As America prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday next year, TV’s most eloquent historian, Ken Burns, reminds us in his latest sweeping epic just how grueling the nation’s birth pangs were. “It’s our creation myth, our creation story,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Atkinson (The British Are Coming), one of many distinguished storytellers enlisted in The American Revolution, which feels like a fitting bookend for Burns, whose breakthrough work The Civil War premiered 35 years ago.
Over six nights and 12 hours (beginning November 16), Burns and co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, with writer Geoffrey Ward, reveal in fascinating and exhaustive detail how a rebellion against British tyranny became a bloody, world-altering battle for independence on a continent that, like now, was deeply polarized. The conflict would divide communities and families, ensnaring multiple countries in what became both a global and civil war.
“We want history to poke a hole at things that we don’t typically learn about,” says Botstein. “We want to celebrate our achievements, look squarely at our failures, and make the history both exciting and real.”
The American Revolution achieves that goal brilliantly, sidestepping romanticism of the period (see Outlander) and stripping away myth with a grounding in granular reality. While never losing focus on heroes like George Washington, whose triumphs and mistakes are scrutinized by a diverse faculty of scholars, the series brings history to life through the accounts of lesser-known participants, including a teenage fife player and other colonists uprooted by the carnage. The series also acknowledges the conflicted roles of Native Americans and free and enslaved Black people on both sides of the fighting.
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The techniques are familiar: panoramic portraiture of scenic fields where battles once raged, punctuated by evocative sound effects, with animated maps illustrating complicated troop movements. Once again, Peter Coyote’s authoritative narration is joined by an A-list cast of actors quoting from journals, letters, and historical documents. Throughout, deafening blasts of cannon fire, accompanying vintage paintings and judicious use of wordless and faceless reenactments, ring loudly as a prelude to imperfect liberty. And if nothing else, this series and all of Burns’ enduring library remind us of the essential role public television, its future threatened by capricious government defunding, plays in our cultural landscape.
The American Revolution, Series Premiere, Sunday, November 16, 8/7c (through Friday, November 21), PBS
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