Ken Burns Reopens America’s Founding Wounds in ‘The American Revolution’

From left: Director Sarah Botstein. Scenes from PBS’ The American Revolution. Courtesy of Alvin Kean Wong; Mike Doyle; Courtesy of PBS

In his latest documentary, The American Revolution, Emmy-winning filmmaker Ken Burns argues that America’s founding conflict was not a tidy, unanimous march toward independence, but a messy, agonizing civil war defined as much by its profound contradictions as its high ideals.

“We’re obviously very polarized right now, but we were divided at our founding, and we’ve been divided at every celebration of the American Revolution,” says Sarah Botstein, who co-directed the sweeping six-part, 12-hour docuseries with Burns and David Schmidt. “We are a complicated country. We are not quite sure what kind of country we want to be, and we are continuously debating and swaying one view to the other. That is true in pretty much all of American history.”

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More than nine years in the making, American Revolution became the first PBS title to crack Nielsen’s top 10 streaming ratings. The miniseries spans from the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754 through the Revolutionary War and its aftermath, detailing the rising colonial resistance to British rule along the way.

American Revolution features more than 400 voices and nearly 200 first-person accounts read by more than 50 actors, including Meryl Streep, Samuel L. Jackson and Tom Hanks. “There’s been so much new history written specifically since 1976, [with] different generations of scholars looking at different parts of the history and bringing different people to life through their letters and diaries,” Botstein says, also crediting the extensive research of show writer Geoffrey C. Ward.

Alongside familiar figures like the Founding Fathers, the filmmakers sought to elevate the stories of women, children and people of color, who Botstein emphasizes were already “baked into the history” of America’s founding. The series examines how Black and Indigenous peoples were largely forced to fight against their own interests — enslaved Black people were exploited for freedom by both sides, while Native nations faced accelerated expansion, genocide and cultural erasure regardless of the alliance they chose.

“The American Revolution is obviously in part about breaking away from a mother country and a very serious civil war where families and communities were torn apart,” Botstein says, “but it was also a war for the prize of North America and what is and should be remembered as Indian land.”

Having “spent a lot of my professional life considering the cost of war,” Botstein says, she thinks her work on Burns’ Vietnam War and World War II docs helped her “think about ways to visualize a war that seems very far away and sanitized in our history books.” This effort to challenge sanitized narratives feels timely as the nation reexamines how its foundational stories are told: “We have a responsibility to every generation to tell good history so they can understand the geopolitics of where we are right now.”

This story first appeared in a July stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.