Yes, this isn’t videogame related. I want to put it online though and I’m not sure where else to put it so I guess I’m putting it here.
Please note: this is written with the assumption that the reader has watched the series. This isn’t meant as a ‘should you watch this?’ review, but more of a critical article about some failings I see in it.
Also, if I was making this series, I would have started with a quick note on how the lowercase s was written in the 1700s. It looks so much like an f that it takes a while to be able to recognize it. I’m sure some viewers were confused for some time.
Recently, famous PBS documentary filmmaker Ken Burns aired his latest work, a six-part, twelve hour series on the American Revolution. I have a degree in history and have read a good amount about the subject, so I am perhaps not in the target audience for this series that was clearly aimed at more casual history fans, but I watched the whole series and have a lot of thoughts about it. Overall, The American Revolution was a decent series, but I think that it has issues. My impression of the core concept is that what Ken Burns was trying to do was make a modern take on the Revolution, aimed at people who previously learned the traditional story and the basic sequence of events but are interested in being reminded of the basics of the story while learning a more left-leaning version of the story, focusing strongly on civilians, blacks, and native peoples of that era and why the black and native peoples didn’t support the Patriots.
There is a place for this kind of history, but the problem is that this is a Ken Burns documentary. People take his work as The Authoritative Take on a subject, and in order to get in all of the coverage of journals written by white civilians, the history of black people of that era, and the struggles of the Native American Indians against the colonists, Ken drastically cut back on the amount of the core traditional narrative of what happened. Major figures are either never mentioned or barely mentioned; very significant events and writings go unmentioned or covered in unacceptably limited detail; and more. This is not, and cannot be, The Authoritative Take on the American Revolution because it is too incomplete. Perhaps, with a few more episodes worth of material added to fill in the gaps, it could have been that history, but as it is this series left me frustrated and feeling somewhat disappointed. I just do not think that a history of the American Revolution that takes 12 hours but has so many gaps could ever be considered authoritative. No, this is a side work to watch alongside your primary history of the era, that preferably should come from a book or books.
The First Two Episodes are Seriously Lacking Necessary Detail
Here are a few examples of this. The series is made up of six two-hour episodes. The first episode covers the period before the war, and is unacceptably lacking of many necessary details. A lot of very important events led up to the revolution starting, and this series barely covers them. Expect something like maybe junior high textbook levels of detail here, nothing more. I expect better than that from Ken Burns. It felt to me like they were not very interested in the part before the fighting started and wanted to rush through the prelim part to get to ‘the good stuff’, but the part before the war is critically important! For example, the coverage here of Samuel Adams, crucial Boston activist and printer, really was, as I said earlier, junior high textbook tier, at most. I’m sure some junior high textbooks do a better and more comprehensive job of talking about Samuel Adams than this series does. He was mentioned very briefly and with near zero details. He was one of the most important people to the existence of America and I don’t think that comes through at all in the series; you just learn that he was a printer, published a lot of largely unmentioned articles to help keep the anti-British idea alive in peoples’ minds, and such. More on Samuel Adams was necessary. I would particularly recommend reading The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, by Stacy Schiff. That is a very good book.
And that’s only the beginning! The series covers the Stamp Act in detail, and explains why the then-colonists hated it. It mostly does an okay job here, but I cannot think of one reason why perhaps the most important symbol of colonial resistance against the Stamp Act, The Virginia Resolves, are, as far as I remember, never mentioned even once in this series. That 1765 resolution established in a state legal document the idea that taxation without representation is tyranny, and thus are a hugely important moment in the lead up to revolution and the build-up to the Declaration of Independence establishing that all people have natural rights. Alongside the resolves he authored, critical Virginia Patriot Patrick Henry is, I believe, never mentioned in this series, not once. I do not understand how you can actually publish a twelve hour history of the revolution without mentioning one of its most important prewar advocates. Obviously his most famous quote isn’t mentioned either, but more on that later.
Similarly, this is a bit later as it was written in 1779-1780, but the Massachusetts State Constitution is either unmentioned or maybe referenced once. It was another important step forwards towards freedom and natural rights, as it put the Declaration of Independences’ rights into an actual legal document. They didn’t bother mentioning that John Adams wrote it, or any details about its declaration of rights — life, liberty, and property. Personally I think that Jefferson’s idea of ‘the pursuit of happiness’ was conceptually brilliant work versus ‘property’, but the concept is important either way.
Native American Population Numbers
But what about the Native Americans, or Indians, or Indigenous peoples, or whatever term you prefer; the series uses all of those and more, which makes sense, there is no agreement including among their groups of what the preferred term is in the United States. [For any Canadians reading this, the Canadian preferred term ‘First Nations’ is very, very rarely heard in the USA.] This series tries to incorporate a significant amount of their history, but it has gaps as well. For instance, in the first episode, the series establishes well that the British colonies controlled the coastal region, but the government banned settlers from moving inland into what we now consider the Midwest and inner south. However, at some point there is the comment that ‘powerful [Native] nations’ lay inland, opposing the colonists. That Native nations lay inland and were going to oppose the colonists is certainly true, but I thought that the series was a bit deceptive here in order to play up how much resistance they could actually put up against the Colonists, or the Americans as they would soon become.
That is, while the population levels of the colonies are mentioned, the Indian population is not mentioned until the last episode of the series. I think that for anyone who doesn’t know much of the context, they might be confused at a lot of the events here if they didn’t realize that the colonists massively outnumbered the natives, but this is not a fact that the series really ever makes clear. It does say that the colonial population was rapidly increasing due to immigration as well as births here, but the sheer scale of the mismatch isn’t made clear. The series does say that several million people lived in the Colonies just before the revolution, but again, it’s not until the very last episode that it gives an estimate of the much, much lower population of Native Americans at the time; I think they said something like a quarter million but can’t remember exactly. That would make sense though. I understand emphasizing the native nations, that was good, but by not mentioning the population difference I think that it may lead people to think that they had more of a chance than they did.
As an aside, I am sorry to have to mention this because it is quite depressing, but this series never references one of the key reasons for that disparity in population levels: that the vast majority of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas died of disease over the 400 or so years after discovery. This really is the most centrally important fact behind why the Americas are as they are, that most of the native population died on their own, before ever meeting a white person. Europeans conquered almost the whole world between the 1500s and 1900s, but why are most African countries today black, most Asian countries inhabited by their native groups, and most American nations white or black, and not American Indian? Well, sadly that is first and foremost because something like 95% of the native population died of disease. Following that the survivors lost everything over the Indian wars of the next 400 years, but without the diseases some areas would certainly be almost entirely native today, especially the areas from Brazil and Peru up to Mexico. Populations north of Mexico were lower, but at least up to Massachusetts many people lived there in sizable numbers, until plagues carried away almost all of them. The Pilgrims, for instance, settled at Plymouth on a coast that had been emptied by a massive plague a few years earlier. Without the great dying the Americas would probably look more like Africa, Asia, or Oceania today, with pockets of white settlement in areas where few native peoples had lived in an otherwise primarily non-white region. I can understand why he left this out, it is largely beyond the scope of the series, but even just a quick mention of the challenges that the native nations would have at trying to resist against people who outnumbered them so massively would have been good. As with many things Ken Burns’ American Revolution is incomplete; it tries to do too many things to do them all well with the amount of runtime that it has.
The Flaws of the Segement on The Declaration of Independence and the Interviewed Historians
Most of this series is only on PBS, but this segment was put on YouTube. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFY-0-o8K38
On the list of segments that needed more detail, one that I would not expect is the Declaration of Independence, but sadly, it was. This section is about 12 minutes long, which doesn’t sound too bad, except that it is unacceptably lacking in needed detail. I already said that important predecessors like the Virginia Resolves aren’t mentioned here, but this lack of interest in probably the most important thing about the Revolution gets worse. In this series, they don’t even bother to mention the names of anyone on the committee other than Thomas Jefferson, much less anything they added to it! I do not understand how that actually happened, that’s insane and not okay. Jefferson may have been the primary writer, but John Adams and Ben Franklin’s roles were also important, and well known to history. Adams and Franklin are shown in a painting, but their names aren’t mentioned and nor are any of their contributions. I do not understand how you leave that out. The segment mentions how important the Declarations’ statement of the rights of man is — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — and that is good, though I would have liked more; there isn’t anything here on the European political philosophy that led to those rights, for instance, of Locke, Rousseau, and such. The term ‘humanism’ is also not mentioned, though this is what that line of philosophy is. Things like these should show how this series is lacking in necessary detail. It affects the whole series; I thought the first episode was by far the most lacking in detail, but as the Declaration of Independence section shows the series never hit the level of detail I expected from a Ken Burns documentary. In twelve hours you can’t cover everything, but you could cover more than they do.
Additionally, something else happens in this segment. So, I know that most viewers will not be familiar with the ‘talking heads’, the historians interviewed who they show on screen. I am well read in history enough to be familiar with some of them, including Nathaniel Philbrick, Gordon Wood, Ned Blackhawk, and more. Gordon S. Wood is elderly now, but I would say that he is probably the best known academic historian of the revolution. [As an aside, I’d never seen his name listed without the middle initial as a part of it, but Burns left it out in this series. I am including it because that is always how his name is written.] He appears in this series… for the first two episodes. Wood believes that the American Revolution is an exceptionally important positive event which we should celebrate and which set the world on a path towards greater equality and freedom, but also generally wrote what is probably the definitive standard version of the story of the Revolution, with a particular focus on its ideological component. So, I can understand why he was somewhat sidelined here, as that is not the version of the story that Burns wanted to tell. That more traditional approach definitely clashes with the more qualified, ‘but marginalized groups were excluded and understandably opposed the Patriots because the Patriots opposed THEIR freedom’ approach that this series takes, but personally I think that both sides are right. I know that awful things happened, particularly to the black and native peoples, but despite this the way the Revolution brought the concept of freedom and democracy to the world is one of the most important events in human history, I really believe that. It is one of the, or maybe THE, most important historical turning point towards freedom and democracy existing on this earth. Gordon Wood would surely agree with that.
So I wonder, what were they saying to him behind the scenes? Because, during the segment on the Declaration of Independence, he pretty intensely said “Everything we believe in comes out of the revolution, our ideals of liberty, equality, it is the defining event of our history. ‘All men are created equal’. That is the most famous and important phrase in our history. If we do not celebrate it we have no reason to be a people. Lincoln knew that, and that is why he says ‘all honor to Jefferson’.” These are concepts he discusses in his writings. And then I do not believe he ever appears again for the remaining four episodes. I found that quite odd, and I have no idea what happened but it made me wonder. What happened there? What was said that isn’t published, did he dislike something they were saying and walk out or something? If so I would understand it, honestly. To be clear, Wood is no right-wing conservative. He simply believes, correctly, in the greatness and importance of the Revolution and the ideologies that led to it, such as freedom. Going by this series, Burns kind of does, but with more reservations than Wood has. I’m much more with Wood on this one. Burns? Well, he wants it both ways, saying how important the concept of freedom from the Declaration was, while also making a segment where the only one of the list of crimes that is actually discussed is the one blaming the King for inciting Indians to attack the frontier. There is no reason to list every crime in the series, but by ONLY describing that one you are making a choice. It would be better to describe both that one and some the others.
On that note though, the series does correctly point out that once the concept of human freedom and that government comes from the consent of the governed — that the people rule, not the kings — it spread and that spread would inevitably bring freedom to more and more groups over time.
As for the other interviewed historians, I had missed that Nathaniel Philbrick switched from naval history to writing books about George Washington so I was surprised he got such a big role. He did great in the series though, he was one of the most commonly seen faces and always did well. On the other hand, I found it quite odd that Ned Blackhawk, something of a new star of American Indian history thanks to his recent book “The Rediscovering of America”, appears… once, in the first episode. The rest of the Indian history is done by others. Did he not have time for more? Like, I’m sure that Irish guy who does a whole lot of the Native American history in the later episodes knows Native American history well, but … like, it’s a weird choice if you could have had Ned Blackhawk, whose recent book on the subject is probably the best one written so far on the topic!
And lastly, the elephant in the room — and I imagine that Burns asked but was turned down — is that Ron Chernow does not appear in this series. His books on Washington and Hamilton are exceptional, among others he has written about other eras — his Grant book is the best Ulysses Grant biography probably ever! — but he does not appear here. Chernow is a writer, not a historian, but I’m sure they would have gotten him on this series if he had agreed, given how popular his books are, Hamilton especially; it inspired the famous Broadway musical, after all.
The Middle: Solid Treatment of the War, With a Few Issues
I have little to say for episodes three through five because they were fairly good and reasonably complete as far as they tell the military history of the war. There are some oddities in what is covered, but the war itself was covered comprehensively, for the most part, and discussions on the battles and such are mostly good. I can make a few critiques, though. First, when discussing George Washington’s struggles to win a battle, one explanation I have seen from other historians, such as Chernow if I remember right, is that Washington had a liking for overly complicated plans that fell apart because his troops were not able to perfectly execute his complex, multi-pronged maneuvers. Sometimes he overlooked something, and the series did mention this, describing the pass they didn’t guard on Long Island and the ford they missed at Brandywine, but other times he was just assuming more of his troops than they could do, such as the complex multi-prong assaults at Trenton and Germantown. The descriptions of those two battles here were decent, but in both cases probably didn’t describe exactly why the other wings, other than the ones led by George Washington himself, weren’t also able to execute on his complicated expectations. Washington had good ideas but perhaps expecting four columns to coordinate in the fog as he did at Germantown was too much. The series skims over this, describing the struggles of the main column but only barely mentioning the others. I understand the unmentioned context but many viewers won’t.
Additionally, I need to return to a previous criticism about how some people deserved more than you see here. One story during the Revolution is about Europeans deciding to throw in with the rebels and join the Americans during the war. This series mentions the major ones in brief, but none get full histories, though that is hardly surprising given that nobody gets that in this series, not one person. So, here the Marquis de Lafayette is mentioned a few times, but we get few details about his early life, nothing about any of the many consequential things he did after the Revolution, and nearly no mention of his campaign in Virginia commanding troops following Cornwallis around, either, even though that was somewhat important. If you want more on Lafayette, read “Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution”, by Mike Duncan. The Polish Tadeusz Kosciuszko similarly is mentioned only in brief, primarily about his work designing the works for the siege line at Saratoga. Like Lafayette he would go on to try to bring freedom to his home country after the war, only to end up failing. An artificial hill monument was built in Poland for his efforts. (The tallest mountain in Australia is also named for him, but no he did not go there himself; another Pole gave it that name because he thought it resembled the monument.)
And last of the big names, the one who is mentioned the most probably is the German Baron von Steuben. In this series, you get the traditional-story version of von Steuben: he arrived after certain events in Europe caused him to want to leave, he trained the troops at Valley Forge, and then he isn’t mentioned again afterwards for the rest of the series. Steuben is the only one of the major European military helpers who stayed in the US after the war. The series chose to say that von Steuben left Europe ‘because he was accused of having relationships with young boys’, and I think that “young boys” term Burns used really is not okay. It is true that von Steuben fled first Germany for France, and then also France for the US, almost certainly because of accusations that he was homosexual, but “young boys”? Seriously? Who wrote that? To me this makes one think he had some kind of pedophilic tendency, which is not true. It is true that the American man he would live with until his death in 1794 was younger than he was, being about half his age, but he wasn’t a boy, when they met the guy was about 23. This series is mostly left wing, but that phrasing was so odd it made me wonder if some right-winger got it inserted into the script…
Where are the Famous Quotes?
This is a small thing, but I do think it is noteworthy. Any American has heard some of the most famous quotes attributed to people during the Revolution. With one exception, you will not hear any of them here. Ken Burns wants to cite diaries and written works, not quotes attributed to people that they may or may not have said, exactly, and that is what he does. Even so, when you are making a history of the Revolution over twelve hours, even a modern one like this, how are these all missing? Here, Patrick Henry is, again, never mentioned. Needless to say he never says “Give me liberty or give me death” [despite being a big slaveowner and supporter of slavery]. Nathan Hale’s capture and execution is mentioned, but his famous quote, “my only regret is that I have but one life to lose for my country”, is not mentioned. Instead all the series says is some odd quote about a sign the British apparently put around his neck before killing him. That both of those quotes likely come from a popular play of the time about the Roman legislator Cato is, needless to say, also not mentioned, though that is an interesting fact. And these are only two of the more famous quotes not mentioned.
Similarly, when discussing the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock’s famously large signature is not mentioned, much less the myths of why he wrote it so large that people wrote over the years. This is another example of probably intentionally leaving out core parts of the traditional myth, though it is certainly true that Hancock wrote larger than any other signer. Regardless on that, they do quote a supposed saying that a signer with palsy said ‘my hand trembles, though my heart does not’. It’s a good quote, but opens the question of why other famous quote are not included.
This came to my mind again in the last episode, when, randomly, they say that George Washington said ‘I have grown blind in the service of our country’ in order to put down a putative revolt. Given how so few famous quotes from the Revolution had been mentioned before this, and that this was yet another voiced line and not a quote from a written speech or memoir, I was honestly shocked that they included it, but for some reason they did. It’s one of the only famous quotes in the entire series, it’s so weird they put it in. I am glad that they included it, but it just highlights how odd it is that only this one gets a mention and not any others.
The Ending is Just as Incomplete as the Beginning
Here is another example of something missing which you really can’t leave out in an authoritative history of this era: Alexander Hamilton. To the best of my recollection, Hamilton, one of the more important Founders, is referenced only once in this series: during the section on the siege of Yorktown, they mention that Hamilton led the attack on one of the redoubts. And that’s it. Uh, yeah, that is not exactly what people need to know about Hamilton. It gets weirder, though, because earlier on in the series, there was a section about whether the new nation should pay its debts. The series discusses the issue in short, before saying that even though the financiers helping fund the revolution didn’t know whether they would get their money back or not they put the money up anyway. The series never gets back to this point at the end, however, which makes the whole segment feel very incomplete and disjointed; why discuss this issue at all if you aren’t going to point out that later on Hamilton was instrumental, during the Washington administration, in convincing the government to pay all of its debts? When they did that first segment on the financing I thought this was leading to a later section on Hamilton and his key success at getting the debt paid, but no. The issue is not mentioned again and just becomes one of many dropped plot points.
Unfortunately, this is far from the only thing not mentioned at the end. Here is one missing thing that happened during the war: while the beginning of the Spanish and French siege of Gibraltar is mentioned, how it ended, with the British surviving the siege and keeping the territory, isn’t. This is a very consequential event and I don’t understand how it got left out. Similarly, a major part of the story of why the peace treaty was in 1783 and not earlier, after Yorktown in 1781, was because of the warfare internationally between Britain on one side and France and Spain on the other. The series makes a few mentions of things, such as detailing Spain’s capture of Florida from Britain, but largely skims over this. This was important because Britain withstood the assaults and not only kept almost everything else in its empire, but primed itself for the great expansion of the British Empire which would come in the 1800s.
So many things go the way of Hamilton and international politics; Burns clearly decided that he didn’t have time for a full conclusion saying what happened afterwards to people, so he just didn’t include almost any postscript, for almost anyone. The series does mention that George Washington became President, but not anything he did as President. Nobody else gets any resolution, other than two civilian guys; one guy is described as later becoming a dentist who made a set of false teeth for Washington, and another, a black man who became a privateer during the war, as using his war profits to help fund The Liberator, the great 19th century newspaper of freedom from slavery. Also they mention that the civilian woman from Yorktown never returned to her hometown after the war. Why these few civilians get conclusions but not anyone else is beyond me, it seems quite odd. Yes, people could look things up themselves or read a book to learn what happened and you obviously cannot cover everything, but choosing to cover nothing instead seems, to me, to be the worse option.
Indeed, the ‘nothing’ is so bad that even the Constitution is barely mentioned! The failings of the Articles of Confederation are very briefly referenced, but the resolution of that is left for another time. The viewer should go look up the Constitutional Convention if they want to learn about that, I guess. The story of the Revolution ends with the Constitution. Leaving the Articles of Confederation decade and the Constitutional Convention almost entirely out is a mistake.
Next, after strongly focusing on the Native Americans through the first five episodes, the last episode didn’t really finish their story. Instead, it largely drops that plotline. The series mentions that the British gave the new USA the Midwest in the 1783 Paris peace treaty, surrendering all land to the Mississippi to the new United States, but no context was provided for why. George Rogers Clark and his fierce Indian-hating and Indian-fighting was mentioned in ep. 5, though not with all of his accomplishments in taking some British forts, but he or his actions were not mentioned even once in the last episode. Clark’s taking those forts is usually considered to be an important part of why the British surrendered the Midwest in the 1783 treaty, so I do not understand this. Of course, Clark also did awful things to the Indians, and that is mentioned at the end of episode five, but that just increases my confusion about them basically dropping him and the whole ‘Northwest’ theater from the last episode. If a goal of this series is to correct the historical story and, alongside celebrating the good things about the Revolution, make Americans more aware of the awful things done in the name of the United States, shouldn’t episode six have finished the story? But it doesn’t. The series just said ‘they couldn’t understand why the British abandoned them’ or something like that and left it there. There were reasons but you won’t learn them from this series. If you wanted to do a Native-focused history of the era the series is a very good but incomplete start, though again that was true for almost everything.
As an aside, a counter to this would be the treatment of upstate New York. Unlike the Northwest Territory (Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc.), the war in upstate New York between the US and the Iroquois is discussed in detail, including comprehensive coverage of the reprisal campaign Washington sent there to burn Indian villages after some raids. This is certainly one of the sadder elements of the Revolution so good on Burns for covering it. America at its best is the greatest, but we are not always at our best.
On Slavery
As I have said, one major focus of this series is an examination of things other than the traditional story of the war and its white male Founding Father leaders. It is no surprise that the black experience and enslaved people thus get a major role. First, they chose to say ‘enslaved people’ or terms like that, instead of ‘slave’. I get modernizing language and such, and trying to emphasize their humanity as people, but it seems pretty much the same to me. I think either way is fine. Anyway, for the most part the series does a good job covering the subject, but I have two critiques.
First, in the middle of the series, there is comprehensive mention of southern Royal Governors escaping to ships off the coast, and of Royal Governor Dunmore of Virginia’s proclamation that any slave of a Patriot who reached him would be freed. This is discussed at length, say that many of the escapees ended up dying of disease, then drop the point without saying where he or his ships went after that. I presume that they went to New York at some point, but the series should have spent a sentence sometime telling us. It is odd to leave that point hanging without resolving it. For those who did reach New York, though, the series does a great job of explaining what happened at the end of the war, with many of the escapees being brought away to Jamaica or Halifax, fulfilling the British’s promise.
On the note of Washington, the series reminds us that Washington was a man who entered the war a committed and believing slaveowner. It does not mention that Washington was closely focused on efficiency and realized that slaves were never going to be motivated to work hard because they get nothing for their efforts, but does discuss some racist things he did early on, most notably how he temporarily banned blacks from joining the Continental Army. However, immediately after that harsh critique, the series flips around and say that Washington changed his mind, and decided to allow free black men to join the Army after all. It is great that this change of heart is mentioned at that moment in the series.
However, that it was just the beginning of great personal change and growth that Washington would undertake in his later years largely isn’t discussed. One thing that bothered me greatly about the ending of this series is that that after so much focus on slavery, and on Washington’s position on slavery, they didn’t mention that he was the only slaveowning Southerner president to free all his slaves upon his death. This is a very important point on Washington’s moral journey and I think the series is really remiss to not mention it. He changed from being an unquestioning slaveowner to deciding to take personal action against it, and this series should have said that.
Conclusion
Overall, I thought it was a good series I guess, but it’s not really a good way to learn the history of the revolution, given the odd choices of what to cover and what not to. This is a good supplemental piece teaching some of the modern history of marginalized groups during that era, but far too much vital information is entirely left out for it to be your primary source of learning about the time. Ken Burns’ The American Revolution is not that. Read some books instead, you will learn a lot more that way and hopefully won’t have huge gaps in the story as you will here. For people who already know the main story well, though, this series is a solid summary of the modern left-wing and minority-focused histories of the era, with some of the traditional story included as well. I just wish that it was not only that, but also a comprehensive history of the Revolution. It isn’t. I don’t know if this series was always intended for six two-hour episodes or if its length was cut, but it feels like something condensed down to fit in less time than intended to me. Too much is missing.
Even so, this documentary is very well produced, and in many ways is classic Ken Burns — it is loaded with talking-heads, pans over paintings, scattered scenes with reenactors, long anecdotes, lengthy quotes from random civilian diaries and journals, pieces of the traditional story but not the whole thing, and everything you expect, voiced as always by Peter Coyote. It is a compelling watch which glued me to the screen through its whole run, which I watched as they aired the first six nights. It might show Burns responding to criticism of his earlier works, as well; he has never admitted fault with his ’80s classic The Civil War, even though anyone looking back at it sees a series hopelessly compromised with pro-Southern mythologizing despite Burns being a Northerner, but the strong focus on a more sympathetic and modern look at marginalized groups than you see in that series is, possibly, a reaction to that criticism. Certainly nobody could say something similar about this series; it is sympathetic to both sides, but it shows why that is the correct position to take. However, ironically, this series probably ends up just as flawed as that one is, only in different ways.
In conclusion, Ken Burns The American Revolution is a fine documentary that I recommend anyone who knows the subject should watch. If you do not know the subject, though, read something else first that is more complete. If this is ever shown in schools I would strongly recommend to only do so after learning about the subject first, since it just is too incomplete to stand on its own. This does not tell enough of the story.
Finally, Ken Burns, the National Parks are not “America’s Best Idea”. No I will never get over that he actually made that the main thesis of that series. Electoral democracy and freedom, the great legacy we get from the American Revolution, is America’s Best Idea. For all the faults of the era — slavery, taking land from the native peoples, and more — the accomplishment made in advancing freedom was unlike any previously in human history other than possibly the short Athenian experiment with democracy, and the Founders learned from that example to form a more stable democracy than that one.
As a final note, a review of this series espousing a similar sentiment is this one: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/12/18/whats-wrong-with-the-american-revolution-ken-burns/ I wrote this before reading that, but entirely agree with everything they say. You cannot tell the story of the Revolution without a much deeper dive into the importance and meaning of the ideological basis of the Revolution than you will find in this series.
