On with Kara Swisher - Ken Burns & Sarah Botstein on Finding Hope in America’s Brutal Beginnings

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

In “The American Revolution,” a new six-part docuseries airing on PBS this week, filmmakers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein take a deep look at the American Revolutionary War and the years before and after. They debunk many of the idealized myths we tell ourselves about the country’s founding and the complex motivations of the men who championed independence. At once critical and patriotic, it examines America’s history in ways the Trump administration would rather paper over. Kara, Ken and Sarah talk about the ways George Washington was both a deeply flawed man and integral to American victory in the war, how enslaved African Americans looked to the British for hope of freedom, and why it’s unfair to paint all Loyalists to the British Crown as traitors. They also talk about why there’s still a lot of reasons to find hope in America’s origin story today.  Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Democratic socialists don't kill Jews. National socialists kill Jews. I'm not worried about Democratic Socialists. I'm worried about dictators. It's on. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Box Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today are filmmakers Ken Burns and Sarah Bowers. Botstein. The first episode of their six-part documentary series, The American Revolution, premiered last night on PBS and continues running through Friday. It's a deep, nuanced look at the American Revolutionary War in the years before and after. Over the course of 12 hours,

Burns and Botstein challenged many of the neat stories we tell ourselves about the country's founding and what motivated the men who fought for America's independence from British rule. It's the kind of nuance and challenging look that history the Trump administration is actively fighting against. But Burns and Botstein also make it clear there's still plenty of reasons to celebrate our country's origin story, even if it is way more messy and brutal than we'd like to acknowledge. I am a huge fan of him. He's just a really interesting and complex person himself and quite, I would say patriotic, one of the more patriotic people I've ever met. I studied history in college and I really enjoyed this series. I think the most surprising thing to me was

the depiction of Washington for as much as I do. understand his complexity, he was even more complex than I thought. And I think it's one of the best depictions of one of America's most important citizens. All right, let's get to my conversation with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein. Our expert question comes from historian, journalist, and author Garrett Graff. This is a good one, so stick around. Support for this show comes from the Audible Original, the downloaded two ghosts in the machine. Quantum computers, the next great frontier of technology,

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from Ugg, skims, dipteak, free people, Stanley, and more. Plus, explore their amazing gift shop in stores and online. Free styling, free shipping, and order pickup, make it all easy. Add Nordstrom. Ken and Sarah, thanks for coming on on. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to start with you, Ken. We've talked many times before on a lot of a range of topics, but in recent interviews, you've said the American Revolution was the most important event in all of world history since the birth of Christ, and the revolution certainly was a huge event. But explain why it's more important than the fall of the Roman Empire, the arrival of the Europeans in America.

You know, tell me what makes it stand apart from your perspective. I was out on the road talking endlessly about this, and I wasn't trying to be provocative. I was trying to enjoin a conversation which has happened. Ecclesiastes said there's nothing new under the sun, and all of a sudden, on July 4th, 1776, there's something new under the sun. People are no longer subjects under authoritarian rule. They have the possibility of being citizens, and this is a big deal. And these are the noblest aspirations of humankind that are expressed in the second sentence of the declaration. and certainly in other parts of this struggle,

which is not only a revolution, but a civil war and a global war over the prize of North America. It's been interesting because it has enjoyed a lot of conversations. As with a scholar at Brown University, she said, what about the French Revolution? And I said, how did that work out?

And then somebody else said, the Renaissance, and I said, really good point, right? So I'm not trying to impose this. There's no test on Tuesday whether if you check this as the most important event after the birth of Christ you lose or win or whatever it is. I just wanted to have people think about the importance of it because our revolution is so drowned in kind of Madison Avenue, sanitized, fife and drum, treacle. The barnacles of sentimentality have encrusted themselves over every aspect in large measure because there are no photograph or newsreel to give a human dimension. We think they can't be like us. They're exactly like us.

What Sarah and I have tried for the last 10 years to do is to sort of remove the opacity a little bit and treat it as the fact that we're born in violence, but that these ideas are beyond phenomenal. And that maybe in times of division, going back to your origin story, maybe helps understand. Yes, well, perfect timing, by the way, perfect timing. Ten years ago, Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency, so nobody was talking 250. Nobody was talking semi-quincentennial, and so we've just stumbled upon our good luck here. Yeah, absolutely. Timing is everything.

So, Sarah, one of the through lines is, of course, what Ken was talking about, was this was different, right? This was so different, and it's throughout the entire thing, and I think you stress it quite a bit. I love your perspective, what was the through line, and did it change over the process of you doing it? Did it start as something else? I mean, I think like any huge revolution, the seeds did change over time. They were figuring it out as they went. I think for me anyway, some of the debates that the founders had themselves about what should happen next. What were they going to declare independence? Did they need a foreign ally first? What were the rights of the states versus the larger body? These are questions that our founders were.

as the war was brewing, as the war was happening, and when the war was ending. So for me, working on the series actually had the effect of making me feel really deeply patriotic and proud of a lot of our history and begin to understand for myself how young a country we are in some ways and how unlikely it was that we were going to win this war. And so I think the film is a very surprising underdog story that the founders were figuring out as they went, too. And some of the great, most important, exciting ideals bubble to the surface, and those inspire us 250 years later in some very important ways. Sure, but also the situation in the United States is changed while you're doing it. What kind of effect did that have?

So I love the fact that these films take a long time to make. The film that I worked on with Ken before this was on the U.S. on the Holocaust, and that film also took a lot of years to make. And the world changed enormously while we were making that film, and the world changed enormously, particularly here at home, while we were making the film. So what kept me up at night was not what was happening around us, but to actually shut that noise out and get the history right and tell the story so that the film would transcend the moment and tell good history. That doesn't mean there aren't lessons and parallels and echoes. Well, there's a lot. A lot, right? But that that made the history for me feel more important to get right so that we weren't blowing with the winds of what was happening. Ken, you've talked about your past opposition to working with war reenactors to make a series.

Talk about how your team have to adapt the filming, so to capture the details of the war and make it compelling. People's tastes have changed. You and I have talked about this a lot of how they watch things. And, you know, from the Civil War, that was groundbreaking the way you did it. But not the same in this watching environment with the impact of the Internet, et cetera. Right. You know, those are a couple different questions. And let me just talk about reenactments.

I haven't really done. We had made a film in the late 90s on Lewis and Clark. It's two, two hours. There's maybe four minutes of watching people in keelboats or portaging canoes or sewing leather, buckskin via campfire, close up to no faces or are far away, no faces. And it worked. It helped us understand what the expedition looked at, an objective view, so that we could then subjectively see what they saw in terms of natural scenery. But here I realized with no photographs, we've got no chance in particularly over 12 hours of understanding it unless I got over myself and, you know, said, we're going to

do reenact, but we're going to do it in a different way. We're not going to have reenactors reenact an event for us. We're going to film them for five or six years in every time of day and night, in every season, in every weather, and to do it impressionistically, and to do it So we're not looking at faces, collecting a whole critical mass of hours and hours and hours of this stuff so that we can then use it as we would photographs or paintings in our work to complement the paintings that we do have, the documents that we do have, the drawings that we do have. And that, it works. It actually does something I was so surprised and anxious about it. I decided to do this when I was looking at a map that we'd made for the Vietnam War of the Yadrang Valley and the Central Highlands. I thought maps will be really important. Maybe you can cover a lot of territory with maps, and this could be the British moving west in Long Island towards Brooklyn.

And so, yes, we got all of that stuff. Lots of maps, more maps than in all of our other films combined. Some of them are beautiful, artistic ones we haven't touched. Some we've just added an arrow. Some we've done CGI. You know, sometimes you've got witnesses in Vietnam, and you have no first-person voices. Here, you have no witnesses.

We had no scholars in Vietnam unless you happen to have been there. And here we've just got scholars, but 400 voices read by the finest actors in the world that bring to life not just the top-down, bold-faced names, which it's important to know who they were and to remove that opacity, but also scores of other people that I had never heard of, and I presume you had never heard of, that make up, in totality, the complex, incredible variety of human beings that occupied what we call the 13 British colonies in North America. and that's the exciting thing to add. It's bringing to four people you don't know. Chisory is littered with those people, of course, who are critical. So, Sarah, one of the things your film makes clear, though, is that the Revolutionary War was a civil war. It was probably our first civil war.

The historian Alan Taylor says in your series, quote, the greatest misconception about the American Revolution is that it was something that unified Americans, the war-pitted neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, father against son, obviously Ben Franklin. It's the most famous example of that. And also Native American tribes

and both free and enslaved African-Americans. So talk about the dividing lines at the time in terms of who supported the separatists versus who sided with the loyalists to the crown because it wasn't so easy, especially the common people. They were sort of happy to be British citizens in many ways. I mean, one of the really surprising things

when you dive into the history is to begin to have empathy and understanding for why you would have been a loyalist. I think Ten talks about this a lot. kind of come down to us in history books as cartoonish and silly and traitors, when in fact, you know, probably close to a third of the population potentially, at some point felt like they would be loyalists. The historians in the film sort of say, what does politics have to do with me? This is a violent, scary time. The British are not so terrible to us. It doesn't affect me so personally. Please, I don't want the war in my backyard. I'm afraid. I'm afraid for my family. I'm afraid for my family. I'm afraid for. or my community. And so just regular ordinary people, I think it's very understandable why you would have been loyal to the crown. And in fact, you know, when the Germans came here, they looked around and went, why are these people rebelling? It's pretty good here. They have it pretty good.

Also, the richer class was more into this and had to convince the lower class. It's complicated. There are people that are making money that feel that their wealth and their property has come from the British constitutional monarchy. And of course, the people. people want to stay out of it for their families. They don't want a revolution era is important, but they're also loyalists that are saying, wait a second, and they're forming loyalist regiments that are fighting patriots. They're going to Canada, forming regiments and coming down. We have one loyalist who kills his best friend at the Battle of Bennington, who's stabbing, his best friend is stabbing him saying, you, damn Tory, and he said, I'm obliged to destroy him. It's that kind of

intimacy that goes on. And I think the question is really like, what would I have been? Would I have been a loyalist or would I have been a patriot? Would I have been willing to pick up a gun for a cause? Are each of you, Sarah, what would you? Right, I mean, I think at different times in the war, I think I maybe would have chosen different positions, which is not a wishy-washy thing to say. It's more sort of when the war felt inspiring and worth fighting and when the war felt very scary and maybe not worth it. But I think also to your question, in terms of Native American communities and the black, free, and enslaved communities,

they were making very, very complicated decisions for, I think, very understandable reasons. And again, putting into context why Native American tribes amongst themselves were split to fight for the Patriots or to stay loyal to the crown because they had been dealing with the British for a long, long time. And then both our side and the Brits were manipulating particularly enslaved African Americans and whoever was going to promise what they thought was the best chance of freedom. which is where you're going to go, and I think that's a very important part of the story. Yeah. So I want to talk more about Native Americans and African Americans in a bit,

but the American Revolution was also a world war, which people probably don't realize. And the British hired Hessian. That's the best known, because we've all read that Hessian book as kids from Germany to fight alongside them. Johnny Tremaine in the Hessian book, the Hessian, I think it's called the Haitian,

and the same author. The French, the Dutch, and the Spanish all get involved on the side of the Americans, despite having their own colonial empires that looked a lot like the British. empire. And it took place, as you noted, all across the world. What drove these other nations into the American Revolution? They often get drawn into other things. So the American Revolution is the fourth global war over the prize of North America. So the previous one, the third one,

which we call the French and Indian War, Britain is triumphant. The rest of the world calls it the Seven Years War. Britain's triumphant, but their treasuries depleted. They don't have the resources to protect the colonists who now want to pour over the Appalachians and take Native American lands. They can't protect them, if they think about taxation and whatever. And meanwhile, France, particularly, but also Spain, they're smarting from the loss of territory to the British, British of Florida. Spain is worried about their holdings around Louisiana and Mississippi. So you have all these players interested in it. And it's an amazing con game that Benjamin Franklin and the other Americans play. They do a declaration of independence saying, we really do mean to come together.

And then they win a big battle, Saratoga. And then all of a sudden, the French are in, all in. $30 billion, Stacey Schiff imagines in aid. And it's very interesting that a Protestant uprising against monarchy is going to be joined by a Catholic monarchy. And, you know, that doesn't work out too well for the French after this all happens. They're, they're one of the losers, not big time losers, but losers in the American Revolutionary Battle. But let's go back to the word prize. That means the land. Right. That land has been occupied for 22,000 years by Native peoples. The 13 colonies are superimposed on land that is originally Native peoples that for the previous 150 years has been acquired and fought for and acceded and bought in some cases.

And there are Native Americans that are completely assimilated. There are Native Americans coexisting with the colonists. It's a very diverse group of people that are living there. You do have Africans both free and enslaved that are part of the dynamic of the economies of all the states. It's legal from New Hampshire to Georgia. And then on the western borders, you have Native nations that are anxious about their land, understandably. anxious. And they think, as Sarah's suggesting, that the Brits might hold the key to it, they're all, it's all a disaster. Everybody wants to take the prize, whether it's Spain, whether it's Britain,

whether it's the French. They want the land. So that land is going no matter what happens. But in the short term, it looks like the people who beat the French and are saying we don't want these rebellious colonists coming into your land might be the people to go with. So on the eastern side of things, The Unitas, for example, are connected to Americans more. They fight for the Americans. And on the western side, the Seneca and the Cayuga and Onondaga and Tuscarora, more sort of trying to protect pristine lands. So you've got great huge forces.

And what we say in the introduction is that it's a clash over Englishmen becomes a global war that involves more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American. And you can hear we are trying to center. we treat Native Americans as them. These tribes, the Shawnee and the Delaware, are as different from one another as the French are from the Prussians.

Why do we just say them? They've been on the world scene, both economically and diplomatically, for centuries. They know people in France. They know people in Spain. They know people in Great Britain. They've traded with them.

And so what we've tried to do is say, this has got a gigantic international dynamic into which you insert this squabble between Englishmen. You won't let us take the land you promised us we'd be able to have. You want to now tax us, and we don't have any representation for those taxes, and we're the least tax people anywhere, and you're the most taxed, and we're not going to do it. And so all of a sudden, this argument coincides with the Enlightenment,

and it gets broken out into universal rights. And so this idea of liberty is now out there for Native Americans and women, and enslaved and free blacks to hear and want as well. So you have a kind of rush for that door of the phrase, all men are created equal. We know what Jefferson meant. But when you say all, as the conservative scholar, Yuval Levin told us, all is it.

All is all. It's over. Except it's not. Now, what Ken's referring to in reality, the elite colonial settlers like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, wanted this land from Native Americans and they made to make a fortune off of it,

1763, King George III had banned new settlements and speculation most of the Appalachians, and they didn't like that. Sarah, in the grand scheme of causes, where did the land rank from your perspective? Was it the primary thing? Because we always think it was taxes, of course, because, again, we have this mythology around Boston Tea Party, et cetera. Was that more important than taxation? I mean, as Ken was just saying, I think a big revelation to all of us when we really cracked

the first book and started to talk to the first scholars about, okay, okay, what is the story that we're telling? What do we have to make sure viewers walk away with? The land is at the center of that. So I think maybe an answer to your question is that sometimes land is more important and then eventually taxes begin to be very important. And they're taking turns in terms of which cause in different times. The 20 years leading up to a shot being fired at Lexington and Concord,

there's a lot going on to the lead up of those first shots. So it is about 1763. That's a huge, amazing, important moment in the American Revolution that they put that line there. And that means, wait a minute, everybody realizes this is a big piece of land. And it's not just Washington and Franklin. Yeah. The higher classes that are dealing in tens of thousands of acres and are very pissed off that they're not going to be able to exploit that. It's just regular folks, too, want to cross over and claim 100 acres.

Their family's been dependent labor for 1,000 years in England. They're going to own their own land for the first time, and you're saying no. And then you mentioned Tea Party as the other part of the taxation thing. How do the people who dump the tea in Boston Harbor dress? Everybody, school kid knows this. They dressed as Native Americans. But then he asked the second question, why? Well, it's to offset the blame, to make them think that Native Americans, nobody was fooled.

They knew exactly you had done it. They did it by proclaiming as a scholar, Phil DeLore. says in our film, we're Aboriginal now. We're not of you. We have separated in our essential sense, and it's so ironic, of course, that you're dressing like the people that you've spent the last 150 years dispossessing of the present land, and you're going to spend the next 150 years taking the rest of the land all the way to San Francisco. But you're making a huge statement, and so it's still about the prize of North American. I'll do one other thing and let you go on, which is they do not call it the Eastern Seaboard Congress,

and the Eastern Seaboard Congress does not name George Washington the head of the Eastern Seaboard Army. They call it the Continental Congress and the Continental Army. They know where they're going. And whether you've got a tax on T or stamps or panes of glass or painters lead or whatever it is, they're going to take this land. We're going to pay our soldiers. in landscapes.

And we're going to pay those who sign up for the duration in land. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Quince. As the air turns crisp when the holidays draw in here,

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great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash Kara. That's LinkedIn.com to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Let's talk about some of the other myths we tell ourselves that the hypocrisy inherent in the Declaration of Independence is well-trod territory for colonialist equality for all men, did not include Native Americans, as Ken just noted. It does not include women. It did not include enslaved African-Americans. One of the points you make in the film is that for a lot of enslaved people,

it was the British who represented freedom, not the Patriots, around 5,000 African-Americans joined the Patriot cause, but more than 15,000 fought on the side of the British, three times as many. Why were the British the lesser of two evils for people who were enslaved? And I just recently read the book about the guy who ran Virginia, who was very friendly. Done more. Yeah.

So the British Empire is, dependent entirely on slave labor. There are 26 colonies that they have in North America. 13 in the Caribbean are hugely profitable, and they're all dependent on slave labor. We're the least profitable, only Virginia and the Carolinas are. In Virginia, the royal governor, Dunmore, has been deposed. He's floating impotently out in the Chesapeake, and he gets this idea. I can offer freedom to only those slaves of rebels, not to slaves of loyalists who will have remain slaves forever. And oh, by the way, I own slaves and I'm not going to free them. But there are circumstances, as Sarah was suggesting, and it's all local. The decision, the run for

daylight is dependent exactly where you are. And so a lot of enslaved people rush to Dunmore. It's a disaster. They're killed in these battles, foolish battles. They die at disease. They're not treated well. But there is a sense that the British are going to be the place, as Christopher Brown says one side is unevenly attached to this institution, Britain, although in a global sense, they are totally attached to the institution, and that our side is 100% for it. And so you do have that. But at the same time, there are people who hear that liberty talk, Native Americans and women and blacks who hear that, and that's what they go. We follow James Fortin, who's a kid who hears the Declaration read the first time it's read in public in Philadelphia, and he knows

that it applies to him. He knows also he's not an idiot. He knows that it means all white men of property free of debt. But for him, he wants it. He joins the Patriot cause. He's captured. He refuses a kind of sweetheart deal to go to England. He ends up in the Jersey, which is a prison ship in the East River, which is, you know, a death trap. Very few people come out of it alive. He makes it home. He becomes wealthy in the merchant marines. And he starts funding the abolitionist movement. and when offered a pension, he said, no, I'm a volunteer. And, I mean, it is so, it's a layup to go for the hypocrisy of it. It's totally hypocritical.

But it is those people at the margins, as Maggie Blackhawks say, who give it meaning. And the real hypocrisy is that as this resistance is building up, the rhetoric increases. And so what happens, the rhetoric of people are often that the British are enslaving us. And even Washington says, you know, hold arbitrary sway over us as we do over the Negroes, you know, in our backyard. And you go, okay then. And they know slavery is wrong. I was sort of confused by that. I was like, wait a minute. What slavery are we talking about? That rhetoric was, in anyway, yes. So, Sarah, the desire to uphold slavery also help unify the colonies because it helped convince the southern states to support the war against the British, but it also made slavery.

issue of national debate in the colonies in a way that it just wasn't before. Talk about how this issue of slavery, both united and divided Americans around the time of war. When we started, my husband said to me, you know, in so many ways, the American Revolution was our Civil War and our Civil War was our Revolution. I think, as Bernard Baylon says beautifully at the end of the film, before the American Revolution, slavery was not a constant conversation, and after the Revolution it was. And I think that's for a number of different reasons. Most important is what we were just talking about, which is the Declaration of Independence, which is this document that everybody reads, inspires everybody, and its ironies and its complexities and its hypocrisies are not lost on anyone.

So the colonies are not a monolith around slavery, people are not a monolith around slavery, and we're going to say all something, everyone's going to think about that in new and different ways. And the founders debated slavery themselves. And George Washington frees his slaves on his deathbed. Thomas Jefferson doesn't. Ben Franklin, they all have different records on slavery,

different opinions on slavery. They are thinking about it all the time. Ken, George Washington, as serves as noted, is a mythic figure, of course, in this story as both the commander of the Continental Army and the first U.S. president. But your documentary paints a more complicated picture of him. He wasn't a particularly great general at times.

He made a series of major tactical mistakes. It almost lost the war for the Americans, especially in the Battle of Long Island and Brandywine. There was talk of mutiny among the ranks in the Army at one point. And yet a few of the historians in the series say the war couldn't have been won without him. Talk about his flaws as a general and why he was so integral to the victory.

We wouldn't have a country without him. It's really unbelievable. He's a deeply flawed human being. he owns other people. He knows slavery is wrong, and only until his deathbed, does he do something about it? He is opposed when he gets to New England that there are black troops and doesn't want any more hired. He changes his mind on that. He's persuaded, which makes him different, as Jane Kaminsky says, than any other Virginia planter of the time. So he's malleable in one respect. He's rash. He rides out on the battlefield risking the whole cause, because if he's killed or captured,

that's it. We're done. The revolution's over. He makes, as you suggest, some tactical mistakes at Long Island and at Brandywine, and some would argue at Germantown that cost the war. So that's if you're trying to decide which college to go to, those are all the negatives, right? We're not going to George Washington University because of this. But we are going to George Washington University because of this, which is he is able to inspire people, ordinary people, not of his station. He may be the richest man in America at one time, to fight in the dead of night, to when

they're going to go home because they're cold and hungry, to stay longer. He picks subordinate talent, generals that are better than him, including Benedict Arnold and Nathaniel Green, and does not feel the jealousy. He defers to Congress, even though he has the moral rectitude and the kind of presence that Benjamin Rush, the only physician who signed the Declaration, said, would make every other ruler in Europe look like a valet de chambre next to him, and yet he defers to Congress. More importantly, he's able to convince people from Georgia and New Hampshire that they are not from these separate countries that they believe they've always been from, but are this new

thing called Americans, and more important than anything, he gave up his power twice and set in motion. So for all of these reasons, he didn't know he was George Washington. He didn't know there's a dollar bill or a quarter or a big spiky monument in the national capital named after him or a state on the other side of that. Yeah, that might be going soon, but go ahead. You know, the state on the other side of the country and every state has a Washington county or a Washington town. He's central to this.

Annette Gordon-Reed, the historian, says, you know, he's the glue that held it together. And Christopher Brown, a younger historian, you know, breaks the fourth wall for the only time in our 12 hours and just sort of, I can't believe I'm saying this, because I don't believe in the great man theory of history or interpretation of history that we don't have a country without his leadership. One thing you do note is the first, he fired the first shot of the actual war, which was in the French and Indian. Right. Well, we think he did. Native allies suggest that this 22-year-old militia commander from Virginia fired into a French encampment that began the seven years war. He has a very mixed result there, but he distinguishes himself and, as a question.

for a commission in the British Army and doesn't get it, and they turn him down. And that begins a kind of, wait a second. You don't want me. I didn't know that. You don't want me. I didn't know that. Yeah. So we have an idealized notion of all these men, though, who fought in the war as these noble patriots fully committed to the cause of American freedom and liberty, but as the war drags on, the ranks of the Continental Army are eventually made up of the poorest, the poor, jobless laborers, second and third sons who weren't going to inherit anything. British deserters, felons hoping to win pardons, immigrants from Ireland and Germany. There's no nationwide draft to force Mentunes List, and some states did implement drafts,

but why did they stay along, Sarah, from a perspective, to win them more? No other choices? I mean, I don't want to speak for them, but I think this is, you know, part of the history of our country and of wars and who fights them versus who leads them. You know, I think they fought the war for all the reasons that are inherent in your question. It was their chance at something. It was for financial reasons, for family reasons. They didn't have any other choice for the hope of a better life.

They were promised things that were better than the station that they started in. And I think class is at the center of our history as much as race. We don't talk about it as much. And this happens in war, and it happened during the American Revolution. And it's so great because they're also, everybody's drawn to these ideas, the animating spirit of it. And plus many of them are in the revenge business. They are after the fact that the British came through and occupied your New Jersey town and stole your crops and raped your daughter and, you know, stole all of your possessions. And so cause animated by Fury is a great motivator. So what we can say is that, Democracy is not the intention of the American Revolution, by no stretch of the imagination. The ruling elites, we'd call them today, believed in forming some non-monarchical Republican small our form of government. But in order to win the war, you've got to begin to promise things to the people who are fighting the war for you.

And it is fought not just by this dirty land-owning militiamen. They're often unreliable leaving to plant crops or to harvest crops or because they're scared. and it ends up being won by these teenagers and these new immigrants that don't own property. And it is, as Washington said, it's just nothing short of a standing miracle that they were able against all this odds over six and a half years to pull it off. It's just, it's incredible. So I'm going to jump for a second to present day in the ways we talk about history now. This is airing in a particularly fraught time to be telling these kinds of nuanced stories. It's become a political act, whether you want it to be or not.

The Trump administration is demanding a return to telling more patriotic version of the country's history. Trump wanted to purge the Smithsonian of what he called divisive race-based ideology. He's ordered any material that disparages Americans to be stripped from the national parks. You've got a lot of that in there. You're telling the story, right, which is the factual story. So how has that been in working on it over these 10 years? Because you started in a different time. Look, I have two children.

I see history as our great teacher. History as a warning. History as inspiration. History as essential to understanding where we are and where we might go. And I think to teach complicated good history is at the heart of this country. Our founders wanted us to be educated. Curiosity, education, Ken talks a lot about this. Virtue are all about trying to understand the good and the bad. it's like making a hero perfect. No hero is perfect. No person is perfect. You need to make somebody truly heroic. You need to understand the things they're not good at, at least for me, because then you can tell your son or your daughter, look at that incredible person who wasn't perfect and look what they achieved, right? Whatever it is. Like you want to give people complication and nuance, and we have a really complicated, I don't really love the word nuance, but it's appropriate, nuanced history where, you know, Ken says this a lot.

As soon as you're sure you're really right, you better peel back and let somebody tell you why you might not be right. That is at the heart of, I think, what makes a human experience worth living through. So I think the film in the end, for me, is a deeply patriotic film. I feel very proud to be an American at the end of this film, not because we did everything right or we've done everything right in the last 250 years, but because this is such an unlikely and surprising story. Citizenship is the highest form of office.

Citizenship to me is at the heart of any film we make, actually. And I want to inspire young people to care about their local school board and their local election. And you can only do that if you understand who your neighbor is and that their beliefs might be different than yours. So, Ken, do you think, you know, you talked about getting history right, and you've definitely gotten more nuanced over the years. right, in terms of who you pick and choose and the perspectives. I don't think so. I was looking at the Civil War, and I thought it had, you know, it's pretty nuanced in terms of the voices that you hear from and all the various people who contribute to it.

Do you feel pressure to include even more voices that you may not agree with? No, no, not at all. Tell me about that. You know, what's so nice, they take a long time. So people don't have the attention spans to, like, sort of oversee us. But let me just say something. This nuance is not the province of progressives. This nuance is the province of human beings and storytelling.

So let's just take what is considered a kind of bellwether of the conservative, supposedly, which is the series I love called Yellowstone, right? It's patriarch. It's George Washington is a very wise person who happens to murder people and dump their bodies in a ravine. Right? His strong daughter, right, is... She's a hot mess. She's a hot mess and is incredibly wise and smart

and also kills people and dumps their bodies in ravines. There are two sons, one of whom is married to a Native American and conflicted throughout the whole film. The other is Benedict Arnold. The daughter is in love with the foreman who has a crew of young and old, white and black people, right? And surrounding them is a Native American sense that this is their land, and overlaid on that is the American story of taking over land and

greed. So this is the, this is a complicated thing. I could be describing a Shakespeare play, for all you know. This is what people want. They are hungry. And Sarah and I were on Washington Journal and C-SPAN, you know, where they call in in the morning over the headlines and they got a Democratic line and a Republican line and a independent line. And I'm used to being on it. And you're dodging arrows and bullets and spears that are coming at you from every one of them. Each caller said, oh, we really love your stuff. So what it means is that we're hungry for good stories, and good stories are always complicated, no matter what the state might want to impose, it doesn't work for anybody.

It doesn't work for a conservative. It doesn't work for a progressive. I mean, look what the left is done in sort of editing out of people off the Politburo. or this thing or whatever it is. It's all in the interests of authoritarians to make this a single-note story because that keeps you a subject dedicated to conspiracies and mythology, not what's really cool. Let me push back.

You say no, it's not progressive, but let's not both sides. Trump and Mag are interested in not incomplicated nuance portrayal of American history, correct? No, no, totally. But what I'm saying is that they don't necessarily write. represent even conservatives in the United States. Fair. What we have is a good story is a good story. The novelist Richard Powers said, you know, the best arguments in the world, and that's

all we do is argue, won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing they can do that, he said, is a good story. That's true. So good stories remind us that it isn't a binary. Right, right. But, Sarah, I'm just curious, your thought, can stories of history ever be neutral and is it wrong to present them as such if they're, they still hold a point of view, right? Look, I think the way I think about this is facts, as close to a fact as you can get,

and then how you interpret those facts is where I think the heart of your question is. So what we try to do, both in Vietnam and this, and I think we've talked a lot about the scholarship in both series, they may seem so different, and they took place a long time apart, but they're like upside-down versions of each other. In Vietnam, we're looking at the war from four different perspectives, and the scholars, are behind the camera. In this film, the scholars are on camera helping the American people understand the facts on the ground as we're putting them forward. And the historians have different expertise and different points of view and think different things are important, and we want to put them in conversation with each other to give our audiences the tools to

think for themselves and have questions and get to the heart of some of what you're saying, which is what we've done well, what we haven't done well, and how to think about our origin story. So truthful but not neutral, necessarily. Yeah. No, no, we say calling balls and strikes. That's the phrase we like to use. You do know the Chief Justice, John Roberts, also talks about calling balls and strikes.

He's misusing it in a different way. Let me ask you the last sort of Trump question. In addition to this docu-series, you've made films on Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin in Congress itself, based on your decades of research about this era, what does Trump's rapid consolidation of power, tell us about the gap between the founders' visions of checks and balances and the reality of what we're seeing today. And what would they make of Congress's abdication of its own constitutional powers as a check on the executive? Because it's sort of the opposite of what your story is telling. Yeah, so we were with Yuval 11 a few weeks ago

in Philadelphia taping something that'll air after the broadcast of our film with Jeffrey Rosen at the National Constitution Center and Melody Barnes, Sarah, and me. And it was a wonderful conversation and Yuval was saying, you know, the founders aren't going to be, they wouldn't be surprised that somebody was seeking, you know, monarchical power. They'd be surprised

that Article 1 is not the executive. Article 1 is the legislative and that they had abdicated. That would be the huge, stunning shock to them, that there had been any kind of abdication of powers. He said it in a wonderful way having to do with tense. He said that the legislative was in the future

tense. You'll do this. The executive was in the present tense. I am doing what you told me to do. And the Supreme Court is in the past tense judging that. And so they saw this almost in that temporal way, the founders I'm talking about, and this is through Yuvel Levin, who knows a lot more about it than I do, even though we, I'm sure, find ourselves on opposite sides about any number of things. But it was an interesting way to understand that. And it took me back, you know, to what I carry around, which is the Constitution and the Declaration and the Bill of Rights, and to read, you know, just how extensive Article 1 is and how much less extensive two and three are and the other sort of parts of it before we get to the Bill of Rights. It's, it's unprecedented

times. And yet, you know, I made a film on Huey Long, which, you know, every sentence is rhyming with today. Every sense of that song is rhyming with today. He had a different outcome. Different outcomes. Who knows? Who knows? We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from the Audible

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credit. Go to upwork.com slash save now and claim the offer before December 31st, 2025. Again, that's upwork.com slash SAVE. Scale smarter with top talent and $500 in credit. Terms and conditions apply. All right, every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours. Hi, I'm Garrett Graff, a journalist and historian. And my big question for Ken Burns is about his documentary Civil War. Ever since that documentary came out in 1990 and helped re-inspire and re-interest America in that seminal conflict. We've also seen the civil war become a flashpoint in our politics again. We've seen the Confederate flag removed from the State House lawn in South Carolina after that infamous church shooting in Charleston. We've seen Confederate statues

removed across the country in the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020. And now we're living in another moment where Confederate statues are going back up in Washington, D.C. I wonder, Ken, how your view of that war's legacy has changed since 1990 and what you have learned about how we remember that war as a nation. Well, the Civil War, that's a really great question. the Civil War, once we started our country, is the most important event. And let's remember that Confederate flag was not the Confederate flag. The flag of the Confederacy is a different flag altogether.

That was one battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia that was just adopted by the Ku Klux Klan. So that use of the flag is in itself even more specious than being the flag. So they're just stupid, but go. And so it's constantly doing that. I've got photographs in many other films of Klansmen marching by the tens of thousands in Washington, D.C., unfurling gigantic American flags on the steps of the Capitol, we've had periods in which we have romanticized this, and part of the attempt to simplify our history to go back to something that's more manageable and simple, whether it's moving women back into the position

where they should be, making it a lily white story, is, of course, to elevate the aspirations of the Confederacy, which itself was not only bankrupt, but varied in and of itself. There are nine million people in the South, four million of whom are owned by the other people in the South. So you have 45% of the population that doesn't give a damn about slavery. They want it to end as fast as possible. And so we've got a really complex that the Civil War will always resonate. There's no different way that I treated our film after a prologue and

introduction, begins with a quote that says, when thinking about America, I admire her bright blue stides, this is an approximation of it, her beautiful moundser, star, cross, field, blah, blah, but then my rapture is soon checked when I realize it is filled with slaveholding and wrong. The tears of my brethren flowed to the sea, that the soil drinks daily of the blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing, Frederick Douglass. That's how our series begins. don't have, after the prologue and introduction, I don't have any problem with that. Today, yesterday, 35 years ago when it came out, or 35 years from now, which, God willing, we still

got a republic thinking about the centrality of the Civil War and the excellent question that was just posed. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're not going to be able to run the Smithsonian, Ken, but that's okay, not this week. The Civil War is actually a good segue to finishing up and talking about the legacy of the Revolutionary War and what came after. Sarah, Ken has the democracy was not the intention of the American Revolution, but a consequence of it. You see the tension with the founding fathers themselves, as you both noted. Two hundred and fifty years later

we're still trying to live up to the values. They champion, even if they didn't live up to them in personhood. So if the challenge for every generation is to try to live up to those ideals and create a more perfect union as the preamble the Constitution says, how do you think that legacy is going and how

and what are the unique challenges? Are they the same challenges from your perspective? I don't think they're the same challenges, although there's probably some similarities just to the human experience. I do think citizenship and your responsibility in a democracy are just essential elements to try to inspire in our young people, to actually be civically minded, civically engaged. I think there are a lot of deeply important principles at our founding, the freedom of speech, the freedom to practice your own religion, the separation of church and state and a balance of

power, free and fair elections. I think some of our founding principles are deeply inspirational and really, really important. And when we lose our way, we need to go back to those principles, kind of strip back and reassess and sort of, I hope, actually come together around this pretty surprising. It's a great underdog story. It's very unlikely that we were going to win. We didn't win alone. So it's, I mean, at the heart of your question, I think, are some of the things the founders were debating themselves and fighting for and declared and then tried to figure out, right? There's 10 years between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It takes a while to form of government. George Washington steps away from power because he wants to show an example of a peaceful transfer of power. There's a lot to our beginnings that might help us right now. So, Kent, what do you hope particularly young people will take away from the docu series? According to the recent PBS, News, Maris Paul, nearly a third of Americans right now say people may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back. So what do you hope people will take away?

Yeah, no. The study of war is always fraught because you are essentially reexamining and re-presenting. violence that is part of the human story. In fact, one of our episodes of the Vietnam War was called The History of the World, meaning that's what human beings do, is they kill each other. And regardless of what a poll says on Thursday or whatever, it doesn't matter, you don't want in any way glorify war. It is really horrible.

There's a woman, there's a line in a document we have. Rebecca Tanner lost five sons fighting for the Patriot Cause. Rebecca Tanner was a Mogeean Indian from, we presume, Connecticut, ultimately. We have an ability to tell the story because it's so dramatic and so part of the human condition. But the idea of this, that what emerges are these free electrons, the free electrons that Sarah's been talking about, of citizenship and education. That pursuit of happiness doesn't mean stuff, it means knowledge. And that the word that is most commonly used throughout our film is very virtue, which is an old-fashioned word. And this period has as much venality as it has virtue,

maybe more venality, just as our period does. And to your earlier question to Sarah, you're going to always take steps forwards and steps backwards. And I think the chicken little in us at any moment says our moment's the most important. And of course, it's the worst has ever been. And so you can either chicken little it, you know, sit in the room with your, you know, sucking your thumb in a fetal position and go, the sky is falling, or you go out and vote. But I want you to address young people specifically. So I think they're the ones that are most sophisticated about stories. They're the ones who are getting our stuff now in school and come up where nobody knew me

from Adam when the Civil War came out. Now all of them have seen it, and they come up and they want to talk about. We were yesterday at the Trinity Church in Manhattan doing stuff on the Revolution with Lynn Manuel Miranda, and there were all school kids, 400 school kids, from all over New York, and there was this one kid who, like, he knew everything about me, every film I'd made, every, you know, stuff. And I just kind of went, holy Toledo. And then he gets up, and he's one of the performers of a scene from Hamilton, this rap,

which he does perfectly with Lynn Manuel going, oh, my God. Because we've got, it's, to me, it's the easiest group to do. It's the people who have permitted their beliefs to become so encrusted. and they're so certain, learn it and. There cannot be a better name for a judge than learn it. So they're not more doubtful. No, no, no, no. They're more open. They're persuadable.

They went with the Democratic Socialists, you know? Democratic Socialists don't kill Jews. National Socialists kill Jews. Many of our allies have been or are Democratic Socialists. I'm not worried about Democratic Socialists. I'm worried about dictators.

That's what I'm worried about. and so are they, because they told us which way they wanted to go. So you've got, this is complicated. It's that learned hand said, liberty is never being too sure you're right and that you have to understand there is a fluidity

and that this question that has animated my work, who are we, is in fact a mirror that has to hold up to herself and say, who am I? And I think good stories do that. And so if people give us our attention, I don't care if you voted for Trump, I don't care if you voted for Kamala.

Harris. I literally want you to do it. And we've been out in the country, Sarah and I've been traveling all across the country. And we've said the same thing to Joe Rogan as to kids everywhere in inner city kids in Charleston and Detroit and Chicago and suburban kids and general audiences in every part of the country. Same story. Same fastball down the center of the pipe there. I could give you another baseball story. And what you find is a curiosity and a hunger and the best thing we ever hear, which is, I didn't know that. So this is my last question. Despite all of the hypocrisies inherit in the origin story in the country and its founding

documents, it's hard not to come away from your series feeling patriotic, as Sarah noted. So even though the story of America's founding was brutal and messy and ugly, right now, each of you, why don't you start, Sarah, what things are worse celebrating and taking pride and then can you finish up? Hmm. I mean, you know, I think the 4th of July is worth celebrating because we did turn the world upside down. We changed the way governments function. We changed the way people could participate and have a voice, even if that voice was for a very small segment. In 250 years, we've pressed the levers of power, right? It took 144 years for you and me to have the right to vote, but we did it. And those women fought hard for us. So I want to stand on their shoulders and fight hard for the next generation. I think optimism gets lost and I want to be optimistic. You know, I don't think I have a deeply sophisticated answer for that other than going back to some of the debates that they had themselves, I find very helpful to understand

where we are now and where I think it would be helpful to go. I think we frame this always in binaries. No matter. what question we're asking of ourselves. We have to say, despite the hypocrisy or despite that, the actual human experience is much less defined. It's more shades of gray than the black and white that our computer systems of one and zeros and our media system of My Way or the highway, red state or blue state, would suggest. And I think that if we can, and this is where good stories come in, then we have the idea to go and I could amplify Sarah, that optimist is not a naive and pejorative condition.

Cynicism is a luxury for jaded journalists and jet-setters, not for the rest of us. We all have to say, yep, there's a lot of bad stuff behind us and there's a lot of good stuff behind us, but in fact, none of that matters. It just matters what I do. So what I do is I vote. I go to my school board meeting.

I go to my city council. I run for dog catcher. I clean up my dog's poop. I find out what my neighbor needs. I shovel their walk if they're in. I do the things that the civic engagement that the revolution suggested was possible, that for the first time in human history, and I'll repeat myself, human beings are no longer subjects, willfully dedicated to being ignorant, susceptible to superstitions, but educated

and now citizens exercising, as Washington felt when he resigned the presidency, the highest office in the land. Great. Perfect. Thank you so much, Sarah. Bodstein and Ken Burns. It's a wonderful documentary. Thank you. Thank you. Great to be with you. Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Roussel, Kateri Yocum, Michelle Aloi, Megan Bernie, and Kalyn Lynch. Neshot Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Catherine Barner and Eamon. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're only following this show,

So you're a patriot, but not the Mel Gibson kind. If not, go read some history books. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more. Mercury knows that to an entrepreneur, every financial move means more. An international wire means working with the best contractors on any continent.

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