Ken Burns has produced nearly all of his documentaries with PBS—over 30 films and series spanning four decades—and his upcoming series on the Revolutionary War is no different.
The six-part, 12-hour The American Revolution, which Burns directed alongside Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, aims to present our country’s founding struggle as more complex and less sanitized than traditional historical accounts, weaving together perspectives of not just founding fathers and British generals but women, everyday militiamen, Native Americans, enslaved people, and civilians caught in the crossfire.
What is different this time, however, is the existential threat facing the platform that has hosted Burns’ work since his 1981 debut, Brooklyn Bridge. The publicity cycle for Burns’ latest work, which premieres in November to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War’s beginning, falls just after President Trump signed an executive order instructing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop funding for PBS, which Trump calls “biased” and “woke propaganda.” It’s the latest in a decades-long battle over public broadcasting, but one that PBS CEO Paula Kerger recently called an “all-out effort to take us out.”
It’s hard to miss the irony: a documentary about the birth of American democracy launching on a network fighting for its own survival in a deeply divided nation.
Burns was in Raleigh this week for a preview screening at the Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts and to tape an interview with PBS NC. Afterward, I had ten minutes with the 17-time Emmy winner, and he almost immediately brought up the importance of local public media stations in preserving America’s stories from the “bottom up.”
KEN BURNS: Excuse me for one second. I just have a daughter that needs a little bit of attention. [Types out a text]. She just got home from school.
INDY: How old is she?
Fourteen, my youngest. I have four daughters. …You know that you’re the dominant species, right? The whole Adam and Eve thing is bullshit. God does not make the non-reproducing species first, and the rest is just a patriarchal conspiracy. This is what I’ve learned from my daughters. I mean, they haven’t said that to me. I’ve said that to them, but I’ve learned by observation.
I look forward to that docu-series.
[Burns laughs.]
As a local journalist, especially recently, I am spending a lot of time trying to identify and preserve stories that feel like they’re being overlooked. I know that’s something that you’ve done in this series.
I’ve tried, in all the series, to do a bottom-up as well as top-down perspective. I don’t want that unforgiving revisionism—to throw out the top-down version, which often happens with revisionism, saying it’s only this, that the other stuff doesn’t matter. It does matter. Everything matters. The problem is, for too long, it’s just been a top-down story in American history: the sequence of presidential administrations punctuated by wars. It’s much more interesting and more complicated than that.
I spent my entire professional life making films that are broadcast on PBS. I’m independent. I don’t work for any particular station. But all of them go there, because they’re invested locally. It’s the largest television network in the country; it has 330 stations, and they’re the ones that are keeping local news alive and local stories alive. It’s very much bottom-up. And so there’s something that I recognize, I feel a kind of connection to that way of doing it.
I live in rural New Hampshire. I moved out of [New York City]. I assumed that, [in] becoming a documentary filmmaker, strike one, on PBS, strike two, in American history, strike three—that I had just taken a vow of anonymity and poverty. I’m very happy to tell you that neither has happened, but I still live in the same house I moved to, sleeping in the same bedroom that I moved to, in this tiny village in New Hampshire, where I could live for nothing because I was willing to give up the stuff in order to be able to tell those those kind of local stories.
As news becomes so homogenized and so corporatized, sometimes the PBS station is the only local news there is. Somebody’s got to be covering the school board. Somebody’s got to be covering the zoning board. Somebody’s got to be covering, ‘there’s something fishy about the relationship between this person and this person and that development that’s going on out of town,’ or just the lives of ordinary people who are caught up in the indifference, the icy indifference, of incipient authoritarianism.
As you were doing research for this project and for others, did you have a sense that these “overlooked” stories were being disseminated and shared among people at the time, but then filtered out over history, by the people writing the–
I don’t think there’s a conspiracy. I know what you mean. These stories are told. It’s just that the ease and simplification for teaching has mainly been the reductionist one.
I mean, we don’t mention Betsy Ross in our film. We say we don’t know who made the first flag. That’s what we say, because we don’t know who made the first one. So I think that it’s not so much a conspiracy, but it’s just, consider who’s telling it and what’s going on. These stories have been around. People have been reading them. Scholars have been including them. It’s our job, when we decide to do something like this, to spend the nearly 10 years to deep dive into the scholarship, to go back to the primary sources to find more stuff, and to then share them without, sort of, without a concern.
Betsy Ambler’s in [the series]. She’s 10 years old when the war begins and 16 when it ends. Her family’s from Yorktown, and that’s an important place. But they’re refugees, and their circumstances—they’re pretty well-to-do, and their circumstances are greatly diminished. There’s a 14-year-old kid from Boston who joins the militia, the Patriot militia, and there’s a 15-year-old kid who joins the Continental Army. These are great stories to tell, and there are women all up and down this story, and there are Native Americans, and there are free Blacks, and there are enslaved Black people who have a particularly intensive stake in the outcomes.
I have a neon sign in my editing room in cursive. It’s been there for years and years, and it says, ‘it’s complicated,’ that’s it. It’s there to remind me and everyone else that it’s super complicated, this whole business. There isn’t a filmmaker, or conversely, a journalist, who—when you have a beautiful sentence or a scene that works, you don’t want to touch it. But your dictum, in your business, is to kill the little darlings, the sentences you’re most proud of, and ours is to have the courage to open up those scenes and say, ‘I’ve learned contradictory information.’ It may destabilize what works about the scene, but it ultimately serves the purposes of a much more complicated and accurate thing.
Your dictum, in your business, is to kill the little darlings, the sentences you’re most proud of, and ours is to have the courage to open up those scenes and say, ‘I’ve learned contradictory information.’ It may destabilize what works about the scene, but it ultimately serves the purposes of a much more complicated and accurate thing.”
But it is super complicated. I was saying [during the PBS interview today] that Wynton Marsalis said to us, in our film on jazz, that sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. I think it’s incumbent upon us, particularly now, when we live in a computer age where everything’s a one or a zero, and a political world in which something is either right or wrong, red state or blue state, to be able to tolerate the contradictions that exist and that we know in our own friends and our own spouses and our own children, and to be able to say, ‘Why can’t I have my history in the same way?’
Benedict Arnold is introduced in the first seconds of episode two, and it isn’t until about 40 percent of the way through episode six that you find out that he’s Benedict Arnold. Up to that point, he’s Benedict Arnold, one of our fightin’-est generals, and he’s a hero at Quebec and an even greater hero at Saratoga, and Washington loves him.
And then you find out what happens, and that’s possible to, even in the case of George Washington, understand that he’s a deeply flawed human being, as we all are, who’s rash, who makes a lot of mistakes, and without whom we would not have a country, period full stop. We’re not supposed to say that. He’s not supposed to be a great man, capital G, capital M, having that kind of primacy in the story anymore. But I have two black historians in a row saying, without him, there’s no United States.
Do you have a favorite president?
Abraham Lincoln.
As you were going through primary sources, what did you learn or notice about how people preserved the history around them as it was happening?
It’s pretty amazing. The young girl, Betsy Ambler from Yorktown, actually wrote a memoir in the early 19th century about the revolution days to her younger sister, who was born after July 4th. His father called [the younger sister] his only independent daughter. She was too young to remember, so [Betsy] wrote this beautiful memoir in which they go back to Yorktown. Before the final drama takes place, they’re in reduced circumstances, so they’re in a tiny shack on the outskirts of town, not their big former mansion in town. And she says at one point that ‘We were playing by the most novelous river, and we would almost fancy ourselves heroines.’ It’s so beautiful.
What you realize is the great gift of how articulate and literate people were. We believe, historians believe, that American colonies were—only Scandinavians were more literate than us. That [literacy] provides us with a record, whether it’s a diary, or a memoir after the fact, or a correspondence, say, between Abigail and John Adams, which is just amazing, or some of the official business of the people considering the ideas at the Constitutional Convention.
We benefit so much from the extraordinary use of language. Right now we’re down to, like, ‘r u ok,’ instead of– just go back and read the first sentence of the Declaration [of Independence]. It’s basically saying, ‘we kind of owe you an explanation for what we’re about to do.’ It’s a beautiful sentence. The second sentence is the most important sentence besides ‘I love you’ in the English language—“We hold these truths to be self-evident”—but go back and read the other one, because it’s just so gorgeously written. It’s almost like a piece of music. And the use of language then becomes one of our great secret weapons.
We’re a visual medium, but in the beginning is the word. Our script, in this case it’s written by Jeff Ward, but it’s tightened and polished by all of us, especially me, in the editing room. It’s really tight and it’s economical. As long as 12 hours may seem, it is economical. We have just been exposed to great writing, telling the history of America, and we hope that our own work is equal to at least representing it.
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