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.”
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.
