Fresh Air - Best Of: Malala Yousafzai / Ken Burns On The Revolutionary War

Episode Date: October 25, 2025

We know Malala as the youngest Nobel Prize laureate, the girl who survived a Taliban bullet at 15 for advocating for girls' education in Pakistan. Now in a new book, she's reintroducing herself to the world. It's called Finding My Way, and in it she writes about the messy, funny, and flawed experiences that come with age, while carrying both the honor and the weight of being an activist for women’s rights. TV critic David Bianculli reviews a new documentary series about Martin Scorsese. And Ken Burns talks about his new PBS documentary on the Revolutionary War. It includes the perspectives of women, Native Americans, and enslaved and free Black people–the people initially excluded from the declaration “all men are created equal.” Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Our common nature is a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma and me, Anna Gonzalez, through this complicated country. We go into caves, onto boats, and up mountain trails to meet people, hear their stories, and of course, play some music, all to reconnect to nature. Listen to Our Common Nature from WNYC, wherever you get podcasts. From WHYYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend, I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, Malala Yusuf Tsai. We know her as the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the girl who survived a Taliban bullet at 15 for advocating for girls' education in Pakistan. Well, now, she has a new book where she's reintroducing herself to the world.

Her new memoir is called Finding My Way, and in it she writes about the messy, funny, and flawed experiences that come with age, while carrying both the honor and the weight of being an activist for women's rights. Also, Ken Burns talks about his new PBS documentary on the Revolutionary War. It includes the perspectives of women, Native Americans, and enslaved and free black people. The people excluded from the Declaration, all men are created equal. And TV critic David B. and Cooley reviews a new documentary series about Martin Scorsese. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe. When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit Wise.com. Tise and C's Apply. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. College is often a time to figure out who we are. To fall in love for the first time, to experiment, to fail, to question what we believe. But for my guest today, Malala Yousafzai, it was different. She spent her college years under scrutiny and 24-hour security.

When she was 15, Malala survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban, a gunshot to the head while riding home on a school bus. But long before that, she'd been standing up to them, demanding the right for girls to go to school in her hometown of Mingora and Pakistan Swat Valley. The Taliban had taken control, closing schools, banning women from public life, and brutally punishing anyone who resisted. After the shooting, Malala's life changed overnight.

She became a symbol of resistance, praised, politicized, and picked apart. While the world saw an unshakable young woman with a message, Malala was also a teenager, undergoing surgeries to reconstruct what was destroyed by the Taliban, experiencing post-traumatic stress, and navigating others' expectations of who she should be. Her new memoir, Finding My Way, reveals the person beyond the symbol. It's the story of a young Malala, learning the bounds of what it means to be a free woman, trying on jeans for the first time, falling in love, failing exams, and confronting the trauma of a shooting that for a long time she had no memory of.

Malala Yusuf Saai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for her efforts to combat the suppression of children and advocate for their education. She's written several books, including I Am Malala and We Are Displaced, True Stories of Refugee Lives. The 2015 documentary, He Named Me Malala, Chronicles Her Family's Activism. Malala Yusuf Sae, welcome to fresh air. Thank you. This memoir, in a way, in many ways, picks up where your first memoir left off. Just to put ourselves in this place, I mean, such a dichotomy here.

because, and how remarkable this is, because here you are entering college. I mean, you won the Nobel Prize at 17. So it's an unbelievable honor that I know you take great pride in. But it also comes, as you say, with this tremendous responsibility to always live up to all that you had endured and what you've accomplished, what it represents. That that expectation also feel like a cage in the way? Like you want it to come into college almost as an anonymous person. Going to Oxford was my childhood dream, and I wanted to be myself, make as many friends. But I think with these titles and recognitions, like the Nobel Peace Prize, I thought I had to act differently.

And because, you know, a lot of the people who receive these titles are much older in their life. And they, you know, they're usually in their 50s, 60s. They have, you know, like a family life already established. I received a Nobel Peace Prize when I was in my chemistry class. So, you know, I was still a school student. So I see it as a big responsibility. And I always have felt that now I need to live up to the, expectation, you know, it was given for the work I had done, but it was also given for the work

that is ahead of us. So for me now, like, I have to work for the rest of my life to prove that it was well deserved. And for me, that is just, you know, seeing this dream of girls' education becoming a reality in every part of the world. But at the same time, I thought, okay, like, but do you have to change as a person? Like, are you supposed to live a certain way? In college, though, this was the first time that I allowed myself to be more of myself, to really just tested. And to be honest, I didn't even know who I was. Am I funny? Am I not? What do I enjoy? Like, I didn't know any of that. I have never seen boys my age. I have never, you know, been away from my parents or lived on my own. I can decide. I can go to a Diwali party. I can

stay up late at 3 a.m. and, you know, like my parents would not know about this. And, you know, I could sign up for rowing or I could go to the aerobics 80s themed party, any of that, we could do all of that. I was somehow feeling that I was reliving all the missed years of my childhood because of the activism that I had to take from such a young age that I missed. Was there a particular moment when you realized, you're at college, when you realize, wait a minute, I could do whatever I want, you know? You know, I think about the roof climbing experience oftentimes because that was offered to me by a stranger at college who told me that there is this crazy thing that only cool college students do. And he offered it to me and I said, okay, I'll see you at midnight. I told my security like, I'm done for the day and you guys can go to sleep. And I just want to note for folks that you had 24-hour security because,

Because during this time period, in the years after you were shot, you received lots of threats against your life. That's why you had 24-hour security, in addition, in the same way that many heads of state have security in the United States. Yeah, I mean, it was awkward to have, like, guys following you. But at the same time, it just helped me have the opportunity to experience these things and not be worried about safety and security. So, yeah, but for that night, the roof climbing night, I told them, I think I'm going to. to be safe on my own. I said, you guys can go to bed. So it's midnight. I follow the stranger. We go up to the fourth floor of the building and there's a small window in this room and he tells me that we need to sneak out through the window and then walk by this narrow path on the

roof. One misstep and you could fall and I am just nodding and I follow him and it was a really scary way, making it up to the rooftop. And on the rooftop, there's this bell tower, like the clock tower. And that moment just felt surreal. I just thought I had like conquered something. I was breathing in the fresh air and I was looking down, just seeing some students still up at night or the light was still on in some rooms and I was thinking maybe they're still trying to finish their essay or just feeling a moment of victory. And I was so scared that I might be kicked out of college for this. And this happening so soon, so I was terrified that being an advocate for education and then getting in trouble and being kicked out.

What do you think it was about that that like really set your heart on this independent journey? Like that it's almost like another near-death experience. I think for me it was just wanting to disobey rules. I thought I had to live up to expectations and be a certain way I could never get in trouble. I thought if this is something that puts me in the cool kids category or the rebellious kids category, I want to give it a try.

I wanted these college years to be that experience that I otherwise would never come across. you really did experience a lot of things in college that many students do, including getting high. You, your spring year of college, first year at Oxford, you're with friends, you're hanging out as college kids do, and you're offered marijuana, specifically a bong. And you join in with your friends, and as the hours tick on, you have a reaction. You can't walk. everything goes black, and this you realize is a very familiar place. Could I have you read what you wrote about it in the book?

Suddenly, I was 15 years old again, lying on my back under a white sheet, a tube running down my throat, eyes closed. For seven days, as doctors tended to my wounds, I was in a coma. From the outside, I looked to be in a deep sleep, but inside, my mind was awake, and it played, a slideshow of recent events. My school bus? A man with a gun?

Blood everywhere? My body carried through a crowded streets. Strangers hunched over me, yelling things I didn't understand. My father rushing toward the stretcher to take my hand. As the images repeated in the same sequence over and over, I raged against them, trying to beat them away. This isn't true, I told myself. The real Malala is the one trap.

in this nightmare, not the girl on the stretcher. Just wake up, and it will stop. Wake up. I had tried to force my eyes open to see something other than this carousal of horrors. Inside, I screamed. Outside, my lips stayed closed, motionless. I was awake and buried alive in the coffin of my body.

It's hard to read. Yes. It's hard to read it. Yeah. The bong incident, you know, just turned out to be an experience, not that I had imagined, I had heard cool things about it. And of course, you know, like it's different for everybody. But I think in my case, there was this unaddressed trauma. The memory, the visuals, everything, I think, had been there. My brain had tried to suppress them because, you know, it's just a moment of fear that you do not want to see again. And when the, you know, and when the bong incident happened, my body froze and I was reliving the Taliban attack. I could see the gunman, I thought, this is happening all over again. I often, you know, say that I received my surgeries and I recovered so quickly from the Taliban attack. But just when this happened, I realized that maybe I actually had not fully recovered. There was this unaddressed part of my recovery,

which was mental health, which was the trauma that we did not actually count in the treatment process. There are some dark moments that you experienced after that night. You started to experience these intrusive thoughts that didn't stop, even after the high went away. You described being afraid of a kitchen knife, not that someone would hurt you with it, but that you might hurt yourself. And I just kept thinking as I was reading this, for someone the world has called the bravest girl on earth, what was it like to suddenly be frightened of your own hands, of your own self? It was frightening.

And even now, like, when I think about it, it's just a really frightening place to be in. You feel trapped. You do not see a way out. That's exactly what I was going through in. those days, I was shaking. I was shaking every minute. I could not look at harmful objects. I could not look at a knife. I could not watch news that said anything about murdering people or, you know, or somebody being killed or shot or wounded. I just felt so disappointed with myself that somebody who actually faced a Taliban gunman was somehow now scared of these small things.

It was all like trivial stuff that it made no sense to me. And I thought that I had lost my courage, that I was not brave enough, the titles I had received my whole life, and I thought I had to live up to them. I felt like an imposter. and then one of my friends suggested that I see a therapist. She said that a lot of students actually get therapy in college, that she herself is seeing a therapist, and I was a bit skeptical. I also thought a therapist would not understand what I'm going through.

Right, because she said, I should give it a try, yeah. Because your parents didn't believe in therapy. I think your father said only a completely non-functioning person needs to. a therapist. So there was a lot that you needed to get over to actually seek one. Yes, you know, growing up in Pakistan, we had not heard about therapy and mental health that now we are hearing where it's been accepted as a normal conversation. People are opening up about it. It, you know, and we don't even have that much support around mental health. Has it helped you?

Therapy has definitely helped me. I remember the first session where I told my therapist all my problems, past, present, potential future ones. And I said, okay, like, now give me some medication. How do we fix it? And she took a deep breath and she said, you know, this is not how therapy works. And she told me that I had PTSD and anxiety. And this was like the first time that I actually heard the word PTSD. You know, people, I had come up, like, I had heard it in a few different contexts, but I thought, you know, okay, I faced a trauma, but I think I don't have PTSD. But seven years later, the PTSD appeared. And, you know, I learned something that when people talk about, like, a traumatic experience, it's not necessary that PTSD or the mental health issues appear immediately.

They could appear seven years later, ten years later, you never know. And that happened in my case. My guest today is Malala Yousafzai. We're talking about her new memoir, Finding My Way. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Let's get back to my interview with Malala Yusuf Sai. She's the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate and co-founder of Malala Fund, which advocates. for girls education worldwide. In her new memoir, Malala writes about her college years at Oxford, her struggles with PTSD and panic attacks, and her decision to marry despite her reservations about the institution of marriage. Her new memoir is called Finding My Way. Let's talk about love. You write that you'd convinced yourself, you'd never date, you'd never marry, that you'd be like a quote, like a nun but Muslim.

Once you got past yourself and you and your now husband, Aser fell madly in love, which books can read all about it in this book, but you were resistant to marriage for a long time. Why were you against marriage? I mean, growing up, I had seen many girls lose the opportunity to complete their education and, you know, just their dreams to become a doctor, engineer, because they were married off. So, like, marriage, I, that was like the last thing I wanted to think about, I did not want to get married. It was like, it was not a cool thing. If you wanted to have a future as a girl, you wanted to keep yourself away from marriage for as long as you could.

Because even later in your life, it just meant, like, more compromise. for women, that you know, you had to readjust to the husband's family and you just had to pray that the husband turns out to be a nice, respectful person. I remember when I was thinking about marriage for myself, I put myself in my mom's shoes for the first time. I had never thought about anything from her perspective before. And I, you know, I would always admire my dad and I wanted to like follow his footsteps and all of that. But this was the first time. first time I wondered what life would have been like for my mom when she decided to marry. How did she trust this guy? She had not even known and decided to like move into his house and

be married off and restart a new life. And I asked my mom actually what were what were her dreams when she was a kid. And she said, you know, I just wanted to find a husband who would be respectful and I can go into the city and like have nice food and like drive around in a car. And I realized that my mom didn't even have a dream for herself, that marriage was a way for her to find some sort of freedom, a little more freedom than she had right now. So it was sort of a fascinating time. When I saw Asar, I immediately fell in love with him. I knew that I wanted to be with him. And I knew that we had to be married because in our culture, for two people to be together, you have to be married.

But then marriage just felt like a very heavy topic for me. I even went to read some books. Yes, you read a lot of books about feminism and marriage. Yes, I was like, please Virginia Woolf, help me. Bell Hooks, can you share a few words of wisdom? Well, you made this list of questions for him before you marry him. I mean, you asked him about fidelity, about whether he'd control what you wear, whether he'd take another wife. These were real considerations that you had to know. You were trying

to extract guarantees, though. And he tried to give them to you, but then he said something to you that was really kind of profound. He said, there are no magic words to take away all of your doubts. Why was that the right answer for you to kind of come to the realization that this was the step that you should take? Yeah, I mean, like, poor asser, I was on. I was on. asking him every possible question about every horrible things that I had seen or heard about like, you know, a husband doesn't allow his wife to work. A husband has a problem that the wife earns more money. The husband is of this view that he can marry like more wives or things like that and he is, you know, okay with like telling the wife off or like that she has to live by his rules

and all of that. So I said, who knows? Like I know he's a nice guy, but who knows? I think it's better to get a verbal confirmation. It's just the fear, the fear that we all carry. I knew that I was a very independent person. I did not need a husband. Literally, I did not need him. But I wanted him, and I wanted to make sure that this was, like, worth my time. But when he, you know, when he said that, you know, no answers would clear all my doubts,

I think he was right. It was true. because even when he was answering, I still had that little hesitation in my heart. But what I really loved was just the way he was answering those questions. He was very patient. He gave me time. You know, this marriage conversation started like a while ago,

but he allowed me to go and do my research and talk to people and just like take my time off. Malala Yusuf Zai, thank you so much. Oh, thank you so much. Nice talking to you. Malala Yusuf Tsai's new memoir is called Finding My Way. Martin Scorsese, analyzing the film director's life and work, is appearing now on Apple TV Plus. Directed by Rebecca Miller, it's called Mr. Scorsese, and our TV critic David B. and Cooley has this review.

If the thought of a five-part five-hour study of Martin Scorsese might sound excessive, then maybe you haven't seen enough of his movies. Or, for that matter, feasted on any of his multi-part documentaries on the history of film, both domestic and internal. international. Their treasures, loaded with insights, passion, and hints about which films to seek out next for even more riches. In Rebecca Miller's new Mr. Scorsese, he turns that focus and knowledge on his own work, with Miller providing visual aids to underscore his points. Take, for example, one of Scorsese's most famous films, Taxi Driver. Robert De Niro plays New York City cab driver Travis Bickle, who is rejected by some elements of the city and repulsed by others. Scorsese explains to Miller how he set out to emphasize Travis's sense of alienation

visually by subtly but intentionally selecting how he presented De Niro's character on screen. So we always try to kind of psychologically try to keep him separate from everybody else. That was the key thing in that film. Who's in who's in who's in? Who's in? frame. And so I was trying always to keep him in a single frame, nobody in his frame. And then when I cut to the other person, he's in their frame. But they're not in his. We're given lots of other insights about taxi driver, and not just from Scorsese. Robert De Niro and Jody Foster talk about how their improv sessions during rehearsals define their characters and led to some of the movie's most indelible scenes. The film's screenwriter, Paul Schrader, talks about how

both the director and the actors elevated what was written on the pages of his script. And Schrader, when asked by Miller, also talks very chillingly about how the pent-up, potentially violent loner of taxi driver is a much more familiar

character today in real life. It feels like there's a lot of Travis Bickles, especially right now. They're all talking to each other on the internet. When I first heard about him, he was talking to nobody. He really was at that point the underground about bad. Now he's the internet man.

One of Scorsese's friends and fellow directors, Stephen Spielberg, offers some taxi driver's insights too. He tells how Scorsese avoided an X rating for that movie, which the film board threatened to impose because of its bloody climax, by adjusting the color of the blood on the finished prints, from bright red to a much more muted brown. Scorsese learned that lesson well. Later, for his brutal boxing epic raging bull, he drained the color of blood completely, shooting the entire film in black and white. Most of Scorsese's films are dissected with the same loving detail, by those who know him and his movies best.

The people interviewed include not only De Niro, Foster, Schrader, and Spielberg, but actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day Lewis, Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci, Margot, Robbie, and Kate Lanchette, directors Spike Lee and Brian De Palma, and rock stars Mick Jagger and Robbie Robertson. Then, there are his other creative collaborators such as Thelma Schoonmaker and his grown children, his wife and ex-wives, and childhood friends. All of them have some informative and wild stories to tell. Early on, Scorsese sits down with some guys from the old neighborhood, including De Niro, to talk about old times. I never forget one night

We're standing outside And there was a guy Lying in the Jersey Street Remember? And we're still looking We're talking We're by the graveyard And we're going

Out the guy's not moving Missing his hands Yeah I said guy's not moving Yeah He's dressed Nicely You kind of go over

Robert You were going over You were looking around You came back He said Jimmy Just put a pencil in his head To make sure That it was a bullet hole

That was when Mulberry Street Was still The place where they dumped the bodies. They called it murder mile. It used to be called. And the barry was called devil's mile.

So we were in between murder mile and devil's mile. But even while growing up in that tough neighborhood, young Marty Scorsese found solace in the local movie theater and began drawing his own make-believe stories. Essentially, they were comic strip storyboards for the movies in his mind. Violent period epics with titles like The Eternal City, complete with gladiators and bloody battles. And with credits that read, even at age 11, directed and produced by Martin Scorsese.

I became obsessed with all kinds of films, and I used my imagination, I was making up all these stories. So I started drawing these little pictures that showed the impression of movement, like the storyboard for a film. These images move. This is a boom, a tracking shot. Here's the wall of Rome, and here are the trees here, and the cameras on. a crane and the camera comes all the way down over the backs of the first group of men and the doors open. But it's a big crane shot. As you go from here and then it goes behind and you go down, I'm still doing this shot. I'm still doing it doesn't quite work all the time. The documentary Mr. Scorsese spends its first installment on his early days. His childhood, making student films at NYU, being on the movie camera crew at Woodstock, and a

eventually getting his break with low-budget movie producer Roger Corman to direct a Bonnie and Clyde knockoff called Boxcar Bertha. When Scorsese showed it to his filmmaking friends, they were unimpressed. And when he showed it to his mentor and hero, independent filmmaker John Cassavetes, the reaction was even worse. So he looked at Boxcar Bertha. I saw him afterwards. He looked at me and he was like 10 feet away from me and he goes, come here. And he was. And he And I went up there and he embraced me. And he held me aside, pushed me aside. He goes, you just spent a year of your life making a b***.

Don't do this again. Don't do this again. And he didn't. Instead, Martin Scorsese made mean streets with Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro and took all their careers to a higher level. Mr. Scorsese takes us on that journey, and some of the stops along the way are breathtaking. The Last Waltz, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, the Aviator, the Wolf of Wall Street. There are a few regretful omissions in Mr. Scorsese, but in an overview of this type, that's inevitable and completely acceptable.

This new Apple TV Plus series is self-described as a film portrait by Rebecca Miller. And as portraits go, it's by no means a hasty sketch. With its many interviews and film clips, and its exciting use of split-screen comparisons and music by the Rolling Stones, Mr. Scorsese is closer to a patiently painted masterpiece. David B. and Cooley reviewed Mr. Scorsese, now streaming on Apple TV Plus.

Coming up, Ken Burns talks about his new documentary series, The American Revolution. Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Here's Terry with our next interview. Divisions in our country are often traced back to the civil war, but the divisions go all the way back to the Revolutionary War. It wasn't just a war against the British. It was a bloody civil war in the colonies, between the revolutionaries, who call themselves

the Patriots, and the loyalists who wanted to remain under British rule. The revolutionists, The Revolutionary War is the subject of a new documentary series made by America's best-known documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, along with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. Burns describes the Revolutionary War as the most consequential revolution in history. The series tells the story not only from the perspectives of the founding fathers, the generals, and the fighters. It includes the stories of people left out of the declarations statement, all men are created equal. That's women, Native Americans, enslaved people, and free black people. Making this film, Byrne says, led him to new perspectives on the fundamental questions about the founding. This 12-part series premieres on most public TV stations Sunday, November 16th,

with two hour-long episodes on six consecutive nights. The subjects of Byrne's other documentaries shown on public TV include The Civil War, the War in Vietnam, baseball, jazz, country music, and our national parks. We recorded our interview on stage at the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Camden, New Jersey, next to the river depicted in the famous painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware. I have to tell you, Ken, that one of the things I love about your series is it talks about the revolution, not just from like the founding fathers, you get to the women, you get to the enslaved and, the free black people, you get to the Native Americans.

So let's start with the enslaved and the free black people. They were fighting in the army on both sides. Right. So what were they promised on each side? There are about 20% of the population of two and a half to three million people included in the colonies, excluding native peoples, are enslaved and free black people. And they've got decisions to make.

we think 20,000 fought, 15,000 for the British, who had cynically promised freedom for those slaves of rebelling people, not of slaves of loyalists. They had to remain slaves. The man who issued this proclamation, Dunmore himself owned other human beings and didn't think that that was inconsistent. And many black Americans flooded there and had a taste of freedom for the first time and fought alongside British regiments. The remaining 5,000 were patriots who fought. So the British promised that enslaved people, if they fought with the Brits, would be freed. Do the Americans make the same promise? No, except in Rhode Island and a few other northern states, particularly Rhode Island,

in which those black regiments that were made up of both free and enslaved were promised their freedom, but it was also indicated that Rhode Island would compensate the owners for the loss of their property. Was there anybody speaking up during the revolution about ensuring rights for women or Native Americans or enslaved people? Everywhere. All the time it's going on, Abigail Adams. During the revolution, Abigail Adams is saying, you know, we have this phrase that comes down to us and we leave it. remember the ladies, it sounds dainty, and we leave it alone. But she says, all husbands would be tyrants if they want to, and then goes on to say that if we don't get some sort of representation, we're likely to foment a rebellion. And so there are people who are already

patently anti-slavery speaking about this at the time. And by the time the constitutional convention is over, and our government is starting, Benjamin Franklin himself, who had owned human beings in his own household, a handful of people, is all. is submitting to Congress a bill that goes, of course, nowhere to end slavery in the United States. But there are people arguing for the rights of Native Americans. There are people arguing for women's rights. There are people arguing for the rights of enslaved people. It is an incredibly fluid and fascinating dynamic.

Well, hearing Abigail Adams' prediction about how horrible a revolutionary war would be and learning more through your film about how horrible it was and all the blood and anarchy and brother and brother fighting against each other. I'm so war-averse, which isn't to say I'm a pacifist, but I grew up watching World War II movies because it wasn't long after World War II. And then there was Vietnam.

And, you know, seeing just all of that horror made me very, you know, feeling lucky that I've never had to live. through a war in my own country. And so it made me wonder, watching your documentary, which side would I be on? I'm not sure that I would be a revolutionary because I wouldn't want to have war in my neighborhood.

I wouldn't want to lose all the men in my life to war. If I was a mother, I wouldn't want to lose my son. I'm a sister. I wouldn't want to lose my brother. Have you thought about that? Which side would you have been on? I think that's the fundamental question, and I really don't know what side I'd be on.

I don't know whether I could take up arms for a cause, whether I would be willing to die for a cause, whether I would be willing to kill for a cause. I remember when we made the Civil War series afterwards, I said, we're not doing any more wars. And for a variety of reasons, we got sucked into doing a history of the Second World War, which we called The War,

Before the ink was dry on that, I'd committed to Vietnam. And before the ink was dry on Vietnam, I said, we're doing the revolution. I'm drawn into the fact that it obviously represents the worst, but often the best of us. And there's so much that happens in the levels of it. And yet the elemental question that you ask is one that I think all of us who've worked on it sound every day in some way. I'm not sure I have the answers. Of course, I might be a loyalist, but maybe I wouldn't be. But could I fight? Jefferson didn't fire a gun in anger. Patrick Henry didn't fire a gun in anger. Benjamin Franklin didn't fire a gun in anger. But George Washington did. And Alexander Hamilton did. And James Monroe did. And, you know, many other people fought in this war and made decisions of that kind. And as the last line of the declaration says, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives.

our fortunes and our sacred honor. George Washington may have been the richest man in America, and he certainly risked his life, certainly risked his fortune, constantly. And let's remember that in a dish between his flaws and between the bad military decisions that he made, often, he also rides out on the battlefield, risking everything at Kipps Bay in mid-Manhattan. And living with his men in the freezing cold and winter. in the freezing cold and being able to inspire them.

This is like the richest guy in America, or one of the richest guys in America. And at Valley Forge, he loses something like 500 major officers who've gotten letters from home saying, hey, we're making a lot of money off this war, selling provisions and doing this, and they desert, and he stays. That's a thing. A lot of the wealthy landowners who start off fighting for independence, they end up going home, and then it's the relatively poor people, the people who don't own land, and teenagers and felons, you say, who become the Army.

And it's kind of remarkable that they succeeded. They had no training. There's zero chance that they're going to succeed at Lexington Green on April 19, 1775. And this is a war that has been proposed and sort of undertaken by property owners, from militiamen who are farmers, to businessmen and merchants and big planters and rich, people. But in order to actually succeed, it has to be, as you say, those teenagers and those felons and those near-do-wells and those second and third sons without a chance of inheritance and recent immigrants who have nothing. And so by the end of the war, the war is being fought in large measure

by people who have little or no property that had started out as a war to protect the rights of property owners. And so the interesting thing is our textbooks say, you know, the American Revolution was about bringing democracy. not an object of the American Revolution. It's a consequence of it, because those people, as Washington himself said, so movingly, it is a standing miracle that that army stayed together and did it. And that's what impresses the French, and that's what impresses the world, is that, and in Johan Evald, who we follow in and says, who would have thought a century ago that out of this multitude of rabble, he's dismissive of them, could come with people who could

defy kings. When I was preparing the interview, I found myself focusing a lot on like Washington's flaws, like his hypocrisy about slavery, and what happened to the Native Americans and the enslaved and free black people who fought in the war and the women. And because those stories haven't been told in the same way that the founding fathers and the poetic language of the founding documents, that's part of what really interested me in your series so I don't mean to just like focus on the negatives but these are like the untold or lesser told parts of the story I was wondering if you were showing this

in a Smithsonian Museum or instead of outside on a night in New Jersey in Camden if you were showing it in a national park would you be canceled? Because it's so DEI, if I may say. You know, because you're focusing on the people whose stories haven't sufficiently been told.

I've always thought another way of saying DEI is e pluribus unum. Part of the dilemma, the trap the mistake of argument is that we become so dialectically preoccupied. One side or the other, we see things in simple binaries that don't exist. And so Richard Powers, the novelist, said

the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. A good story is a good story. I think the story of the American Revolution is a really good story. Conservatives are supposed to love the series Yellowstone, and that is a film about a rancher. I'm going to stop you. I want to stop you to say that you did a series on national parks. Look at what's happening in the national parks. History has literally been escorted out of the parks, taken down, erased, and that's the climate that we're living in now. So in reality, you might have been

cancelled if it was at the Smithsonian if or it was in a national park are there bits of history that you for instance treasure in the national parks that you became very familiar with when you were doing your series that are gone now because everybody loves a good story

but we know we're living in a time when history is being released race and diversity is being punished they did just scrub the word Annola Gay, which is the mother of the pilot who dropped the first atomic bomb, and that was the name of his plane, the Anola Gay, because it had the word gay in it. And I'm disappointed that we at this present moment, and it's not everyone, feel compelled to take the simplified version of things and try to make it all morning again in America. We don't operate that way.

I don't think a good story operates that way. And my argument about Yellowstone is that it's telling about all the stories. They're black and gay and female and white and poor and Native American. And greed is one of the main objects of it. And the main character is a murderer in addition to this big patriot. And it's just beloved good stories about human beings, whether it's William Shakespeare or Kevin Kossner or, God forbid, a documentary about the revolution, can have complexity and nuance.

And people get it. And I'll tell you that I couldn't have made any of the films we made outside of public broadcasting. Well, that's another thing. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been shut down. And I know all of public radio and public television has lost money. You've lost some of your funding. I've lost a great deal, millions of dollars as a result of the rescission, which, as you know, clawed back two years of money that had been authorized and appropriated.

and appropriated and it promised and it's gone away. And it's an incredibly short-sided thing. This is a network in the case of PBS that had William F. Buckley and noted conservatives show on for 32 years. And that show is still on, still moderated by a conservative, but because some people did not like certain aspects of it, the idea that it had to be defunded, it will mostly hurt. W. H.Y. Y. Will survive. I will too.

We'll figure out ways to overcome that. more people will join and become members in Philadelphia, and that will be a good thing. But the losers will be the rural stations, the poor rural areas that will now be news deserts. No one will be covering the school board or the city council. There will not only be the good children's and prime time, but there won't be a classroom of the air in continuing education and emergency signals and homeland security things. This is, you know, this is a big deal. and places will lose what I think is the, in PBS that I know,

and NPR by extension, the Declaration of Independence applied to communications. I'm proud to be an American has new meaning to me, because I realized, like, during the Revolutionary War, when somebody said, I'm proud to be an American, what they kind of meant was I no longer consider myself British. That's right. I'm a patriot. I'm not a loyal. and I'm proud to be a patriot fighting for freedom and revolution.

I'm proud to be an American. It just had totally different meaning to me. I wonder, like, if you felt that way? I have been, Terry, engaged with trying to tell the stories about this complex American project for 50 years. And whether it's about the Brooklyn Bridge or the national parks or the shakers, but strangely, perhaps perversely, in the study of war, no more do I feel, even in things that are so drenched in contradiction and hypocrisy and blood, does that authentic patriotism

that I think you're talking about come out and raise the kind of questions within themselves and between themselves that you've asked in that regard? very sincere, basic, sometimes gut-wrenching questions. What would I have been? Could I have done this? Could I have killed somebody else? Would I be willing to die for a cause? To give up all of my good fortune for a cause?

And then you're beginning to approach, but not necessarily make, the decisions that were made in every family, in every community, and every colony to become a state, to become a union, to become the United States. States of America. Ken Burns, it's time for us to end. I thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for this series. Like I said, it was a revelation. And congratulations to you and your team and your co-directors and co-producers. Thank you, Terry. Thank you. Thank you. Ken Burns spoke with Terry Gross,

His new documentary series, The American Revolution, premieres on most PBS stations beginning Sunday, November 16th. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.