← The History Chicks : A Women's History Podcast
The History Chicks : A Women's History Podcast
BONUS - The American Revolution on PBS - Our interview with co-director Sarah Botstein
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- [00:06]
A
The American Revolution changed the way the world worked. The principles of governance in the new country laid the foundation for movements all over the world. On November 16, Ken Burns and his team premiere their six part documentary series on PBS called, as you might have guessed, the American Revolution. And we had the opportunity to sit down with Sarah Botstein to talk about the inspiration and impact of this conflict. If you've heard our Betsy Ambler show, this is the the interview at the end of the episode. But we thought it was important to post it separately for easier access. In addition, there's an accompanying book that's set to be released soon, the American An Intimate History by Jeffrey Ward and Ken Burns, scheduled for release on November 11, 2025. And now, without further ado on with the interview.
- [00:54]
B
On November 16, 2025, PBS will air Ken Burns the American Revolution. Six episodes, 12 hours worth of exploration into of the revolution that turned the world upside down. And here with us right now is Sarah Botstein, a co director and producer of this project that has taken six years to come to fruition.
- [01:16]
C
Welcome, welcome, welcome. It's actually nearly a decade, so I. Oh my goodness.
- [01:23]
B
Well, let's start with your story. How did you first get into, well, directing for one. And what drew you to this particular series or to history in general? I know you have a long history of history.
- [01:36]
C
Yeah, well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to, to, to be here. I graduated from Barnard College in New York City in 1994. And I didn't know what I wanted to do, honestly. And I got a job working in New York City being the assistant to a group of people in an advertising and PR agency. And I met Ken and I got put on an account that supported work that he did. And I was an American Studies major in college and I'm very interested in kind of cultural, political history and how art intersects with that. And he offered me a job working on a series on the history of jazz music. And I didn't know anything about jazz. I couldn't have told you the difference between Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughn or was not music I listened to. And I moved to a tiny town in New Hampshire where he lives for what I thought was two years. And that was 30 years ago. And I think 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, eight films later.
- [02:30]
D
Wow. And for those wondering who Ken is, she just casually drops the name. It's Ken Burns, the documentarian.
- [02:37]
C
Yeah. So Ken Burns is a, is, is one of the leading historical documentary filmmakers of our time. He's been working, making films for Public television for almost five decades. And he's really committed to public television, public media, fairly traditional historical documentary films. And we take on big subjects and make long movies and ask a lot of our viewers and hope they got.
- [03:02]
B
A lot of it on to maybe the American Revolution itself, I would have to say. And we are almost of an age that the first exposure you and I probably had was the shot heard round the world on Schoolhouse Rock. And then the next thing, maybe the only thing children get exposed to is that thing about the tea. Right. So it's such a massive story that mostly didn't get told to us. And how on earth do you as a team decide what stories, like, what stories are you going to cover since there's a wide open field?
- [03:41]
C
Right, that's a great question. Gets to the heart of so much of what is kind of confounding about this. We live in a country that's actually fairly young on the global stage. So let's just say we're in our adolescence. We know very little about our founding. On the one hand, yes, it. Yet it's draped in a huge amount of kind of popular culture reference mythology that has very little to do with the actual history of our revolution, which just makes for a really great story. Honestly, it's really surprising. It's really complicated. It's very unlikely. We were totally the underdogs. Our American Revolution in many ways was actually a civil war. And our Civil war was in many ways our revolution. We were born in violence in a very divided time. Not everybody jumped to the patriot cause. And the war took almost a decade to fight and to win. And the story is both story of a very brutal, complicated, difficult, 18th century military war that was a global war we would not have won without the help of the French and a great revolution over how a country could govern. And there is enormous optimism and patriotism and excitement in our founding documents.
- [05:00]
B
Do you find any parallels between the historical moments that you were portraying and the world we're living in now?
- [05:07]
C
I mean, that happens on any film I'm working on, whether I'm making a film about Ernest Hemingway or the history of Prohibition or the Vietnam War or the American Revolution. These films take a long time to make. And so the ways that we understand our history and our present keep changing. They change today versus a week ago. So I think there's always a lot to learn from a varied, deep dive into our history.
- [05:35]
D
You had touched on the events of the American Revolution that were lesser known. Was there something, an event or people that you personally Were really excited to tell the stories about.
- [05:46]
C
Well, I'm always interested to tell the stories of people we've never heard of. Right. Children in a war. You know, Henry Knox, who's a famous military story of him bringing the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston. George Washington asked him to do it. It was totally unlikely that he could do it. He did it. But he had a wife back in Boston whose entire family were Loyalists. And so she lost her family and was the wife of a really important military character. So I'm always interested in the secondary characters. I think anytime you do a story of a war, you should make a secondary film about the women. But instead, we just sew the women into the narrative where they're often left out. So I think it's the most interesting to think about life and history when you're taking the big, bold face names, the famous stories, and sewing them together with the ones you've never heard of or the people you've never heard of.
- [06:39]
B
Because the way people typically learn it is there's one rising tide of disaffection with the British, and everyone rose up. But that's literally. I mean, house to house now within a house, as you just said, what happened?
- [06:53]
C
Brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor. You didn't know what side anyone was on, and it took a lot of convincing. There were many truly legitimate and understandable reasons to stay loyal to the crown. And that's important for us to understand. Empathy is a. Is a good tool.
- [07:10]
B
Is that what you hope audiences, especially maybe the younger viewers, take from that story? Empathy, or what do you hope is the impact on people learning about our turbulent birth?
- [07:23]
C
I always hope that any work we do has people ask questions and think about things in new ways where they haven't thought about them before. Be excited about history, want to learn more, want to talk to their families at dinner about whatever the subject that they've just watched is. I think I'm really interested in activating a engaged public. Our founders believe that we should be educated, active, engaged, virtuous citizens. And I think there's a lot to that.
- [07:54]
D
I'm going to just backtrack to your personal. Were you interested in history before you got involved with Mr. Burns?
- [08:00]
C
I was an American Studies major, so I'm very interested in intersection of history, art, culture, politics.
- [08:07]
D
Right. You just didn't get dropped in the deep end.
- [08:10]
C
No, no, no. I wasn't like a math major going to work for Cat, and that was.
- [08:14]
B
Right.
- [08:15]
C
But, you know, could happen. Yeah, sure.
- [08:18]
B
So I've seen You interviewing people for the Holocaust special? Is there, were there. What kind of research did you personally do for this particular series?
- [08:28]
C
We do a lot of research before we do an interview. So we interview depending on the subjects, different kinds of people who've spent their lives either living through or studying a subject. So we spend, before we sit down and interview a scholar, we spend weeks researching what that scholar has written, how they've talked about the subject, what their views are, and we go in with a map of questions. We are a big bunch of nerds. I sit with an incredible team of people and we all, we read a lot, we think a lot, we debate a lot, we work really hard to bring our best game to an interview and to do as much background research as we can to make it worth both the interviewee's time and hopefully have a really rewarding conversation for both of us.
- [09:15]
D
And then comes the challenge of taking all that information and distilling it down to bite size. I mean, this is a six part series. It's 12 hours, if we can call that bite size. But how much of a challenge is that to take? You know, however long you're.
- [09:28]
B
How long are you?
- [09:29]
C
Well, we're always, we're always boiling, we're always crafting, we're always, you know, trying to get whatever someone says to the essence of it. So the first time you see it, you pull a bite from someone in a, in a show and that might be three paragraphs and by the end it's four sentences, right?
- [09:46]
B
So long ago. I swear I have a point. Long ago I used to DJ and there are sets you do for the people in the room, for the audience, and there are sets you do for other DJs. Okay, you mentioned you're surrounded by history nerds. Are. Is there anything going on in this series that is for the other DJs? Is there a moment that the history nerds in your audience are going to be like, yes.
- [10:12]
C
Huh? I hope that happens in every scene. Honestly, I think we, we really. Let's see, how do I answer that? We make our films. First of all, I'll say this. We make our films for everybody. So I hope the history nerds are happy and I hope the people who don't care about history are happy. And I hope my mom wants to watch the show as much as my dad, not because I'm their kid, but because they're both find totally different things to be interested in. I think our work also sits at an interesting intersection of history and art. Right. We're trying to Visualize a history that has no archives. That's traditional the way that we think of when we think of a historical documentary. It's no photographs and newsreel. There aren't contemporaneous news reports of someone on the battlefield interviewing a soldier. So you're reliant on memory, on the more crude elements that were made at the time. And then how to creatively think about filming the places people live, the sites where the war was fought, the important landmark places that we walk by every day, whether it's Independence hall or the State House in Boston, or the Yorktown Battlefield in Virginia, or a longhouse in upstate New York. I think we. We want to celebrate the vast and beautiful landscape of North America. Places where these things happened and the places where people lived.
- [11:34]
D
Did you get to go to any of these places that really just struck you that you've never been to before? I mean, living in New Hampshire, you're in the middle of history.
- [11:42]
C
I live in New York City now, right in midtown Manhattan. You have to hear a fire truck. You know, every project I've worked on has brought me to really amazing sacred places. Whether it's getting up at 4 o' clock in the morning in the early June and walking up the beaches of Normandy to imagine what D Day must have been like, or to be in the middle of a highway in Saigon 50 years after the fall of Saigon, or to walk through the Saratoga battlefield at dawn just two weeks ago and remember what happened there. So we're very lucky to go to really beautiful, important historic sites in all the work we do.
- [12:21]
B
Were there any moments that felt especially emotional or personal for you when you were either researching or filming them?
- [12:29]
C
It's a good question. I think some of the beautiful quotes written at the time actually by Abigail Adams really surprised me at how moving and forward thinking she was and they were and that, you know, she and her husband, John Adams, have a very famous correspondence, which, when you put it in its historic context, actually really becomes quite dramatic and wonderful. So I love hearing families talk to each other in any subject. And those often move me, obviously, when an important something happens at an important moment in history. But, you know, the Declaration of Independence is no joke. There's a lot to celebrate there, and it was a really important moment. It changed the world. There's a lot for us to be proud of. We've done a lot since those words were written. When they were written, only a certain tiny segment of wealthy white men had the right to vote. And here we are 250 years later. And we can vote. Black people have the right to vote. Poor people can vote. There's been a lot of progress made in 250 years.
- [13:33]
B
So you mentioned that. And I have this written down to ask you. I haven't seen in your body of work the road to women's suffrage. And I am putting my quarter up for you to do that. We just covered Alice Paul, and then we. We took 50 listeners with us to her birthplace.
- [13:55]
C
Ken made a really beautiful film on the history of Stanton and Anthony and the women's suffrage movement in the mid-90s.
- [14:03]
D
Gotta go back.
- [14:03]
C
Yeah. Gotta go back.
- [14:05]
D
Yeah.
- [14:05]
B
Just a little bit.
- [14:06]
D
Going back to Abigail and John Adams, you were talking about their correspondence. We are weaving this conversation we're having with you into our episode on Betsy Ambler. How did you meet her?
- [14:18]
C
So this film is. Is directed and made by three of us. Ken, my dear friend and colleague David Schmidt and myself. David Schmidt grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia. He is a student of the 18th century. He was a fife and drummer as a little boy growing up there. And while we were making the film, I said to him at one point, you know, I think we need a. We need a child's story here. We need to hear from a child. I think anytime you make a film about a war, again, widening the lens of the voices we typically hear from. And I mean, we don't. Everyone knows from the Diary of Anne Frank, children have a lot to say and a lot of wisdom. So he set out to try to find a good young character, and he stumbled across Betsy Ambler, whose papers have been well organized and well cataloged, but haven't been exposed much. She was 10 years old in Yorktown.
- [15:11]
B
Virginia, when the war started.
- [15:13]
C
Her family became refugees and moved through the colonies during the war. And she ended up, because of her writings, which she wrote for her younger sisters, so they would remember what her family had lived through. That's also very moving to me. And so she's in almost every episode. And I think scholars are excited to learn more about her and for her to become a household name, that would be awesome.
- [15:37]
D
Love to help that happen.
- [15:39]
B
So in our own work, we sometimes fall in love with one of our subjects. Maybe halfway through doing research about them. You know, we've been looking deeply into their lives. We almost feel now like we're friends with them. I'm wondering if there's anyone, a quote, character in any of the 12 hours that you sort of regard as a friend that you are glad you met.
- [16:01]
C
That's such a nice question. Such A nice way to phrase it. I mean, I care about so many of the different people in the film. Elizabeth Freeman, who was a woman in Massachusetts who was enslaved and went to court for her rights after the Revolution, is a great story and very moving. I think for me, having made the film, I actually am more interested personally in wanting to talk to some of the more famous people of the time, to sort of be at a dinner table with John and Abigail Adams and her good friend Mercy Otis Warren and just be in the room where it happened, as they say in Hamilton. Right. Like just listening to these conversations. These were young people making it up as they went. They had no idea how the history was going to turn out. And they were young and we know them as really famous and realized human beings. They weren't then. And so I think the debates they were having amongst themselves, being in the room where it happened, the conversations that helped birth our country, those are the things I kind of take away and when I'm in my imagination, think about not to discount the different characters I care about or who move me or who I'd like to get to know better or go back to history and meet. But I think it's really, as Hamilton says, being in the room where it all happened, I think is. Is where my imagination goes in this subject.
- [17:21]
B
We say that sometimes that historical figures are not the butterflies on pins framed on the wall. They're actually people that had to flap around randomly to get there. They certainly weren't all perfectly.
- [17:34]
C
No. And they didn't know how it was going to turn out.
- [17:37]
D
No, no.
- [17:38]
C
I mean, after Lexington and Concord and the shot heard round the world, or however we learn about it, it took first of all a year and two months after that battle for them to declare independence. They didn't know if they were going to declare independence. They didn't know if they were going to try to get a foreign ally to help them. They couldn't possibly fight off the biggest empire on earth. I mean, it's just totally surprising and unlikely and they made it amongst themselves.
- [18:04]
B
They're not one. They were more like 13 little countries, weren't they? And not one powerful force all thinking the exact same.
- [18:12]
C
John Adams has a quote saying exactly that.
- [18:18]
B
Susan, I think we probably have time for maybe two more questions. Do you want to.
- [18:23]
D
Yeah. You know what I would like to talk to you about? It's not about the revolution, it's about your life. But as a woman in leadership, behind the camera, have you found the industry shifting in the terms of representation or voice? I mean, you've been in it for a while now. Have you seen much difference?
- [18:43]
C
I mean, I think it's probably changed a little bit over time. I work in a, in an industry that actually has a lot of women in pretty powerful positions. And you know, sometimes people think we're bossy, where they would not say that if it was a man behind the camera. But I really love the collaborative nature of film. I love the collaborative nature of the art form that we get to go out and work with every day. And I also like being decisive and knowing what I think quickly to help the team. So I think having women have powerful, important decision making roles, you know, we stand on the shoulders of a lot of women and we have a lot of work left to do, but we've also done a lot and I, I love inspiring and giving the younger women around me the biggest wings I can. And nothing is more satisfying, honestly.
- [19:38]
D
Can't disagree with that at all. Becca, do you have one more question?
- [19:41]
B
Okay, well, let, let us just wrap it up. Maybe what, in your opinion to. Actually, this is a two part question. What would you say is the overarching theme of the series? And then follow up to that. Maybe if you had to choose the most important thing that the audience should take from the show, what would that be?
- [20:03]
C
So the tagline on our poster for the American Revolution is a story 250 years in the making. America is a great experiment. We are still getting our sea legs. Our country changes all the time in small and big ways. I think it is a deeply inspiring, informative, instructive, complicated, surprising, exciting and honestly, deeply patriotic story. We have a really, really special country. We need to take good care of it.
- [20:32]
B
Thank you so much for being here.
- [20:37]
D
Yes, thank you so much.
- [20:39]
B
Thanks so much for listening. Bye.