[Newt Gingrich]

You know, part of this babbling, though. I think we were much more divided than people think. This is a much closer run thing. Everybody didn't rally around, probably. I'm guessing maybe a third of the country was on the side of the English.

[Ken Burns]

This is the big thing. Can we say to all of those people, those Chicken Littles who are sitting there in their fetal position wondering that the end is near? We were way more divided during our revolution. Way more divided during the Civil War. Way more divided during the period after the Civil War called Reconstruction. I'm working on a big series on that now. Way more divided in Vietnam, something we've covered. Yes. This is not just a revolution. And I think Americans sort of have turned the revolution into a kind of nostalgic and sentimental thing. The barnacles of that sentimentality have encrusted it. And we just don't want to deal with the violent stuff. We accept the violence of the Civil War and all the 20th century wars we're involved in. And I think it's to protect the big ideas in Philadelphia in 76 and then 11 years later in 1787 at the Constitution Convention. But those big ideas are bigger than anything and that no amount of telling the truth takes away from it. This is a bloody civil war, and we are fighting not some distant enemy who's imposing tyranny. We're fighting our own neighbors. We're fighting our own children. We're fighting our own brothers and sisters. We call our Civil War a civil war. It's really a sectional war. Our revolution was a civil war. And it was also, I need to add, a global war over the prize of North America and not the first one. And when you say prize, you mean land. And when you mean land, you also mean other people's land. And so there's Russia now coming into the scene in the west. There's obviously France and the Netherlands and Britain and Spain all vying for this, all want a piece of it. And look, the Continental Congress was not called the East Coast Congress. They didn't put George Washington in charge of the east coast army. They knew where they were going. They knew California was out there. That's what they wanted. And so this is a story of empire as well. So you've got all these layers, almost like the Grand Canyon of things that are taking place. It's not like a singular thing. There is a super wide variety of people, not just the cultural and sort of social differences of somebody say from Georgia, somebody say from New Hampshire. But it's also, if you walked into Savannah, there'd be Native Americans of several different tribes right in there. There'd be free and enslaved Africans, half the population of women who we never even think about. The first history of the revolution was written by Mercy Otis Warren, I'm sure you know that, who's a great philosopher and satirist and poet and the first person who wrote a book about it. Friends of Abigail and John Adams, voiced in our film by a little known actor that I think you should pay attention to to named Meryl Streep. And so you've got this wonderful cast of characters that tell you a little bit about the nitty gritty day to day struggle. And sometimes you're changing allegiances. After Washington loses New York, people flood into the city to sign a declaration of dependence. But after a little while in New Jersey, the occupying army does what occupying armies do and takes your crops and steals your cattle and your furniture and rapes your women. And all of a sudden more British and Hessian soldiers fell in trying to get forage from guerrilla actions in New Jersey than fell in any battle. So you begin to realize, wait a second. And then you get down to South Carolina and it's even worse. Even worse.

[Newt Gingrich]

Well, I've been sort of wrestling with the Declaration itself and with people who are in that room, as you pointed a while ago when Jefferson uses this phrase, will be an empire of liberty. And of course by the time he's bought the Louisiana Purchase, we were on the way.

[Ken Burns]

Biggest land deal in history. Yep.

[Newt Gingrich]

But they somehow, and this is what makes them, I think, so fascinating psychologically. I think they saw themselves as eternal. This was not a temporary fight, this was not an argument for this year. But somehow they had talked themselves over about a 20 year period into going to the very core of how do we operate? What's the basic rules? And when they say we're endowed by our Creator, they are breaking everything about the historic model of the divine right of kings. And somehow they know it.

[Ken Burns]

They know it. And the most amazing thing. Mr. You hit on the knob of. I mean, all religious, all religious faiths speak to this idea of serving others, about kindness and love that's at the heart of it all. And if you see the Declaration or the spiritual ideas and the political ideas underlying our revolution as this great gift, the chances at Lexington Green are zero. You'd be focused on yourself and your own survival. And yet they always talk about posterity. They understand that, as John Adams says, this is the most spectacular revolution ever and the lives of millions of people yet unborn. He means you and me, Mr. Speaker, that's who he's talking about. And they're willing to fight from that. So this argument between British citizens over the application of British law gets broken out into natural rights. And though we understand and acknowledge the limitations of the phrase all men are created equal, we knew they meant white men of property. And they imagined, at least in the beginning, a kind of aristocracy, we'd say elites today, of running a thing. In order to win it, they had to promise and extend this right. So democracy is not the intention of it, it's the unintended consequence, in a beautiful way of it. And that, that sentence, no matter what, it was deeply significant to the people. That didn't apply to. We follow a guy named James Forten, fortunately and fortuitous, read off camera by Morgan Freeman, who's nine years old when the Declaration is first read, first read ever, in Philadelphia a few days after, I think it's July 8th. And he listens to it and he doesn't for a second believe that it doesn't apply to him. He joins the patriot cause. He's in the Navy, ish thing. The fighting, the privateers he's captured. At one point, he's the same age as the son of the ship captain and he offers him, you can come back to England and be his playmate. And he goes, no, I'm gonna give up my country. He's sent to a prison ship in the east river called the Jersey, the most notorious of all the prison ships. And because he's a teenager, he survives. He walks back barefoot to Philadelphia. He goes back into the merchant marine. He makes a fortune making sales. He funds the William Lloyd Garrison's, the abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, the first of it. And his granddaughter goes to the Sea islands, right, to help those not emancipated, but newly freed by the earliest incursions that the Union army makes in the south to teach them schools, to build them churches, to help them understand how to grow crops on their own and things like that. So this is deeply significant, as the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk says, to people at the margins, women and the poor, enslaved and free blacks and also native Americans. So once you open that door and we move it into enlightenment terms, and they're endowed by their creator, as you pointed out, with certain. He wrote inalienable, but he meant unalienable, and it's been corrected. Unalienable writes that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The cat's out of the bag. You're never going to close that door that's been open no matter what it is. All of them, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson included, knew that slavery was morally wrong. And so essentially a subject that had never really come up, meaning slavery becomes the subject until obviously through to the 13th amendment, four score and nine years

[Newt Gingrich]

later, when you go back and look in detail. Caesar Rodney, whose statue was taken down in 2020 during the Great period of repudiating our past, turned out that in 1769 he introduced a bill to abolish the slave trade in Delaware.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, he did.

[Newt Gingrich]

He actually was about as close to being an abolitionist as you could in the culture of Delaware in that era.

[Ken Burns]

You got to make a huge distinction between anti slavery and abolitionists, because what happened is anti slavery, you just knew it was more. But unfortunately, people looked the other way because there was so much money being made. The British Empire is 13 colonies in North America, 13 in the Caribbean. Only Virginia and South Carolina are profitable. And we can infer why it's those Barbados and Jamaica that have 90% enslaved people that's the engine of profit for the British Empire. So people aren't going to give this up lightly. So it's going to be a gradual sort of thing. But it gets on the table that once you articulate these natural rights as the Declaration does so poetically and so beautifully, even though most of that document, as you know, are complaints about the king, to convince not only the citizens of America that this is the bad guy, not Parliament, it's him. It's the whole idea of hereditary succession and all the things of quartering troops in the city, all of the stuff that he does. But it's to the French as well, because we want them to say, oh, we can get our act together. We can figure out how to act in concert and not just be these fragmented little city states that the colonies appeared to Europe as. And so it's an amazing document. And I've spent, I guess now, 36 years at a little cabin on a lake about an hour from here in New Hampshire reading the Declaration before I let my kids eat on the 4th of July. And now my grandkids, and they all look up like, what's he doing? I stand up on the picnic table and I read it out loud. And I have sometimes the youngest who's able to read, read some part of it. If somebody protests, then I say, okay, read these paragraphs of what Frederick Douglass said about what the Fourth of July means to me. Are you satisfied? Okay, let's go back and let's read the Declaration. And oh, by the way, Frederick Douglass flew the American flag outside of his house and helped resurrect with Lincoln Jefferson's primacy, because mainly we just acted off the Constitution. And it was those people that helped turn Jefferson into a kind of hero. And when, when the Gettysburg Address, which is the 2.0 of the declaration, is given, he's going back to the Declaration, not to the Constitution, most of the arguments about the Constitution, but he's going back to the poetry of the founding, the promise. It isn't even just happiness, it's the word pursuit. We're a restless, innovated, dissatisfied people, always divided, who are trying to be better, which is great. We're a nation in the process of becoming. And the Declaration gave that persistent pursuit of happiness. Eleven years later, the Constitution gave it a more perfect union. This is great stuff.

[America 250 Announcer]

This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party, hosted by America 250. America's Block Party is a can't miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

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[Parent Discussing Lingokids]

with my mom and dad living in Orange county, when we bring my five and seven year old to visit, we are sometimes in for a two hour drive that could feel like 10.

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[Newt Gingrich]

Just as an aside from the revolution itself, I think Lincoln is central to the country we become. Not just because he was the key to surviving the Civil War, but because he instinctively, as a person born into poverty who rose by his own efforts, he instinctively understood that the central spiritual document of America is the Declaration of Independence.

[Ken Burns]

Exactly. Well said. He grew up in poverty in Kentucky, then Indiana and then Illinois. And his family left. They were very poor, but their tradition was anti slavery. And he grew up and saw that the oligarchs of the south had this unfair advantage capturing markets and made it impossible. His father moves into free territory where somebody like Lincoln can rise from this poverty, abject poverty, into the greatest president we've ever had. Asterisk After George Washington, Washington was indispensable.

[Newt Gingrich]

He did a brilliant series on the Civil War. So you know this better than I do. Lincoln had this remarkable ability to Both get to the moral heart of the matter and to communicate it with such clarity and simplicity that normal people could take it to their heart.

[Ken Burns]

May I suggest one of the reasons rhetorically why he's able to do that is that he understands that it's neither black nor white light. It's not an on off switch of the ones and zeros of our media culture or the red state or blue state of our news cycles. He understood that it was both things and that he could tolerate the contradictions and the undertow in us. So think about his second Inaugurals. Obviously he's got that Old Testament thing about, you want to keep this going. All the blood drawn by the lash shall be met by one drawn by the sword. Then he pivots into this New Testament with malice towards none, with charity, with all. The one I really like, Mr. Speaker, is the message to Congress in 1862, in which he says, the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present, as our case is new. We must think anew, we must act anew, we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we can save our country. And then he goes, fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation, which is at a. The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate or we cannot escape history. And he would say both. And everybody understood that you could exist. Keats wrote a letter about Shakespeare saying that he had negative capability holding intention. When the moralist in us wants to decide good or bad, he's able to hold intention. These conflicting stuff. This is something Tom Boswell gave me, making an update of the baseball series. The greatest sportswriter for the Washington Post. That the moralist wants to decide. But Shakespeare could hold this, Keats said, till the very end. So the heroes could have this dark side, the villains could have this positive side. And I think Lincoln, in the way he does that, speaking to all aspects of us, or not having a proper noun in all of the Gettysburg Address just signals. This isn't about capital letters. This isn't about position. This is about being of, by and for. And it's not this focus on the prepositions. It's the people, the people, the people. And that's the way we started. We hold these truths to be self evident. We the people, e pluribus unum. This is our message to the world. And it's the only message that works well.

[Newt Gingrich]

And of course, in Lincoln's case, he deliberately spoke slowly so you could Understand the last sentence before he started the next sentence.

[Ken Burns]

Exactly, exactly. It's a beautiful form. It has its spaces in. He knew the histories and he knew the Bible. And that was like Thomas Paine, who was able to articulate, use sort of very familiar stories and allegories that everybody knew, but also add this new language of the Enlightenment. And all Lincoln's doing is, as I said earlier, It's 2.0. The Gettysburg Address is the Declaration 2.0, saying, look, we really do mean it. Four score and seven. Nobody talked that way. He was just trying to find another way to focus your attention and not say, 87 years.

[America 250 Announcer]

Right.

[Ken Burns]

Nobody said that way. He just realized if he lets you do the math, you're suddenly in the driver's seat. Four score and seven years.

[Newt Gingrich]

He also spoke in the language of the King James Bible. Yes. Therefore he resonated automatically with so many people. But you mentioned somebody who's very important. To what extent do you think Paine's the crisis was essential in renewing American commitment and helping Americans understand that the war was gonna be harder than they expected.

[Ken Burns]

I think it's so central, it's a really good question. Can I back up a little bit and say that? Let's remember that the declaration comes 14, almost 15 months after the gunfires at Lexington and Concord. Up to that point, people are still thinking, maybe they'll wake up, maybe they'll agree to us. Maybe we can negotiate. Independency, as they called it, was not on the table initially. George Washington wasn't from it. But on January 9, this pamphlet called Common Sense came out and it just articulated everything. And people were really swayed and changed by this most important of all pamphlets. You know, that we have a chance to do this over again. Not since the time of Noah, he says, can we create an asylum for mankind. We're going to press the restart button and we're going to begin again. This is terrific and stuff. And so by June, you've got a committee writing a Declaration of independence. By July 4th, you're signing it and proclaiming it to the world. And then things aren't going right. The Battle of Long island is the next month, and then it's a big loss. They're losing everywhere, all of New Jersey. And by the time Washington realizes he has to do something and cross back over the Delaware on Christmas night, he's got a three pronged attack. The other two never make it across the ice wall in Delaware, he's on his own. It's a big gamble, but they've Been reading the crisis that has come out that fall. He's been following Washington's army. These are the times that Trimen sold the Sunshine Patriot and Summer Soldier. And he's speaking to people who have left to go back to plant their crops. And now he's left with these teenagers and ne' er do wells and second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance. Recent immigrants from Ireland and from Germany. They're not landowners, which is what this was about, like the protecting the property rights of these British citizens, all that stuff. And they're there fighting because this word liberty is just as powerful a word as has been introduced into the language. And the liberty talk is heard by everybody. Everybody wants it. Nobody wants to be a slave. If you want to be a slave, you've double enslaved yourself, as Tolstoy said. Right. And so there's this sense that we have, and as you pointed out, I think so beautifully at the beginning, it's for posterity. They're talking about us. They're thinking somewhere along the line they're going to be having a 250th anniversary and we got to deliver them something. And our obligation there, therefore, Mr. Speaker, is to go back, particularly in difficult times, re understand what actually happened, not what we think the mythology tells us that happened. What actually happened and recommit ourselves as they did, perhaps lives and fortunes and sacred honors and handing it off to our posterity. Which is part of the reason why for decades I've been subjecting my children to the Declaration before they get to eat their hamburgers and hot dogs.

[Newt Gingrich]

When we come back, we'll discuss how Ken chooses the stories and why complexity in history matters.

[America 250 Announcer]

This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party. Hosted by America 250, America's Block Party is a can't miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

Experience music, performances by major artists, patriotic tributes and the kickoff to giving forth helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history.

It's more than just fireworks.

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[Ken Burns]

Mom, can I have Lingokids? Dad, Lingokids, please. When did we become the lingokids house?

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[Parent Discussing Lingokids]

Last week it was dinosaurs.

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[Ken Burns]

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[Parent Discussing Lingokids]

So no dinosaurs and dinosaurs.

[Ken Burns]

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[Newt Gingrich]

You know, you're sort of an institution and yourself, the quality of your work, the volume of your work, it's been a remarkable contribution to American civilization. I'm very curious. How do you choose a subject and what currently kind of intrigues you?

[Ken Burns]

Yeah. So the glib answer is they choose me. And in some way that's true. If I were given a thousand years, and I'm not going to be given a thousand years, I wouldn't run out of topics in American history. And as I get older, I'm 72, I'm pretty greedy. Usually I'm working on one or two, sometimes three. Now I'm working on four or five because I gotta keep it going. I've set up different production teams and I move from one to the other and it's glorious because, you know, Harry Truman said, the only thing that's really new is the history. You don't know. And I think that's really true. We somehow have numbed ourselves to the possibilities of learning from history. The greatest teacher I do this, I'm drawn, as I said, to the story of Reconstruction, what happened after the Civil War. And I'm working on a thing, been working for years on it, called emancipation to Exodus. What happens after the Civil War, which is we have cuckoo ways of teaching, teaching what happened. It's almost upside down. In some versions, they make our own homegrown terrorist organization, the Klan, the heroes. And you got to go, what? And so Churchill famously said, the victors write the history, but not necessarily in every single case or in every single schoolhouse. So it's trying to call bells and strikes again. No agenda, no trying to comment in the 10 years it took me to do this. As I said, lots of water under the current events bridge while I did it. But like Odysseus, I tied myself to the master. There was no way I was going to say isn't this rhyming just like today? It's going to rhyme or it's not going to rhyme, it doesn't matter. So we're working on one on LBJ and the Great Society. We did a thing on Vietnam back in 2017 and we just talked about his domestic agenda for one sentence. But it's incredibly robust domestic agenda that needs to be understood now in context, criticized, accepted, rejected, whatever. So we've been working on that for many years. I've been interviewing people who worked with Dr. King. Not just the John Lewis's and the Harry Belafontes who we got the last interviews from, but foot soldiers in Albany, Georgia who picked him up at the airport and took him home and gave him a meal in a spare bedroom and took him to church the next morning or in Birmingham or Montgomery. So we're collecting that. Also decided to do a big history of the CIA. So we're beginning to start to do interviews and organize that. I think that's a wonderful way to understand the post second World war United States sort of from the inside out, literally. And you'd think, Mr. Speaker, that if you do something that this would be the toughest. We'd be knocking on the door and there'd be nothing. The second I announced last summer that I was going to do this, and I don't mean announce, it was nothing formal. I just in casual conversations like this, I've gotten hundreds of current and ex analysts and spies and whatever who want to talk. And I go, wait a second, I can't handle this. Let me get the revolution done. Let me get these other projects going on. But it's, as you can tell, I feel like I have the best job in the country.

[Newt Gingrich]

Do you have a team that sort of helps you with this?

[Ken Burns]

It's very small, so when you see the credits go by it very correctly. Thanks. Several hundred people for the American Revolution. But it was made by under 20 people. I had, as you said, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt as my co directors. And we have a couple of producers. We now have legions of researchers. We have three editing teams with their apprentices and assistants and the writer Jeffrey Ward, who I've worked with now for 40 years. Five years, really terrific. And we feed him stuff and we do Interviews? We don't do interviews. Trying to fit somebody in. I know. You've done enough media. Where can you get us from paragraph 2 to paragraph 3 on page 7 of episode 4? We never do that. Every time you see a talking head in our film, it's a happy accident. Happy accident. So we go out and shoot those archives, not unconcerned whether we're filling a script, and we write a script unconcerned of whether they're archives. And then it makes the editing a little bit harder, but it makes it us corrigible to the end. We can learn new information. I have a big sign in my editing room in lowercase neon that says, it's complicated. And there's not a filmmaker on earth when a scene is working that you don't want to change it. Oh, no, no, no. But if we find new information, the facts always have to beat the art. So it's complicated, means we're willing to be corrigible up until the very end. We never stop researching and we never stop writing. And as you know, film production, there's a set research period and a set writing period and produces a script which is comes down from Mount Sinai and informs the shooting and the editing. We just never stop research and never stop writing.

[Newt Gingrich]

I have to share with you just for a minute, one of the more embarrassing moments of my career. President Clinton invited me to a state dinner with the Chinese Shenzhen, and he placed me next to Steven Spielberg. And I'm a big movie fan. And of course, Spielberg's one of the greatest movie makers of our time. Well, you'll appreciate this. You might coach me about this. So I turned him at one point. I said, I'm really curious because there seems to be such a dramatic difference between your most brilliant films and films which don't quite click. And he stared at me like I was insane. And he said, I have never released a movie that I didn't think was terrific. And he didn't talk to me for the rest of the evening.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, you know, it's interesting, and I'm very, very fortunate that I have 40 films out there. Some of them are an hour length and some of them are 20 hours in length, but we call that a single film. And none of them are clunkers. Somebody say, well, I don't like that as much as I like the Civil War or whatever. But it is that moment. And he has the unique, unique ability of just having creative control over everything from soup to nuts, as do I. By choosing public broadcasting and choosing to raise the Money on my own. It means that I don't have a network and layers of suits coming in giving you notes that often make it less so. Let me just rephrase this a little bit more humbly. If you don't like any of the films, it's all my fault. I can't blame it on an executive producer who didn't let me shoot that scene.

[Newt Gingrich]

On the other hand, if we do like it, it's all your fault too.

[Ken Burns]

Then I'm willing to say, well, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, they were really central to it because I have in both places where I lay my head at that little cottage and here, 47 years in the same bedroom in this little village outside this tiny village in New Hampshire, I have an old New Yorker cartoon framed now that shows three men standing in hell, the flames licking up around them. And one guy says to the other two, apparently my over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing, you know, and of course they don't. It's how you treat your neighbor. It's how you raise your kids. It's how you do all the things that really matter about that. So at the end of the day, the whole list of credits and Emmys and Grammys and awards really don't matter. It's just. Just who you are today and how you meet the world.

[Newt Gingrich]

One of the things I just have to say in closing that when you're brilliant and you spend a lifetime being brilliant, part of what happens is you have a range of loose association that allows you to draw on talent that makes the brilliance slightly easier.

[Ken Burns]

When I was working just to stay alive, I was a crew member just carrying the lighting for a small documentary on Emily Dickinson. And that was being narrated and hosted by Julie Harris. And at the end we all became friends. It was all intimate. There may be five people in the crew total. And she said, well, let me know if I can help in any way. So I'm working on this film about Brooklyn Bridge. So I go to her and I said, can you be the voice of Emily Roebling, the wife of the guy who gets the bends during the construction, Washington Roebling? And she says, of course. So she reads it. And then whenever we went early on to get another voice, they'd say, what are you talking about? You're gonna work for nothing? Or sag minute?

[Newt Gingrich]

No.

[Ken Burns]

And I say, well, Julie Harris. And they go, five time Tony Award winning Julie Harris is reading. He goes, yeah, she reads for all films. And then the Civil War came out and people came to Me, Gregory Pack, walked across a room at the Kennedy center and said, Mr. Burns, I'd love to be able to read for you. And I'm dying because I see him across the way and go, how am I going to get up the courage to ask him? Same thing happened a few years later with Tom Hannah. And he breaks away at a party and he says, I'd like to read with you. I mean, for 25 years, I've had Tom Hanks willing to do it if his schedule works out. And he's so, so generous. And I have this teasing joke. I bring the SAG minimum check to Tom Hanks. And they go, now, Tom, just want to tell you we're in a very fickle business. I want you to take some of this money and put it away. Maybe take a little bit, buy yourself a nice meal, but I want you to save some of this, because you never know when the work's been dry. And it's something like, Mr. Speaker, something like $311.14, right, to check for it. And we do it. The routine is every single time that we work together. Sit down, Tom.

[Newt Gingrich]

It's pretty hard to tell young people. If you work hard and you have big dreams and you're dedicated to doing it well, it compounds. And over time, it gets easier and you have more people coming and it begins to really build a momentum. And your career is a classic example of that.

[Ken Burns]

You know, the Shakers, which was the subject of my second film after the Brooklyn Bridge film, they had a saying, do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as you would if you knew you would die tomorrow. So you invest it with all the urgency, and then you don't take any of the ego of it.

[Newt Gingrich]

One last question. You've been very generous with your time. In addition to reading to your children and grandchildren. How will you be spending the 4th

[Ken Burns]

of July up at the lake? And we'll be out on the boat, assuming that it's good weather. I'm going to be talking to some of our media friends, you know, about it. Just how we celebrate because of the revolution. There's sort of a sense of what we're doing. I want to be a citizen. I've now worked really hard. It's sort of the beginning of the sort of letting the film go. It's no longer mine, it's yours. That's been true from the moment it was broadcast in mid November and it ended up hitting for PBS, the first time PBS ever hit the top 10 of streaming. Programs with a metric I'd never heard 565 million minutes of watching. That's in November. By early February, it was over 4 billion. And now we assume it's free streaming. It's going to have a chance to sort of go out and take a complicated and nuanced version of our revolution. And I hope that everybody, regardless of where they come from, regardless of where they live, regardless of their politics, will go back and say, wow, could there be any people more blessed and more fortunate? And yes, we got problems and we'll always have problems, but we've got the blueprint of how to work our way through. And the key is e pluribus unum. You know, I've made films, Mr. Speaker, for 50 years about the U.S. but I've also made films about us, that is to say, the lowercase 2 letter plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty, the complexity, the contradiction and even the controversy of the US and if I've learned one lesson, and it's a lesson I would hope to share in all the films, but also just say bluntly, as we approach the 250th anniversary, anniversary of the glorious founding, the last best hope of earth comes from that speech of Lincoln's in 62, that there's no them, there's only us. That's the thing I love. There's only us. There's no them. And whenever somebody's creating a them, it's just a shortcut. It doesn't work. Our religious faith teaches this, our political faith teaches that. And Americans will never err when they understand there's only us, the US and know them anywhere.

[Newt Gingrich]

I want to thank you for a kind of intellectual patriotism that's all too rare. I also want to thank you for a lifetime of trying to educate the rest of us. I want to thank you for joining me. And as you pointed out, PBS is streaming the American Revolution for free on all PBS platforms through July 12th. I cannot say too strongly to our listeners, it's a remarkable product. You will learn an immense amount and you will be enriched deeply in the meaning of the 250th. So, Ken, thank you for your lifetime of work.

[Ken Burns]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Happy Fourth of July.

[Newt Gingrich]

Thank you to my guest, Ken Burns. New Twirl is produced by Gingrich360 and iHeartMedia. Our executive producers, Garnesy Sloan, our researchers, Rachel Peterson. Special thanks to the team at Gingrich 360. If you've been enjoying Neutral. I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Join me on [e-mail] I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newts World.

[America 250 Announcer]

This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party. Hosted by America 250. America's Block Party is a can't miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

Experience music, performances by major artists, patriotic tributes and the kickoff to giving 4th, helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history.

It's more than just fireworks.

Join this landmark celebration and get your America's gift. Block Party Tickets now for $17.76 at america250.org LA what if your next favorite

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hobby came with a built in crew? That's cornhole. Whether you're brand new to the game or just looking for an excuse to get outside, there's a whole world of players out there ready to welcome you in. Local leagues, weekend tournaments, backyard throwdowns. It's all happening near you. Find your people at your next [e-mail] events new hobby, new friends. Same. You just having a lot more fun.

[Ken Burns]

Mom, can I have Lingokids? Dad, Lingokids, please. When did we become the Lingokids house? No idea.

[America 250 Announcer]

Last week it was dinosaurs. This week it's Lingokids.

[Ken Burns]

Why Lingokids? Because it's the best thing ever. We can play games with astronauts, wild animals and superheroes. With more than 4,000 interactive games, songs and shows, LingoKids is the number one entertainment platform for young kids.

[Parent Discussing Lingokids]

So no dinosaurs and dinosaurs.

[Ken Burns]

Everything kids love. Download it for free.

[Firestone Tires Advertiser]

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[America 250 Announcer]

this is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.