I Spent Two Hours With Ken Burns Talking About the American Revolution, and Now I’m a History Nerd

The acclaimed filmmaker’s 12-hour PBS documentary on America’s beginnings is a captivating look at the fear, risk and courage that forged a country

Eric Spitznagel,

AARP

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Published November 14, 2025

ken burns posing for an outdoor portrait in a black jacket

In making “The American Revolution” documentary, Ken Burns said he worked hard not to over-romanticize the war. “There’s always a danger of descending into the sentimental stuff.”

Chris Buck

Every Fourth of July for 35 years, Ken Burns clears his throat and reads from the Declaration of Independence. Before anyone is allowed to lift a fork at the long table in his sprawling white Colonial home in Walpole, New Hampshire, they listen as the acclaimed documentarian recites from the 249-year-old document. It only takes a few minutes. “I have four daughters — the oldest is 42 — and that’s probably their main memory of the Fourth of July,” he says.

ken burns reading the declaration of independence

Burns reads the Declaration of Independence during every Fourth of July cookout with his family.

Courtesy Ken Burns

He worries that few people know the document by heart, so he made sure his kids would never forget it. “I don’t read all the complaints [the list of 27 grievances against King George III],” he says. “But I read the beautiful setup and the dismount.”

ken burns holding a pocket size copy of the united states constitution

Burns keeps a copy of the United States Constitution in his pocket.

Chris Buck

His admiration for America’s early years doesn’t stop there. Burns, 72, also carries a small copy of the Constitution of the United States in his pocket.

That annual ritual of reading aloud the sacred document — both a celebration and a sobering second look — captures the spirit of Burns’s new documentary, The American Revolution, codirected with longtime collaborators Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. It’s a six-episode, 12-hour series that premieres Sunday, Nov. 16 on PBS, with new episodes nightly through Friday, Nov. 21. (It can also be streamed on PBS.org and the PBS app starting Nov. 16.)

It isn’t just another trot past familiar statues. The filmmaker behind landmark documentaries about the Civil War, baseball, jazz, the Vietnam War, national parks, and dozens other explorations of American identity told AARP during a wide-ranging conversation by phone and video, “You think our country is divided now? Back then it was really divided. It was a revolution superimposed by a civil war, superimposed by a global war.”

The Revolution was an against-all-odds gamble: a scrappy collection of colonies taking on the world’s most powerful empire. In 1776, barely 2.5 million people lived in the colonies, and they were facing down the British Army and Navy at their peak. The fighting was vicious and unrelenting. Roughly 6,800 Americans were killed in action, thousands more were wounded, and disease and prison ships pushed American deaths toward 25,000 — staggering losses for a nation not yet born.

A passion that’s contagious

Talking with Burns is like sitting down with the most captivating history professor you ever had, the one whose office hours would stretch into the evening because he couldn’t stop pulling books off the shelf to illustrate a point. During our conversation, scheduled for just 15 minutes, Burns lost track of time entirely. Two hours disappeared as he dove into the minutiae of Washington’s tactical decisions, the psychological warfare of the prison ships, and the revolutionary fervor that swept through taverns and town squares.

“Please don’t give this away,” he says at one point, leaning in conspiratorially before revealing a narrative twist in Episode 4, involving the second career of teenage fifer John Greenwood, who went on to become George Washington’s dentist — as if there were still spoilers to be had from a 250-year-old war. Yet there are.

the 1851 painting washington crossing the delaware by emanuel leutze

"Washington Crossing the Delaware." Painting by Emanuel Leutze, 1851.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Courtesy Ken Burns

It’s this quality — this genuine, childlike wonder at history’s drama — that makes Burns such a magnetic storyteller. He talks about the Revolution like he’s describing a thriller he just binged last weekend, unable to contain his excitement about what happens next.

The past isn’t distant to Burns. It’s urgent, immediate and bursting with lessons we’re somehow still learning.

From body count to big questions

Burns’s curiosity hasn’t dimmed with age. If anything, it’s sharpened. The American Revolution project took a decade, he says, and demanded everything he had learned over the years. For the award-winning filmmaker, this one felt both inevitable and impossible to get right. It’s personal, urgent and, by his own estimation, the most consequential film he’s ever made.

“Every lesson I’ve ever had about filmmaking, it’s all come into play for this movie,” says Burns. To him, commemorating the Revolution should be something more than a museum diorama. It’s a living argument that requires context and humility, exactly the muscles an older mind knows how to use.

The challenge, he says, is to move past the marble and mythology and let real people back into the room. “Everybody knows, or thinks they know, about George Washington. But we tried to make him real.” That meant showing Washington as a man improvising under pressure.

the 1848 painting washington rallying the americans at the battle of princeton by william t ranney

"Washington Rallying the Americans at the Battle of Princeton." Painting by William T. Ranney, 1848.

Princeton University Art Museum/Courtesy Ken Burns

When the Continental Congress tapped Washington to lead the Continental Army in 1775, he was 43 years old, a Virginia planter with military experience, but hardly a proven commander. He’d cut his teeth during the French and Indian War two decades earlier, but leading a ragtag revolutionary army against the British Empire was a different beast entirely. Washington learned on the job, improvising strategies and holding together an army that was perpetually underfed, undersupplied and on the verge of desertion. He lost more battles than he won, but he had such a presence that men followed him across icy rivers and impossible odds.

Burns lights up when discussing these details. “If he’d been caught, the British would have hung him or drawn and quartered him,” he says, his voice rising with intensity. “Just think of any of the richest people in the country right now. We don’t have to name names, but just think of one of the richest people in the country risking their life and entire fortune for an idea about freedom that’s never been attempted before. That wouldn’t happen.”

Our nation was founded “under remarkable circumstances,” he says. “It’s not something we appreciate nearly enough.”

Seeing the Revolution without the soft focus

Burns didn’t want to over-romanticize the war. “There’s always a danger of descending into the sentimental stuff,” he says. “And it’s good to have a clear-eyed view of the fact that, as much as we accept the violence of our Civil War and World War II and the other wars we’ve been involved in, when it comes to the Revolutionary War, we treat it as these white guys from Philadelphia in powdered wigs, thinking great thoughts.”

The American Revolution leans into the sheer brutality of the conflict and its toll across and beyond the continent, rather than a tidy founders-only tale. For Burns, remembering who the war touched meant widening his lens. The series reminds viewers that the Revolution involved not only the 13 colonies on the map we memorized in school, but lives and interests stretching into Britain’s Caribbean holdings, and the enslaved Africans forced into the maelstrom.

“[Harvard historian] Maya Jasanoff says, at the beginning of our third episode, ‘We came out of violence,’” Burns says. “That’s something that gets lost in all the celebrations and victory laps of the anniversary. It’s the stuff we don’t want to think about, because it’s a pretty scary thing.”

a producer speaking to reenactors dressed as soldiers in the american revolution

Coproducer Megan Ruffe speaks with 1st Rhode Island Regiment reenactors.

Jonah Velasco

As he worked on the film, Burns realized this meant accepting that the founders could be messy and paradoxical, with some aspects of their personalities veering into ugly. “You can look at any period and find virtue, but also venality, in someone,” Burns says. “You can find the greedy and the generous. But sometimes these are warring factions within somebody.”

Burns compares his series to Yellowstone, the Kevin Costner drama that ran from 2018 to 2024. “Let me just dissect it for you,” he says, leaning in again. “Costner’s character [John Dutton] is a murderer as well as a good man, right? He loves his family and wants to protect them, but he does it in the most reprehensible ways. These are characters that we’re supposed to root for, even while accepting that they have some very dark tendencies.”

History is full of the same kinds of complicated protagonists, Burns insists. “George Washington was not a murderer, but he did own other human beings. He’s a good guy, but one who comes with a lot of demons.”

Back to where it started

Burns’s own origin story is as American and peripatetic as the subjects he’s chronicled. Born in Brooklyn in 1953 to a pair of scientists — an anthropologist father, Robert, and a biologist mother, Lyla — he and his younger brother, Ric, hopscotched from Saint-Véran, France, to Newark, Delaware, to Ann Arbor, Michigan — wherever a university appointment sent the family.

a cinematographer filming inside of an old barn

Cinematographer Buddy Squires on location in an aging barn at Longview Farm in Perkasie, Pennsylvania.

Graham Deneen

Then came the rupture. Their mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when Burns was 3 and died when he was 11. The loss didn’t close him off; it opened a window. He found movies. “I knew at age 12 I wanted to be a filmmaker,” he says. “I knew at age 18 it was documentary, and by 22 it was American history.”

Hampshire College gave him permission to chase his curiosity to its limits, and PBS gave him a platform. The rest is canon. The Civil War. Baseball. The West. The Vietnam War. The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. Burns’s list of credits reads like a college survey course and plays like a saga. Along the way came the hardware — two Oscar nominations, two Grammys and a shelf of Emmys — and the skeptics. Burns remembers the early doubters telling him no one would sit still for an epic about the 1860s in a short-attention-span world.

“They used to tell me, ‘They’re watching MTV videos,’” Burns says, laughing at the memory. “Well, The Civil War, which came out 35 years ago, is still the highest-rated program in PBS history. So you know what? People can watch kittens with balls of yarn, and they can do this.”

The numbers suggest he chose wisely. Burns’s premieres still pull huge audiences — The Vietnam War had an audience of 9.6 million, more than triple the PBS prime-time averages — and, crucially for Burns, they remain free to anyone with a television or a library card.

A decade in the making

The Revolution itself ambushed him in the edit bay. He hadn’t planned on documenting another war. But in 2015, while cutting his documentary about Vietnam, he found himself staring at a map of the Central Highlands and thinking about Long Island, New York.

ken burns sarah botstein and david schmidt holding a meeting at a table

Burns (lower right) goes over notes with “The American Revolution” codirectors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt during a screening in Walpole, New Hampshire.

Loren Howard

“It was a big 10-part series, which benefited from tons of photographs and newsreel stuff. And I just had some maps. I just got excited about a map we had of the Central Highlands and South Vietnam. And I kind of went, ‘OK, this could be the British moving west in Long Island towards Brooklyn.’ And I just thought, You know what? I’ve been avoiding the Revolutionary War, but we can do it.”

He started work a decade ago, “when Barack Obama still had 13 months to go in his presidency,” Burns says. He kept going for years, not out of strategy but stamina. “I thought, Wow, I guess we’re gonna come out in 2025. That’ll be the 250th anniversary,” he says. “And then, all of a sudden, people are like, ‘Oh, you’re so smart. Timing it for the Semiquincentennial!’ I wish it was that intentional. It just takes a long time to get the story right.”

Assembling voices for the past, Burns reached for the most recognizable ones of the present. “There’s never been a cast list, in any film ever made or any television series ever made, with this amount of talent,” he says. “Admittedly, they’re all off-camera, but they are the most talented people in the universe.” Burns isn’t being hyperbolic; the actors providing voiceovers include Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Samuel L. Jackson, Kenneth Branagh, Laura Linney, Paul Giamatti, Damian Lewis, Morgan Freeman, Domhnall Gleeson, Mandy Patinkin, Liev Schreiber and Matthew Rhys.

a cinematographer filming a reenactment of soldiers in the american revolution

Cinematographer Buddy Squires zooms in on Regiment von Huyn reenactors. During the Revolutionary War, the unit was made up of German mercenaries who fought for the British.

Edgardo Gonzalez

His biggest concern was that the A-listers might distract from the real show. “I told Tom Hanks, who I’ve worked with for nearly 25 years, ‘I could make you George Washington.’ He would have been a great George Washington, but then people would have spent most of their time going, ‘That’s Tom Hanks, he’s George Washington!’ And you don’t want anybody to do that.”

A historian’s delight

Burns is at his most animated when talking to someone who shares his excitement for history. The moment I mentioned getting pulled deeper into Revolutionary War history while prepping for our chat, his energy shifted into overdrive. Suddenly we’re trading observations about Benedict Arnold’s complexity, discussing the strategic brilliance of the Saratoga campaign, and debating whether enough credit has been given to Nathanael Greene’s Southern strategy.

This is Burns in his element: not performing for an audience but engaging with history as a living, breathing conversation. He references obscure historians, offers fascinating details about 18th-century military tactics, and connects dots across centuries with the ease of someone who has spent his entire life immersed in America’s stories.

the crew of the documentary the american revolution setting up a camera outside a historic fort with a rainbow in the background

Cinematographer Buddy Squires and assistant cameraperson Jared Ames on location at Crown Point State Historic Site on Lake Champlain in New York. During the Revolutionary War, the fort was captured by American forces, who seized cannons and other heavy equipment from the British.

Megan Ruffe

It’s clear that for Burns, making documentaries isn’t about packaging history for mass consumption. It’s about sharing his own genuine fascination with our nation’s past, and hoping it’s contagious.

It worked on me. For two weeks following our conversation, I turned into the worst kind of dinner companion: a newly minted history nerd. I’m stopping mid-dishwashing to quiz my wife on Betsy Ambler. I’m rattling off James Forten facts while she’s trying to watch a show. I’m explaining who John Greenwood was like I’ve been waiting my whole life to talk about John Greenwood.

“What happened to you?” my wife asks. What happened is simple: I spent too much time around Ken Burns.

Citizenship, not spectatorship

If The American Revolution is the newest chapter in Burns’s career, its central question — What does it mean to belong to a country? — couldn’t be timelier in a year marked by sharp political divides and mounting unease about American identity and patriotism.

“What does it mean to be a citizen, and what does it mean to be a patriot?” he asks. “‘Patriot’ is a word that predates the Revolution. It was originally a term inherited from the Brits, for somebody who was a supporter of a constitutional form of government. A lot of people call themselves patriots, but I don’t think many of them really know what a patriot really is.”

The Declaration still needles him, and the phrase that’s lodged deepest is “the pursuit of happiness.” “I don’t think I really grasped it when I was younger,” Burns says. “But what the ‘pursuit of happiness’ meant, I think, was lifelong learning. It means you have to continue to educate yourself and make sure you’re fully aware of what’s a fact and what’s a myth.”

people dressed as soldiers in the american revolution rowing a wooden boat at night, followed by a modern boat with lights on it

Fort Ticonderoga interpretive staff row a hand-built, reconstructed batteau on Lake Champlain, while cinematographer Buddy Squires films from a chase boat.

Vicky Lee

That ethic is local before it’s national. “It means voting,” he says. “It means going to the school board. It means going to the city county. It means showing up and being a part of the community.” Since 1979, Burns has driven to the town hall in Walpole, New Hampshire, in a green Chevy van, accompanied by the woman who would become his wife, to do their civic duties. “Our town meetings are big deals,” he says, “even if it’s just about buying a new fire truck.”

For his next epic, the gears are already turning. “It’s going to be about the Reconstruction era,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about it for 35 years, and we’re finally going to do it.” But when The American Revolution airs, he’ll be right where he’s always been: with the rest of us, watching together.

“There’s something special about watching it at the same time that other people across the world are watching the same thing. I feel like that’s been lost in this world of streaming. We don’t have as many shared experiences.”

Twelve hours or not, he wants suspense. “The trick to making a great documentary about history,” he says with a wry smile, “is always making people think it might not turn out the way they already know it did.” He laughs. “That’s what I want more than anything. Can I get an audience to say, ‘Oh my God, are we going to win?’”

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