Empire: World History - 375. Ken Burns on the American Revolution and Empire

Episode Date: July 4, 2026

How did the United States change from a revolutionary experiment into a global empire? Was the American Revolution really a civil war over Native American land? Why was George Washington known as the ‘Town Destroyer’? How do the Civil War and Vietnam continue to haunt America?  Anita is joined by legendary filmmaker Ken Burns to discuss his fifty-year career documenting the American story and the nation’s dark imperial past. Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnden. Now, as the United States marks its 250th birthday this July, we really wanted to sit with somebody who has spent his entire professional life thinking about what America is, what it promised, what it actually delivered. Ken Burns has 50 years on the clock documenting the American story from the inside.

He's covered the Civil War, jazz, baseball, Vietnam, the national parks, the American Buffalo, and the revolution itself. And no surprise then that he's earned the title, America's Historian. Ken, a very warm welcome to Empire. Thank you. It's great to be with you, Anita. How does that fit America's historian? I mean, is that a coat that's comfortable? No.

I live in a tiny little village in New Hampshire, and all of the notoriety plus 50 cents gets your cup of coffee. You know what I mean? It just doesn't matter. I have in my kitchen a framed New Yorker cartoon that shows three men standing in hell, the flames licking up around them. And one guy says to the other two, apparently my over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing. And of course they don't. So I'm interested in trying to figure out how to tell complicated stories that resist the temptation,

which is everywhere to sort of engage in a dialectic or to say that it's a, you know, an on-off switch, good or bad. And of course, the real stories are way more nuanced. There's no opposites like that in nature. Do you think Americans know, and I mean really know their history? No. Yeah. And it's something that, because we're relatively young, for a long time, we didn't feel that. We sort of burned it behind us like rocket fuel, kind of proud of stuff, taking superficials. In the opening of the American Revolution, the scholar Maya Jasanoff says that our relationship to it is detached and unreal. And she is in sort of this incredibly important part in the opening of the film because, and we're showing Washington crossing the Delaware, you know, standing up in the boat.

Nobody would stand up in a boat in the middle of the snowstorm in an ice-clogged Delaware River, right? So all of a sudden our relationship with it is superficial. The revolution is encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality. and nostalgia, we focus on the big ideas that take place in Philadelphia, which is why we're celebrating the Fourth of July. The revolution had started, you know, 15 months earlier in Lexington, Massachusetts, right? 15 months earlier. And it's not going to end until the semi-quincentennial of the Treaty of Paris will be in 233. Right? So we've got a big, huge period in which Americans are woefully ignorant of it. And as Jasenov,

says again at the opening of our third episode that we do a disservice when we sort of think it's just about great men signing documents. She said the United States is born in violence. So one of the reasons to do the series is to tell the complete story, can't be complete, but as complete as you can, as comprehensive as you can, about this revolution, which is also a civil war, like the Grand Canyon, it's got lots of layers. See, you're doing empire bingo now and just ticking boxes. as you go, Maya Jastanoff is a great friend of this podcast and has been on many times. She's a great friend of our series. She did an extraordinary job reminding us of the darker

interiors of the struggle for the revolution. And that's, it's important to wean people from that idealized version. Okay. So, I mean, you touched on a thing that has been much in our mind here on this podcast. The American Revolution is a paradox wrapped up in an enigma, wrapped up in confusion for many of us who aren't Americans. Because on the one hand, as you say, it's described as a war of independence from an empire. On the other, some people feel that it's the beginning of an American empire. I mean, where do you sit with that? It most definitely is. I just would resist the temptation to create a dialectic on the one hand, on the other. It is all those things and many, many more things. And what you want to do is use the power of narrative to

disentangle from the dialectic and to understand it for all the competing interests. Look, when they met in Philadelphia, they didn't call their organization the Eastern Seaboard Congress, nor did the Eastern Seaboard Congress put George Washington in charge of the Eastern Seaboard Army. They called it the Continental Congress and the Continental Army. They knew where they were going and what they wanted. And at the end of the revolution, when the states are beginning to fall apart and disagree, Washington is in anguish, you're drowning our rising empire in blood. He admits that people

were looking to the West. They knew that California was out there and they wanted it all. And so while you can get a good grade in school in America, if you say the reason the revolution happened was taxes and representation, you have to add land because at the heart of it is the land. It's the fifth global war over the prize of North America. And when you say prize, you mean land, and when you mean land, you mean Native American land. And you cannot escape a story of the revolution without engaging then. You also, it's a struggle for idealism, for freedom, for liberty, and yet a quarter of the population, or a fifth of the population, is enslaved. These are all important. Half the population will not be enfranchised by these radical ideas.

So, I mean, we'll get into those in more detail. But another thing you sort of touched on, and I just, just let's ask the simple question, because I know you're going to say it's not a simple answer. Was the American revolution, then a civil war that got out of hand, or was it more akin to a world war? I mean, after all, you've got all these other countries wading in. Yeah, it's a good question.

It is first a revolution against the ruling British. It is a priori, therefore, a civil war because while Americans think that the bad guys are 3,000 miles

across the ocean, there are are many people, at least a fifth, maybe a quarter, and in some places, a majority of the population, who are understandably loyalist. And then you have lots of other people who are trying to make decisions, free and enslaved, black people about what side to fit on, Native American people who have been assimilated or are coexisting, those on the Western border that are hoping to forestall the further usurpation of their land. This is great drama at many, many levels. So it's all those things. It's first and foremost a revolution.

And what happens is that this disagreement, this argument between British citizens, gets broken out because it's the Enlightenment into natural rights. So instead of saying, you're wrong and I'm right, they're saying we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. They meant white men of property, but everybody got it at the moment. Everybody wanted it. Native Americans, women, enslaved and free blacks, understood that it also applied to them. There's a man that we follow, boy, actually, who hears the first reading of the Declaration, a free black kid in Philadelphia. And he joins the revolution, and he fights for that.

He doesn't, for a second thing, it doesn't apply to him. He's captured. He has a chance to go to England and be the playmate of the ship captain's son. He says no, and he's sent to a prison ship in harbor. And later on, he becomes very wealthy in the Merchant Marines and supports the growing abolition movement in funding the first abolitionist paper, the Liberator. And his granddaughter goes down during the Civil War to help newly freed black people in territory. The Union Army has claimed to restart their lives, to start farms and churches and schools. It's an amazing thing that happens.

That's why we say in the very beginning, the most consequential revolution in history, without a doubt, because it is all of those things. You mentioned Washington using the term empire. And he does it again and again and again. It's only in our United character as an empire that our independence is acknowledged. He writes to Lafayette. He uses the word independence. He uses it in a letter to Hamilton. I mean, I did my homework here and it kept coming up again and again. In his head, is he then thinking that actually we are going to be a counterbalance to the British Empire. We will be an American empire, you know, beyond sea to shining sea. So I think that no, in the sense of the global chess, they understand that they wish to govern

themselves. And so there is, in Washington, he's the one who coins the phrase, avoid foreign entanglements. There is not so much an isolationist thing, but a sense that we need to focus on how we develop this new thing in the world. Everybody is more or less up to this point a subject. And he is, we are creating this thing in which there are. citizens, that with enormous responsibilities. But at the heart of it is this vision that it's not back to Europe and the old entanglements and the old things, countries with one single established

religion, the First Amendment, oh, it's about freedom of speech or freedom to redress agreements. It is those things, but those are the second and third things of the First Amendment. The first is that we will make no establishment of a religion because they saw what religions had sponsored in the past. So there's this attempt to sort of focus on how human beings, you know, beings might govern themselves, and at the same time, knowing that the Pacific Ocean is way out there and wanting everything between it. And I suppose it's easy to think reductively about this. That's right.

This was about the Americans, and it was about the British. But let's not forget, the French waded in, the Dutch waded in, the Spanish had their little go as well. I mean, they weren't involved where they can because of a love of liberty. There are other things going on here. That's a really, really wonderful point. No, and this is what, it's not just the patriots and the British. It's a very, very complex geopolitical dynamic, as you said, the Dutch and French and Spanish are involved. And if they'd won, or the British had won, they'd been after the whole continent, too.

It's not like inevitable destruction. I would like to add that there are many Native American nations that are on that level. And we say that in the opening sentence of the main introduction of the film, that it would engage more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American. Because for more than 150 years, many of these tribes have been players economically, militarily, diplomatically on a world stage. They've been to London. They've been to Paris. They've been to Madrid.

They know what's going on in the world. And they are active players in it. And I think we just tend to say them and just this. And so I would say that a tribe like the Shawnee are. as important as the colony of Massachusetts, later the state or Virginia, or for that matter, England or France, and that we've tried to in this series understand them as real and important and separate and distinct. You can, you know, it's the same kind of superficial way we refer to Africa as if it's one place, right? It's like Europeans would be appalled if they

were just considered one thing when, of course, they have distinct, you know, centuries, millennia old identities, right? So we were trying to do the same thing. These are people who have six or 700 generations of experience in North America. And the Europeans have, what, seven or eight? One of the things, I suppose, that adds to the complexity of this. And I just wonder, as a filmmaker, how you deal with it, is that to some of the native population, Washington was no hero at all. I mean, they called him town destroyer, didn't they? Yeah. Now, in an American school, would American kids know that, for example?

No, no. In fact, they understand that many native tribes fought with the British. So they're already opposed not to Washington, but to this effort. They think, I think falsely, that if they ally with the British, they can foresaw who they call the hated Bostonians or the Yankees or whatever for me. taking their property. If the British should one, they'd be all about taking their property as well and settling it just under the name of their British colony. The Washington thing that you refer to is has to do with the mostly upstate New York, six tribes of the Odinashone, the Iroquois Confederacy, the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, and Mohawk people who have

formed their own kind of union well, you know, for more than 150 years. And what happens is as the revolution is going on and settlers are moving into Indian territory. They fight back. And the governors of New York and Pennsylvania are adamant that Washington do something. And he sent a general from New Hampshire where I live named Sullivan to that area telling them to just destroy everything. And that's where it comes from. And it becomes, in a way, a scouting expedition for future white settlement after destroying 40 or 50 separate Indian towns. And let me say that these villages are, I mean, everybody has this romanticized idea of tepees. That's across the Mississippi and the plains.

These people, there are some villages that you would go into that you, until you saw somebody, you wouldn't know who occupied it, whether they were European settlers or there were panes of glass, there's clabbard houses, their chimneys. I mean, we have to extend and we never do to Native Americans' dimensions and not just as described in the negative by what they feel about George Washington. The important thing is their own being and their own. existence. Well, I mean, you've sort of said they're not part of the story. They're the heart of the story, I think. As are the free and enslaved black people who daily remind us. I mean, when those

people start arguing that what the British have done has enslaved them by their tyranny, they are also signaling, you know, not only a great hypocrisy, which we always like to focus on, but they're also signaling to those people that are serving them at that moment, the fact that the issue is about slavery. You know, as Jane Kaminsky, a former Harvard professor now, the head of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, says, the liberty talk is leaky. Everybody hears it. And everybody wants it because, of course, everybody does want liberty. Nobody wants to be a subject. Nobody wants to be enslaved. When you're a mid-sized business, you need every competitive advantage you can get. Like an AI solution that works for you, not against you. SAP grow is built

with AI embedded at its core, working across every system. And it's ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow. AI Cloud ERP for any size business. Thinking, you know, back to your civil war. And that aired in 1990. And I think it's like 40 million Americans watched that, which is, you know, just an astonishing thing. Way more now for the revolution.

That's unbelievable. That's fabulous. Broadcast. but streaming didn't exist then. So we've picked up, you know, millions and millions of viewers from streaming. Well, I mean, it's a massive accolade. 35 years later, here we are. And, you know, there are arguments on both sides of the pond about, you know,

what is seemly to discuss, arguments on your side of the pond about, you know, Confederate monuments, 1619 project, what gets taught in schools. Immigrants. All of that. And, you know, we have a similar mirror image here about whether it's right. and proper to talk about, you know, the depredations, say, of the British Empire or the Rade. On your side of the pond, do you think Americans understand their civil war better than they did when you brought out the film in 1990, or is it actually worse? I hope so. I think that

there had been a lot of dissembling that had taken place over the decades. The, you know, Churchill famously said among, I'm sure, thousands of other people, that the victors write the history. But in fact, the Confederates, the losers, wrote the history of the Civil War, and they post-Civil War period, which we know is Reconstruction, a subject that I'm working on right now, a locally grown terrorist organization like ISIS or Al-Qaeda called the Ku Klux Klanz are the heroes of this period, and that Reconstruction was bad, its collapse was good, when in fact the opposite is true. And so you have a view of the Civil War as not being about slavery. And yet it's, you know, states' rights or nullification or this sort of thing or that sort of thing. And yet, if you go to the South Carolina Articles of Secession that came out just before Christmas in 1860 after Abraham Lincoln was elected the month before, it does not mention states' rights. It does not mention nullification. But it mentions slavery over and over again.

And I think our series, if it did anything, was to center the fact that Lithuanian. not kid ourselves anymore, it's about slavery, and then proceed to tell the dark interiors as what would have been called of the story. Yeah. As we do here in the revolution, it's about battles as well as, you know, great documents and thoughts signed in Philadelphia. I think you've said somewhere along the line that the Civil War is the central trauma of American life and everything else flows from it.

Yeah. If that's true, then why does America keep re-fighting? you know, the civil war in many ways. You've answered the wrong question. What is the central trauma, but a thing that continually is, if it's an individual, say, my mother died when I was 11 years old. I spent the seven or eight years before that watching her die. It was incredibly traumatic and incredibly formative. Look what I do for a living. My late father-in-law, an eminent psychologist, said, I wake the dead. I make Abraham Lincoln come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? He told me at one point in the middle of a crisis.

trauma occurs and recurs. This is the great beauty of literature and art. Your own William Shakespeare has told this over and over again. Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, who may have written a great American novel. Remember, it goes from Tierra del Fuego to the North Pole, those who call themselves Americans in a hundred years of solitude, the inescapability of these things. Of course, here we are a country founded four score and five years before on the idea that all men are created equal. And yet at that moment in 1861, before the guns opened up on Fort Sumter, four million Americans were owned by other Americans. There are a group of people who have the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land. What do you think that's going to do?

No, I get it. I do get that. I mean, I get it. And I love the parallel. But, you know, with traumas, and I am sorry, you know, to lose a parent at such a young age is an awful thing. But people then, you know, from trauma, you can get closure. And I wonder if you look at America. You don't get closure.

The half-life of grief is endless, but you do something productive with it, as I've tried to do with my life. But it doesn't mean that's ever present. Or in the case of a country in which you have so many millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of manifestations, that these old tropes aren't continually doing it. And this is not an American phenomenon. This is a human phenomenon. Let's talk about some of your other enormous success. Your Vietnam film, I would say, is probably the most politically courageous thing that you've made.

And you gave voice to the North Vietnamese in it. Was Vietnam, do you think, the moment that America's imperial project became visible to itself? And what did that do to Americans? Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I would suggest with the revolution that the America's imperial project begins with the subjugation of 300 Native American nations that make up what is the continental United States. But yeah, I think there was an interesting lie at the heart of all of that, you know, many, many years of struggle over Vietnam and that it was important to speak to it.

And I think when you're dealing with war, it's important to know the universality of the experience of war. So often we would pair a Marine or an army guy with a North Vietnamese soldier or a Vietam soldier, saying almost exactly the same thing about either that exact moment or more importantly about the general experience of war. The introduction to that long and complex introduction to that series, which is 10 episodes and 18 hours, comes from a North Vietnamese soldier, Baldeen, who said, you know, people, the only people who want to know who won and who lost are the people who don't fight. You know, I often think L.B.J. gets a rough deal from this.

He does. It is. It's a fascinating, tragic figure. It is. It's Shakespearean tragedy, and we're now working on a film called LBJ and the Great Society, because after Vietnam, it was so clear that we had, not dismissed, but we had covered his domestic agenda, his most impressive domestic agenda in one sentence and one shot, a beautiful picture of him in the White House admiring a portrait of LBJ. I mean, he was called Lyndon Johnson, because FDR had become FDR. He wanted to be LBJ. And so there's a picture of him looking at FDR, I should say, and it's, uh, Wonderful. And at that point, I said I want to do something on LBJ too. Well, I'm delighted to hear that. I mean, just while we're chatting, because I can't wait for your film to come out. I'm anxious to see it. It's going to be amazing. But how should we look at LBJ today, do you think? As the complex figure that he is, as the tragic figure, how do you look at Hamlet today? You know, I mean, he alone passed the Civil Rights Act. His predecessor who proposed it, coming to the subject of civil rights very late, would not have had the political muscle, I don't think, to be able to pass it. He, as a southerner, could,

as well as the Voting Rights Act. And he understood what the political calculus would be. He's incredibly powerful and amazing person, difficult. Obviously, he went to Kennedy's foreign policy apparatus, McNamara and Rusk and others, and said, I need you more than he needed you. And the buck stops there. He's responsible for that. He's the guy who put boots on the ground, although this is euphemistic. Kennedy inherited 700 military advisors from Eisenhower when he was assassinated. There was 17,000 advisors. And it was, you know, fully a year and a half later in March of 65 that Johnson felt

from his mandate that he would put boots on the ground, Marines and Armymen, although they were already there. But this was sort of making it legitimate. There's a great tragedy to the foreign policy blender that it was. and therefore, but you need to sort of see him in the hole and understand the complexity of it. It was so great is that he, like Nixon, had a taping system in the Oval Office. And what's even more spectacular is that his wife, Lady Bird, every night, took out a small reel-to-reel tape recorder and recorded a journal, which we also have. So we like to think that when he lost the New Hampshire primary in 1968, he didn't lose it.

He won 60% of the vote. but McCarthy got an unexpected 40% of the vote. That's Eugene McCarthy, not Joseph McCarthy. And he then said, I'm not running for re-election. But she had predicted back in 65, when he put boots on the ground, Lyndon's not going to run again. So now all of a sudden we have in these tapes that have been sitting there for scholars to listen to, perhaps the biggest evidence of her extraordinary power,

despite the fact we like to talk about how his extramarital affairs, was an incredible, you know, blow to her. I suppose when I think about, you know, the tragedy of the man is that he is often the boogeyman for, you know, disastrous foreign policy and foreign adventurism and others. You know, Teddy Roosevelt, I mean, I remember your American Buffalo film. It had that absolutely devastating, Roosevelt quoting it. You know, the Buffalo's extinction would. And I think this is the right question.

go a long way to solving our Indian problem. Now, he gets away really lightly in the Pantheon. Why? Not in our Roosevelt series, though. Okay, no, I re-watch that last night, by the way. I think four episodes in one sitting. Oh, my goodness. But why does he get away so lightly?

I think his personality is so attractive to so many people who tend to be the ones that sort of define what's good history and bad. His fifth cousin, Franklin, is the much more important present. We're super lucky that there wasn't a war on T.R.'s watch. He's a wonderful present. He's an amazing person. But it is, he reflects the eugenics of the period. He reflects the racism of the period.

He famously, everybody wants to point out, invited, you know, Booker T. Washington to the White House. He got so much grief about it. He never invited another black person to the White House. So while if you can edit this thing, then it becomes this symbol of his extraordinary courage. If you expand the lens out, then you realize that he also caved to the political pressure of what that meant and could have meant for the lives of black people in America. Yeah, it's funny because there's sometimes, you know, TV chewing gum that I enjoy putting in my head is blue bloods. So you've got Tom Selleck who just reveres, you know, Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt and wants to emulate him.

and there are pictures of him as if he's the quintessential president. But he may not have been president at a time of war, but 1898, you've got his fingerprints on lots and lots of things. The Philippines, they're more than Puerto Rico, Cuba. The Spanish-American War is certainly not something that he started, but he certainly was delighted, as he would say, to help finish it. Yeah, and, you know, people like Mark Twain, you've made films about him as well.

even at the time they were famously opposed to the Philippines war. Well, Twain has a statement. I mean, Twain rarely wrote a bad sentence, but he said he didn't want the Eagles Talon, meaning the American Eagles Talon in any other nation. He's, of course, forgetting what had taken place in our or spreading the continent with regard to native nations. He had conveniently overlooked that, despite being the person who invented American literature with Huckleberry Finn and his willingness to take on the twin themes of America,

which are space, not outer, but the physical size of the place and race. I mean, it's obvious. I've watched so much of your work. Thank you so much. No, not at all. I'm honored by your attention. Well, thank you for making it. Is it true, you do not write a script before you start?

filming. Yeah, what we like to do is have the left hand not know what the right hand is doing. We want to go out and interview people. We have never, as many colleagues I have in working on other films have done, where you go to a scholar or somebody and you say, can you get me from paragraph two to paragraph three on page six of episode five? Every time you see a talking head in our film, it's a happy accident of location. And so you want to do these interviews. You want to film things unconcerned with whether you're filming a script and you want to be able to write if you're the writer, unafraid of whether there's images to show. Sometimes you end up not having images and you find new ways, new equivalencies to do it. And other times the fact, the stuff that you have

filmed suggests new things to write. And it's, it makes it longer, more attenuated, I suppose, but it makes it fresher and we're cordial to the end. Normally a production is X amount of time for research and writing. You know, the script is produced. It's written in stone like it's come down from Mount Sinai. It informs the, you know, the editing and the shooting and the editing, boom, done. But we never stop researching and we never stop writing. And it makes us able to incorporate new information to the very, very end. Now, I mean, we are coming to the very, very end of this interview.

Are you up for a quick fire round, Ken Burns? Well, I'm not sure, given the fact that I usually have, you know, many episodes of responses in my films that I can ever be, you know, as definitive as you probably want me to be. You just do you, Ken. You do you. I'll just throw them at you. Okay. All right.

Question number one. Best President America ever had. Besides George Washington, because we don't have a country without him, Abraham Lincoln. Best President America never had someone you wish had really made it to the White House. It would have been nice. He's the old man of the lot. But Benjamin Franklin has got some extraordinary, extraordinary possibilities. And then in a more contemporary sense, I think she was a terrific.

terrible, terrible campaigner and candidate, but I think would have been a very accomplished president, Hillary Clinton. The film you would most like to make, and why? I've been for decades, I have said Martin Luther King, the family has difficultly controlled a good deal of access to his material, and understandably, a man, a husband, a father, they couldn't control in life, are attempting to in death. And we are working on a King project right now. We've interviewed 70 hours of people with the foot soldiers in the civil rights movement,

all in anticipation of being able to do something on that. But look, if I were given a thousand years to live, and I will not be. I will not run out of projects in American history to do. Who would you rather have dinner with Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln? Oh, God, I don't know. That's a tough one. Mark Twain is great. He's got the best one-liner of all time.

He said, it's not that the world is filled with fools. It's just that lightning isn't distributed right. And yet Abraham Lincoln is the poet president of our country. He seemed to contain our entire history, our present moment, and our entire future in any speech. He's got a wonderful speech to Congress in 1862 in which he says, fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down or honored or dishonored to the latest generation. And then a couple sentences later, he says,

the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, we must think anew, we must act anew, we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we can save our country. Which is it, Abe? You can't escape anything? Or the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present? And of course, it's both. And that's the great thing that proves the lie to the idea of ones and zeros and some simple equation of an off-on switch in any of this. Well, I suspect this is not going to be a simple final question and an answer from you. But I understand that every 4th of July you read the Declaration of Independence to your daughters and you've done that for about three decades, which is just lovely.

And now grandchildren too, who are there. And grandchildren. Okay, so after 50 years in this particular moment, do you still believe in America? Oh, of course I do. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were way more divided during the revolution, during the Civil War, during the post-Civil War era,

during the Vietnam era that we are now. It's not to say that this is not a significant and existential threat in which it means I could be wrong about the survival that there'll be another 250 years or another 50 years or another five years. But I certainly believe in the ideas as articulated in the most consequential revolution

in history that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which is not the pursuit of objects in a marketplace of things, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas. We are meant to improve each other, to increase in virtue, to be worthy of the great gift of citizenship.

Ken Burns, thank you very much for being with us. Thank you.