Throughline - Ken Burns and the American Revolution

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

Ramtin talks with filmmaker Ken Burns about the revolution that made the U.S., and the surprising lessons he thinks it holds for us today.Guests:Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Data Bricks, the data and AI company. Are your AI agents working? Most aren't reliable for business. You need AI that's accurate. Agent Bricks, AI agents grounded in your data and built for your goals. No one expects that a bunch of country farmers with muskets are going to hold off a trained army who have orders from an actual general in Boston. There's a real disbelief that a bunch of rag-tag colonists are going to manage to hold their own

Against trained soldiers. Stacey Schiff, the American Revolution. The American Revolution was a bloody civil war that lasted for eight years. It was a time of great division and turmoil in the country that would eventually lead to the establishment of our democracy. In other words, we came out the other side. But that was then. It's become one party defeating the other.

The current presidential administration, seems hell bent on dividing, not only socially, but even economically. People that don't like Trump will say he's very divisive, but those are the same people that say that Biden was great. Americans are anti-institutional now. And if you look at data and trust in institutions, we don't trust anything today as much as we trusted it 40 years ago, whether it be banks or unions or the media or religion. Whenever I speak my values, I fear that something bad may happen.

Instances of political violence also include attacks on local politicians, members of Congress and their spouses, and political disagreements that turn deadly. This tension sits on top of pressures more and more people are already feeling. The increasing cost of living, housing shortages, and the erosion of shared spaces where people used to meet across political lines. I don't think I'm alone in feeling that the country is going through some kind of reckoning or rupture, one where our democracy is, at stake. As the U.S. prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, it's worth looking back at where we started, the real story, the real people who forged the United States into existence, and the chaos, conflict, and compromise they live through. And who better to take that deep dive than this guy? My name is Ken Burns. I'm a documentary filmmaker. I've spent the last 10 years

working with my colleagues, co-director Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt on a six-part 12-hour series called The American Revolution. Ken Burns is one of my favorite filmmakers. And I still remember when I was first introduced to his work back in middle school when I watched his documentary on the Civil War. After that, I was hooked. We even got a chance to interview him on the show a few years back for another great documentary about country music.

And now, after watching this new film, I was eager to bring him back and talk to him about his latest documentary. In our conversation, we talk about that. intense and deeply divided period in U.S. history and how so many different groups of people and factions still managed to come together around a common cause. It was a messy, uncertain time with no guarantees about the future. First, though, let's talk about where we are now. That's coming up. Hi, my name is Helen Hean. I'm calling from Malvern, Pennsylvania. I hope this is the right phone number. I just listened to my first through-line episode about the whiteness myth,

and it was really fascinating. So thank you very much. And here's the line you asked us to say. You're listening to Thurline from NPR. Bye-bye. This message comes from Databricks, the data in AI company. AI agents work best when they have the right context. Your unique data, your rules, your workflows. Agent Bricks helps companies build agents that are accurate, continuously learning, and automate everyday tasks. It's AI built for how your business actually runs. Agent Bricks by Data Bricks. AI agents grounded in your data and build for your goals.

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Part 1, The American Present. One of the most remarkable aspects of the Revolutionary War is that you had such different places come together as one nation. And so it really is actually kind of remarkable the way that that nation ends up coherent, not around culture, not around religion, not around ancient history. It was coming together around a set of purposes and ideals for one common cause. Christopher Brown, the American Revolution.

All of your films altogether, you could take them together and really call them like America a life. You know, it's almost like America becomes a complete life. And obviously it's not over. We're living through a moment of that life. But what I have noticed in it is that the origin. So in this series, You talk about what I took away was really hopeful is that America was obviously built out of ideals, right? Like I immigrated from Iran. I have family members who immigrated to other parts of the West.

And what they always tell me, even to this day as we're adults, is you were really lucky your parents pushed to go to the U.S. Because at least not like where they live in those countries like Germany or France, the nationality is tied to ethnicity. In this country, it's tied to ideas. Now, the dark side of that is in a moment like this where sometimes it feels, at least to me, is it just an observer that maybe we don't share ideals anymore? Like, can you have a country like the United States if there isn't at the core of it some set of shared ideals? Because to me, it feels like that's what the country was birthed in.

Oh, you're absolutely right. And it's a really eloquent and elegant way of putting it. And I think, you know, we feel ourselves in divided times now. we can look back at the revolution and perhaps take some solace from the fact that it was much more divided then. There are always going to be people who are going to shortcut the messiness and the promise of those ideals to say, no, it's actually really about one religion, even though the First Amendment of the Constitution is establish no religion, that it isn't really free speech for everybody, that it's not this and that we're seeing limited. but there's been times all the way through.

In fact, the founders were very ridiculous. This was not a revolution to create a democracy. Democracy was a consequence, not an intention of the revolution. It's an accident because of who had to fight it, who actually ended up fighting it. You needed to throw them some things. And what they threw them was the same kind of representation in a legislative, an executive, and a judicial system that they assumed that only the elite founders, the aristocracy of talent would have.

And that's made all the difference. And we're constantly battling with those forces, regressive forces, that want to say, no, no, no. It's like Orwell's Animal Farm. You know, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. And it's just not the case. And so I think your kind thing about saying

that maybe this could be the life of a country if you collected all the patches of the quilt that I've done, without any rhyme or reason, we're not picking them because of market. group says you should do this thing next, you do what the gut suggests. But when an individual, like you or me, you talked about getting some support, when an individual is in crisis, you seek a professional or a pastor or whatever it might be. And they're going to ask you some basic questions. Where were you born? Who were your parents? What was your upbringing like?

That's called your origin story. And it helps reconnect and reestablish your own narrative. And that's, you know, a narrative that's sort of challenged by whatever pain, whatever unresolved traumas are existing. So if we collectively as a country are suffering from some sense of dislocation and sort of feeling like we're disunited, learning the origin story could remind us a lot of those things. and to sort of say that you could go back to people talk about heritage and blood. Well, if you're really going to apply that accurately to the United States at the time of the founding, then that's Native American. But other than that, we are an incredibly, there's a huge variety of people. There's Americans and there's people that speak Dutch and there's people that are speaking German, they're French, people. there are Native Americans living within us.

There are imported, kidnapped, Africans, enslaved and free who speak and have inherited various religions, but also languages from mostly West and Central Africa. There are those Native nations with their tongues and varieties of religious and spiritual practices and linguistic differences that make it all a kind of complex tower of Babel. And it's only our desire to simplify things to get back to that. that gated community where everything runs smoothly, that we want to limit it to just one type of person. You can't do that with the founding of the United States.

And I think our film is an attempt to sort of remind people how, I don't take the description, the adverb, it's deliciously complicated. It is deliciously complicated. I think you're absolutely right. You know, I always come back to this because I grew up in the shadow of 9-11 and a lot of people around me that I grew up with have evolved this very cynical view towards American history. And I know where that comes from. And they're always surprised when I'm, you know, I'm the father. I have a 10-year-old and I always make my son put his hat over his heart during the

national anthem. And friends of mine are like, why? And I say, because there's an idea at the root and the origin of this country that if we don't fight for, that if we don't, to some extent, understand and revere. The ideas, and I'm not talking about flawed human beings, we should always be wary of putting anyone on a pedestal, a human being. But the ideas are ones which if we don't understand and revere, then one day we may not have them. And there's a great line from P.T. Anderson's new movie where Leonardo DiCaprio's character says to someone else, you know, freedom's a funny thing. You don't appreciate it until it's gone. And I feel that way about the ideas, right? And so I think once, do you think you hope that your films kind of renew,

at least an appreciation or understanding for those ideas? I hope so. I think cynicism is a luxury for jaded journalists and jet setters. I'm neither. And it's shame on a jaded journalist. Journalists have an obligation to free themselves not only from cynicism as they are, a means testing everything. And that cynicism grows from, you know, understanding the flaws of human beings. But if you translate that into cynicism, it's just as bad as the sneering, snobby people of the ultra-rich. So that, you know, I remember reading an article recently in which there was attached to me the idea that I was an optimist. And what was interesting and infuriating about it is that clearly in the context of this reporting, that optimist, that optimist,

was a naive and pejorative condition to which I say, F you. I say optimism is a new punk rock. It is the only thing that you can have in the face of these inevitabilities. None of us get out of air alive. And the fact that you say, if you do not exercise these ideas, if you do not believe in them, if you're so jaded, well, they didn't mean me. They didn't mean my people, my color, skin, my sex, my sexual preference, my age, my location, whatever the thing is. And of course, it didn't. But it did say all men are created equal.

And that all, it just is like blaring down the walls of Jericho. I mean, you know, it's going to take four score and nine years before slavery ends, but it's going to end. It takes an inexcusable 144 years before women get the boat. But that's end. And so, you know, you got to participate in the fact that We're a process country. You know, we're in pursuit of happiness. Happiness is, you know, we can argue about it. They meant lifelong learning. People think it's about acquiring wealth.

But we can have that discussion. But the key is pursuit, right? Or in the Constitution, you know, 11 years later, a more perfect union. We are a nation in the process of becoming. And either you're a participant in that becoming, making it more expansive, or you're trying to make it less expansive or worse, you're cynically sitting it out saying that's for me. So take your hat off while the national anthem is on, put it over your heart. I read to my children, my four daughters that range in age from 43 to 15 every 4th of July.

I read the Declaration of Independence to them and have for 30 plus years done that. This is what we do. And read the Constitution. It's short, and it's Article 1 is not the executive. It's the legislative, the people's representatives. And so our founders will come back and they'd not be surprised if somebody wanted to take more authoritarian control. They're not surprised. This is what they knew happened.

That's human nature. They'd be surprised that the legislative had abdicated so much power to the executive. They just go, what, the people's representatives? are giving up their right and this. And this is coming, not for me, but from Yuval Levin, a conservative scholar of the thing, who I had the great fortune of spending some time with. And so I think that this, you know, we're all,

you know, this division, we're so divided, is a mile wide and an inch thick. And if you can puncture a little bit of that by going back and saying, oh, yeah, we do show this thing in common. We do, we are based on ideas, not on the color of skin. not based on the religion. Thomas Jefferson himself said, if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no God at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. That's why we have a First Amendment. We say, oh, First Amendment, freedom of speech. It says freedom of the press, right,

and address their grievances. But the first thing is no establishment of religion. All of human history you can see so much of the conflict based on a state adopted sponsored religion. And you will find people saying, oh, yes, but, but we can do it here because we are actually this kind of nation. We are an Islamic nation or we are a Jewish nation or we are a Buddhist nation or we are this. And in fact, if we are the first country on earth that was established without a religion established. And that's very intentional. Intentional. And it is giving. And it is. given us unbelievable strength despite all of the people come along and go, yes, but. And what's, yes, and what I, it seems into another moment in, in the, in the series, where

Jane Kamenski, uh, the historian says, and because, because I think it's related, where she says, I think to believe in America is rooted in American, in the idea of possibility, that that's what everyone was fighting for. And that is, no one wrote possibility, right, in, in the constitution or anywhere else. It's subtext that still last to this day. And she said even people who did not have ownership of themselves are invested in that. And earlier in the film, she says the liberty talk, her words, is leaky. Meaning, you know, you may be reading the newspaper about this thing around the table and the people who are serving you, they're interested in liberty, perhaps even more than you are.

And the women at the table, they're interested in equality. perhaps even more than you are. And that this is the American promise is that we're going to steadily expand this narrow thing when Jefferson wrote all men are created equal. He meant all white men of property free of debt. We do not mean that now.

And yes, and what is really haunting me about that, even though it's a beautiful moment and a beautiful sentiment, what haunts me about that is like, look, you and I are sitting here, we're employed, right? We live in some level of comfort, okay? how can there how and this is what worries me about the future of the country when economically for many people in this country they don't feel like there's a possibility right that that subtext is withered away

or it feels like a distant kind of whisper so let's tell each other's stories the novelist richard powers said the best arguments in the world and that's all we do won't change anybody's point of view the only thing that can do that is a good story so let's tell stories that reach to every middle sex village and farm that penetrate down to people who are don't feel they've got a stake in any of this, that penetrate up to those people who think that they are born to a kind of privilege that should not exist in the United States, that goes out wide and says, yeah, we disagree, we voted for somebody different, but don't we do share these things in common, right? Nobody, when you go into the ballpark where you're about to sing the national anthem,

anybody asks you who you voted for it, what political. party you're registered at. So Colistice. I live in a tiny town in New Hampshire. Everybody's from every possible political thing. And we get along, right? We have to figure out how to get along, you know?

Coming up, what the American Revolution was really about. This is Leia Margeley calling from Paris, France, and you're listening to ThruLine. I just want to say, I think your show is fantastic. I love everything from the content to the music.

You guys are doing an amazing job. Thank you so much. And keep up the good work. Part 2. Finding Unity The American Revolution changed the world. It's not just about the birth of the United States. It has ramifications across the globe. So studying the American Revolution, understanding it,

and putting it in a global context. I think it's vitally important for us to understand why we are Where we are now. Stephen Conway, the American Revolution. You know, I think the question you're getting a lot is sort of, what was the American Revolution really about, right? It is a global war preceding it by 20 years as what we are called the French and Indian War, which we see in our own way as our own story, our own battle with our then-British allies against the French and some of their Native American allies.

And we had our own Native American allies. and we won for the prize of North America. So the important thing is to rewind and say the prize of North America that then introduces an even more important thing. If you're saying North America is a prize, you're saying that the land is a prize. And that land has been occupied for millennia by other people. And 1776, 13 British colonies occupy the Eastern Seaboard,

which they've already superimposed over. existing native lands, varieties of tribes, varieties of customs, not a single entity of them, but distinct states that have been on the world scene trading and diplomatically and militarily and have known the other empires, Britain and Spain and France, particularly Netherlands, for centuries. And some of the people superimposed by those 13 colonies have assimilated. Some are coexisting. Some have moved west and are in. in those Western territories that the colonists want to spread into and the British can't afford to protect them. And so you have great tensions.

And so I think if you're in the eighth grade and you're having a test about the revolution, you pass if you say taxes and representation. But I think as we try to do, like the global dynamics, like the importance of the Caribbean, like the violence and bloodshed that attends this revolution, all of that is revelatory and new, I think, for most people, For most of us, we think it's a bunch of guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, particularly in 76 and then in 1787. And it's true. These are the newest and the greatest thoughts you could possibly imagine. But it's also a revolution. It's also a civil war. And as we've been discussing, it's also a global war. So it's got wonderful, complicated dynamics. And we haven't even brought up the fact that of the three, two and a half to three million inhabitants of those 13 colonies, the beginning of the revolution, 500,000 are free and enslaved Africans who are part of the dynamic women who play essential role in keeping the resistance alive, who are writing as philosophers and historians and satirists and poets movingly about it. They are participating in the revolution when it happens on the battlefield in support of armies or women attending these

armies. They're washing the dead. They are burying the dead. They're washing the bloody clothings. They're around. They're also back home running farms and businesses. Thank you very much. And so there's a whole cast of people who have not really had their stories acknowledged, in large measure, because we're pre-photographic. There's not, you know, 99% of people don't have their portraits painted, but it doesn't mean those 99 don't exist. So we, We've spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out how to make them exist. I mean, sometimes, ironically, it's the gravestone that proves that they were alive. Sometimes it's an enlistment role.

Sometimes it's a letter. Sometimes it's a memoir. Sometimes it's just going to the places where you knew they were and invoking them. So in addition to having a third-person narrator reading Jeff Ward's extraordinary script that is distilling 10 years of our working with scholars of every stripe about every aspect of the revolution and read by Peter Coyote. We also have 400 first-person voices read by the finest actors in the world, probably the best cast that's ever been assembled off-camera of any television or movie, bringing to live scores of people that you don't know. We've tried to

make those bold-faced names less opaque, the Washington's, the Adamses, the Jeffersons, the Sam Adamses, all of those folks, Abigail. But more importantly, to introduce our audience and us initially to a cast of characters I'd never heard of, who I think give dimension and then I think more meaning. I think maybe we tell a superficial version of the revolution because we're afraid that if we show how violent it was, for example, that it diminishes somehow those big ideas in Philadelphia, it doesn't.

It makes them all the more impressive. One thing that comes out in your films, though, that I really try to emulate is that you also profile people or leaders in particular who have understood this subtext and this need for possibility, whether it's Grant or it's Lincoln or Rosa. There's so many, just a list of these leaders that understood on some level for this to feel real, these ideas, it has to feel real in people's lives, where people feel like there's a, and right now what I'm worried about is I'm not pointing to any particular leader,

but I think we've had a series of leaders and just generally our leadership in Congress who don't seem to understand that these ideas don't mean anything if they don't feel like they're real in people's lives. If they don't feel like they can understand. That's exactly right. And so we tell stories about these people. So let's take, go back to the revolution and take the most important person in the history of the United States, which is George Washington. Without him, we do not have a country. We just don't. He's indispensable. He's also deeply flawed. He owns hundreds of human beings. He's rash. He rides out on the battlefield, risking his life and therefore the cause. He makes some bad military decisions, but he's able to inspire

men in the darkest of night to fight for a cause that nobody had ever fought for before in all of human history. He is willing to sacrifice as the last line of the Declaration says, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes. He may be one of the richest men in America. And he spends most of his time living in other houses and tents. for most of the war, never gets back to Mount Vernon. I think he spends four days during the war at Mount Vernon when it sees named Commander-in-Chief. He's willing to do that and his sacred honor. He knows how to pick subordinate talent, unafraid or jealous of the fact they may be better generals than him.

Some are. He knows how to talk and defer to Congress, which is the important example of a democracy, of a republic. He's able to convince people from Georgia and New Hampshire that they're not from individual countries, as they think they are, but a one thing, Americans, and more than anything else, he gives up power twice. First, his military commission and that. And he didn't know he was George Washington. He didn't know there was going to be a dollar bill or a quarter

or a big spiky monument in the national capital that's named for him or that be on the other side of the continent, a state name for him, or then every other state has either a county or a town name for him. He didn't know that. He didn't know how it was going to turn out. Even when the French came in on our side, He was worried when the British took Charleston.

He really thought, okay, this is over. I'm not going to be able to pull it off. And if you have the arrogance of the present thinking, well, we know how it turned out. What could there be? Then you miss the interiors of the contingency. Good history is staying tuned because you think it might now turn out the way you know it did. And that's great.

I have lots of people who write me letters or stop me on the street and say, you know, I watched the Civil War again and I went into that last episode thinking maybe this time at Ford's Theater. the gun will jam. And I just give them a hug. And I said, hallelujah, me too, me too. I want that gun to jam. And it never does. He always gets killed.

He always gets killed. But that is the understanding of the contingency. David McCullough said, and Rick Atkinson, who is this great historian, a writer in our film, likes to quote it. He says, in history, there's no foreseeable future, right? Right? There's no, nobody knows that Washington's, As he rides out just like a couple miles from here at Kipps Bay in Long Island, I mean in Manhattan,

he rides out and one of his aides is grabbing the horse. He's going to be shot. If he is shot, we're speaking English, English, or French or Spanish. We're not who we are. And to then understand and weigh, I mean, we lament today, and you were lamenting today. You know, we sort of don't have heroes. But a hero is not a perfect thing. A hero is, and the Greeks brought it to us, it's their idea, that heroism is a negotiation between the person's strength and their weaknesses. And sometimes that negotiation, it's all internal, is a war, a kind of psychological war. Achilles had his heel and his hubris to go along with his great strengths and powers.

And so if you're, if you just want some sanitized Madison Avenue, top-down version of the past, it's bankrupt. If you just say it's only bottom up and you throw out the Washington's and the Jeffersons and in that unforgiving revisionism, it's bankrupt. And yet if you tell a complicated narrative that goes, yep, this is who they were. And sometimes, as Winton Marcellus said to us in our jazz series, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. We don't understand that in our friendships, in our loves, in our relationships, and stuff, but we don't apply it to our politics because everything's binary. Everything's one thing, my way or the highway, or it's red state or blue state, or it's on or off.

It's like the same in our computer world. It's either a one or a zero. And it doesn't work like that. Coming up, 250 years later, where a divided America goes from here. This is Johnny Cox from Oakland, California, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. I love third line because y'all share stories that otherwise I wouldn't know. And I think they often have to do with topics and subjects that knowing about them really will, I believe, make me a better person. So thanks so much.

Part 3, America's Unforeseeable Future. We are in the very midst of a revolution. The most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of nations. Objects of the most stupendous magnitude and measures in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested are now before us. John Adams. Early in the film, in this series, there's a clip from John Adams describing how the early resistance to the British was fueled by resentment. that there was a resentment towards the occupation. And what that made me think about is like,

that's like in DNA of the American psyche in a lot of ways. It's a human thing, you know, that you've got this cause. And it's really improbable that you have so-called ordinary people that don't have any property that are fighting for an idea of liberty, of freedom, of equality. What the hell does that mean? And then, of course, they're having to deal with at various times an occupying army, which always does bad things.

It lutes, it forages, it steals crops, it rapes women, it destroys houses, it breaks your China, all of those things which create resentment. And Adams, John Adams is realizing that the kind of supercharged combination of both cause and fury is what is going to animate. The reaction is true, particularly in New Jersey and South Carolina, where the fighting is so bloody and it is citizen-to-citizen, loyalists killing patriots, patriots, killing loyalists, and not just set pieces of battles. What you find is this great animus

that comes from people not only dedicated to an idea. A lot of people are dedicated to the ideas and disappear when the first shots are fired or disappear when their crops need to be planted or harvested. But this revolution begun by property men to protect their property and their rights suddenly get blown into natural rights talking about things that all human beings have,

which means enslaved people and Native Americans and women and people in the margins, as the legal scholar Maggie. Black Hawk says in our film, they're deeply influenced by the Declaration. So all these people are moving and changing sides. And in one season, more British and Asian soldiers were killed in kind of ambushes and guerrilla actions that reminded me having the previous film on War of Being Vietnam just made me feel like we were in South Vietnam. They're talking about pacifying provinces and all of a sudden there's having to admit that province isn't pacified anymore.

Exactly. And that made me think about how this is at the root of our existence as a country is a violent resistance to the excesses of an occupation. Then why do we struggle to understand whether it's Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan or Palestine? Why do we struggle as Americans to then understand or have empathy for other anti-occupation movements? Well, the Bible, the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes gets it. What has been will be, again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. Human nature doesn't change and that human nature superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events and we hear the echoes. We see the motifs. Mark Twain is supposed to have said history doesn't repeat itself,

but of course, of course it doesn't know event has happened twice, but it rhymes. And that's exactly right. I've never made a film where it wasn't rhyming in the present. And our responsibility our discipline as filmmakers is not to point signs saying, oh, isn't this rhyming like today? Because that not only dates the film, it makes you fall out of the complexity, but that this thing needs to have a complex and nuanced story of what actually happened and not some sanitized Madison Avenue

version of the revolution that we've normally been taught in large measure because there are no photographs and there are no newsreels and the paintings, they seem different. from us. They have buckles on their shoes. They wear hoes and they got breaches and that. And you think it can't be like us. They're exactly like us. The same degrees of virtue and venality of generosity and greed obtained then as they do now. And so you don't need to spend your time wasting your time as filmmakers going, oh, isn't this so much like today? You can just let it go. There's a failed invasion of Canada. We wanted to make it the 14th state.

There's a continent-wide pandemic in which there are huge arguments about inoculations. And Washington makes, as the historian, the distinguished historian, Joe Ellis, says the greatest military decision was to inoculate his troops. There's a total eclipse. There's lots of stuff that rhymes. But you don't have to say, hey, doesn't that seem so much like today? Because you want to do something that lasts. And you want to have something that, you know, our Civil War series.

series. Today is a school day in America, as you and I are talking. And my Civil War series, which is more than 35 years old, is being shown in hundreds of classrooms. Not the whole thing, but a 20-minute or a 40-minute gulp about the Battle of Gettysburg or about Black troops or about Lincoln and the White House and issuing demands, whatever it might be. It's in use. And it wouldn't be in use if everybody's going, oh, isn't this so much like today? And I appreciate you saying that because I think one of the pressures in the podcasting world in which we because it was born out of individual narrative, which is obviously nothing wrong with that. You profile many individual people, but it's done within a context, within a world.

Like, you build a world and then the people live in that world. And I think often if you tell the story without someone living in a world out of the context, then in a way you're missing the whole point of the story. And I appreciate that you take that approach, which makes me think about this idea that you're just pointing to about like not knowing the possible futures. We may know possible futures from reading about history, but you're never going to know exactly what's going to happen. And so looking forward, this always rigs me to my like future prediction question, but listen, as we both acknowledge, we are in a moment of division and difficulty in our country. How it compares

to things in the past, that will only be able to know as things proceed, right? Like, you can't predict the future. But given coming out of making this, film over the course of 10 years. And also, let's just note a 10 years in which the country changed drastically. Yeah, we started. Barack Obama had 13 months ago in his presidency. You know, and so the things that were rhyming then, don't rhyme now, or some do, and stuff comes and goes. We have the wife of a German general, Heshen General, who's traveling to the United States alone. She'd waited for the birth of her third daughter and was now making the perilous thing. She's anxious because she hears that Americans eat cats. Now, if it had come out,

When we're in the middle of the presidential campaign, and people were talking about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating cats, completely made up, completely not true. But that would have said, oh, can you put that in to do that? I think this year it'll go over and nobody will notice it. But it's a beautiful moment. And you begin to realize rumor, conspiracy, you know, disinformation has always been. when the first human being started having a conversation with one another,

somebody told a lie, you know. And that lie, I mean, if you think about the lie is at the root of storytelling. That, so this brings me to what I kind of want to get to here, which is your films have almost a mythical quality, even though they're dealing in fact. They're told in a way that I felt that, you know, in my own tradition, you know, my parents have always taught me that it's important to remember your ancestors and the things that have happened

because if you're not rooted in anything, you're out there sailing out in the ocean with nothing to hold you down. Have you viewed your career up till now in a lot of ways as creating that anchor, not creating it, or pointing to it maybe, even in all of its complexity, that in some sense we have to kind of understand

and appreciate our ancestors because without understanding that, what are we? Where are we? Exactly. If you don't know where you've been, you can't possibly know where you are or where you're going. I agree with that.

I'm a filmmaker. I'm not a history and I'm not professionally trained in the scholarly sense, but I happen to choose history the way to tell my stories, the way some painter might choose oil as opposed to watercolor. And fortunately, the word history is mostly made up with the word story plus high, which is a good way to begin a story. So I don't want to overindulge it. I don't want people to take a certain thing away from this. We've worked for 10 years so that you can take away whatever you want to take away. But I promise you that every person in this country, I did not make it for a certain subset. I made it for everybody.

And I've traveled the country. I've said the same thing to Joe Rogan for three hours. As I said, the New York Times editorial board, as I said, to inner city kids in Charleston and Detroit and Chicago, to suburban kids, to general audiences. I say the same thing about the story that we've told because everybody within the sound of my ears is a product. that can get involved in that story. And other than that, what they do with it is what they'll do with it. And I hope, if I had a wish, I would say that I hope that the film might help put the us back in the U.S.

I think one of the questions me and a lot of other fans of your films over the years have asked is like, what happens when Ken Burns stops making these films one day for like whatever reason, right? how important to you is it to kind of pass on the baton of this work, of this kind of documentary storytelling as you're looking into the future? How important is that for you? I don't think it's this kind of documentary telling because everybody is individual and unique and we've been working together many of us for 50 years, for 45 years. I've got two or three production teams. we have a really rigorous and disciplined way of working, which I don't, for a second, think, will not be carried on.

Our fact-checking is as good, I think, as the New Yorkers. We're interested in facts, our scripts, as we're working on them. They're not coming down from Mount Sinai and then informing shooting and editing. We are shooting before there's a script. We're shooting after there's drafts of scripts that sometimes will go to 20 different iterations. We're always researching. We're always changing up until the very last moment. And we have to be able to tolerate complexities. We have in our editing room and have had for years and years and years

a neon sign in lowercase cursive. And it just says simply, it's complicated. Because you just want to respect the fact that if you think that scene is working and it's perfect and then you learn some contradictory information, nobody wants to change it, but we change it. We go, we're willing to sacrifice. des stabilize a scene that's working because the facts have to win out over the art every single time. Given all that and your wish, do you think right now after making this film and after making all

the other films you've made that the moment we're living here in the U.S. right now is part of, just part of, is it lean more towards just being part of a cycle or that it's a uniquely tenuous moment? It's an uniquely tenuous moment, unprecedented and an existential threat. But history makes you optimistic because I can point to many other films that I've made that have been about similar existential threats. You know, they're not as unprecedented in this case, but, you know, in human history there have been in smaller moments. I made a film about Huey Long, who was sort of this dictator, politician in Louisiana that was going to run for president and was assassinated. And, you know, it's got echoes of today. But I don't need to say, oh, isn't this,

I mean, just don't, I made it in 83. It seemed to exist by itself. It had theatrical distribution and won a lot of awards. But, you know, if you dust it out and show it today, you go, oh, I know what Ken's trying to say, you know, and you go, no, no, you don't. I'm just trying to tell a complicated story. So that actually leads me to kind of a, this is a little bit of a personal question, but I'm fascinated by it, which is I've interviewed over the years now doing this show,

so many historians or people who have been so interested and fascinated And like, you know, it's a catnip for them, history. And I thought about one common thing I see across a lot of those stories when I ask people personal questions about why they've been interested in it is usually people have experienced, like I did, some major loss as a young person. And, you know, I read that you lost your mom when you were young, I think just 11. When I was 11 and she'd been sick for all of my conscious life. So there was never a moment.

And yeah, no, I had a crisis later on in my life, and my late father-in-law, who was an eminent psychologist, I said, I seemed to be keeping my mother alive. I could never remember. I could see the date that she died coming up, April 28th, but then it would be receding. And he looked at me and he said, I bet you blew your candles out on your cake wishing she'd come back as a kid. And I said, how did you know? And he knew a lot of other stuff. And he said, look what you do for a living. You wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you're really? trying to wake up. And that intimacy was very helpful for me to go back and try to heal some of the things from that loss, but to realize that many of us are defined, and it sounds like you, by loss, and that it's interesting that we're always trying to design our lives, kind of almost

with a gated community, as if we can ensure that everything is running smoothly, when in fact we're mostly defined by these difficult times and how you negotiate. these difficult times or don't, becomes the measure of who you are as a person. I feel incredibly lucky. I was once asked by a sociologist what my mother's greatest gift to me was. And I said unblinkingly dying. I didn't want her to die. I started to cry when I answered it. But what I meant is that I wouldn't be here talking to you. I wouldn't have made these films if I wasn't constantly dealing in, you know, it's made me a good dad and a good filmmaker, I think. it's made me terrible in lots of other ways.

But that loss has had a profound thing. I think that's true. If you're supported and have a life in which that you're able to not just bounce back from that, but use that as you're saying, as fuel for your own interests, to expand to make art, whatever it is, then it's a really positive. Yeah, I don't think you ever bounce back. I thought that the half-life of grief was endless. But that somehow you learn to try.

transform some energy. I mean, my mom's been dead for 60 and a half years, which is, I have to say, way too long to be without a mother. But I also know that the reason why I'm talking to you, the reason why I just finished a film on the American Revolution, and the films before that, some of them 20 hours long, some of them like this one, 12 hours long, some of them one hour, I mean, has been because of this.

And it's not that I'm running away from it. It's just that whatever is part of, of the negotiation with our inevitable mortality, no one within the sound of my voice, is getting out of here alive. And many of us don't deal with that. And that along the way, we will be challenged by extraordinary and at times unbearable loss.

And that this is what human beings are kind of burdened with by consciousness, by language, by memory, by feeling, by art, all of those things that we distinguish us from the prehensal thumbs from most other creatures also deliver this potentiality for enormous suffering. You know, out in the real world, you have the example of a perfect nature and imperfect human being. So nature can be a great guide and you can tell stories which are always complicated, the ones that we like the most. And then out of those, you form a much more sophisticated and complex view of the world that helps you negotiate what's going on. And it helps you remain

optimistic that the system is terrific. But you know, you have to get through some of these speed bumps, and maybe they're there just like our own private losses. Maybe they're there for a reason for us to figure out how to overcome them. That was filmmaker Ken Burns, talking with me about his new documentary series, The American Revolution.

You can watch it now on pbs.org. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randaabdel-Fattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui, and you've been listening to Thurline from NPR. This episode was produced by me And me and Lawrence Wu

Julie Kane Anya Steinberg Casey Minor Gristina Kim Devin Katiyama Irene Noguchi Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin vocal

Also thank you to Johannes Durgy Beth Donovan and Tommy Evans This episode was mixed by Maggie Luthor Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric Which includes

Navid Marvi, Shoe Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine atMPR.org. And make sure you follow us

on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.