There’s an American flag behind Ken Burns’s couch. For someone who’s made a career of telling uniquely American stories, winning countless awards in the process, it seems like a logical symbol for the background of his Zoom window. However, Burns reveals that there is more to the flag than meets the eye — it is actually a Navajo blanket.
“Somebody spent a lot of time, hundreds of hours, making something about the country that had dispossessed them of their land,” he says.
The Navajo American flag blanket represents Burns’s and his longtime collaborator and co-director Sarah Botstein’s nuanced approach to storytelling. They consider themselves “umpires” of history, calling the “balls and strikes” (successes and failures) of historical figures, rather than filmmakers who take a stance. In their upcoming documentary, The American Revolution, they strive to present as many perspectives from people of all walks of life during the Revolutionary War: soldiers, founding fathers, ordinary civilians who were both loyalists and patriots, and others who remained neutral in the conflict.
I spoke with Burns and Botstein about The American Revolution, a 12-part documentary set to premiere on PBS on November 16. Burns comes to Camden’s Freedom Mortgage Pavilion for a preview screening and interview with WHYY’s Terry Gross on October 9. The event showcases the Philadelphia area’s historical role in the country’s founding.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
In your previous work, you’ve always made a point of focusing on ordinary people and telling personal stories that can connect with the viewer. So, was it a challenge to do this series without being able to conduct interviews?
Ken Burns: My very first film was about the Brooklyn Bridge and there was nobody alive [who worked on the bridge] except for an old man who was about 104 years old in Harlem, who had delivered lemon water to the workers on the bridge as a boy. [In the case of the American Revolution], not only is there nobody alive, but there are no photographs and no newsreels.
The American Revolution is smothered in mythology. There are lots of casualties from that sentimentality and nostalgia that surrounds it. A lot of the boldface names that we think we know, we don’t know. They’re just completely opaque, two-dimensional figures, whether it’s a Franklin or a Jefferson or an Adams or particularly a George Washington. One of the obligations is to try to make them human, three-dimensional people that feel real. And the first-person voices do that, they substitute for that interview. But also, these are not the people who do all the fighting, right? One of the great casualties of a superficial history is that you think that there are no women involved. Well, they were central to the success of the resistance before the war started. They were there at every battlefield with children, at their homes running businesses and farms, and being very engaged. Some of them are philosophers and historians and poets. This is a story of Native peoples whose land we are on and whose land we are coveting. This is the story of enslaved and free Black people. This is the story of French allies and German enemies and British soldiers and all sorts of Americans, including loyalists who don’t have to be automatic bad guys.
We’re in pursuit of happiness, a more perfect union. This is a nation in the process of becoming. That’s what we celebrate in all our works. — Ken Burns
It’s one of those topics that I feel like almost every single person who went to school in the U.S. has studied before. With that in mind, are there any particular misconceptions or false assumptions that are really prevalent?
KB: So many of the mythologies that survive are just not true. Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes: there’s no way George Washington is standing up in the boat in the middle of the night, in the middle of a storm in an ice-clogged Delaware River crossing it to do that.
There’s no mention of Betsy Ross — we don’t know who made the first flag. Nathan Hale didn’t say, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” We’re not knocking those things down consciously in the film, but we’re replacing them with deeper things. Paul Revere didn’t say, “The red coats are coming,” which is a wonderful, easy phrase [to understand]. He said “The regulars are coming out.” So it’s not an unforgiving revisionism. It’s not like we’re canceling people. We’re just calling balls and strikes.
I remember we showed the not-yet-completed battle of Long Island [portion of the documentary] early on to some magazine editors and writers in New York City. And one of them said, “My heart is pounding,” because he didn’t know it took place over the place where he lived in Brooklyn. He didn’t know that it was an American loss. He didn’t know that George Washington got away just through the luckiest of circumstances.
Sarah Botstein: New Yorkers don’t realize that this was the loyalist stronghold for the war.
KB: Philadelphia, too, is not the center of the rebellion. There are more people in Boston who are radicals, but there were even loyalists there. And in Philadelphia, my goodness, there are lots of Quakers, many of them are pacifists. And many of them tend to ally themselves with the loyalist cause. We follow a woman, Sarah Fisher, and her husband and others who are loyalists in Philadelphia.
Do you have a stance on the historical debate of, When American history began?
KB: We don’t take stances. That’s what being an umpire is all about. The history of America begins for human beings about 22,000 years ago when East Asians crossed the Bering Strait’s land bridge and began to populate that. And so we treat Native American nations the way we treat nations like France, as individual entities. Not all of them as one thing, but as many, many things.
And so you could say when the first Europeans came, is that Columbus? Is it Jamestown, the first English colony in 1607? Is it 1619, when the first slaves were brought to go and live at Jamestown? Is it 1620 with the pilgrims? I mean, you can chase your tail forever on all of this. When we’re talking about the American Revolution, we needed to back up 20 years and understand the third global war (which we call the French and Indian War, and everyone else calls the Seven Years War). This has laid the seeds for the American Revolution in lots of super interesting ways, with unintended consequences.
Can you talk a little bit more about how the “civil war” aspect of the American Revolution might resonate with American audiences today?
KB: People are really Chicken Littles right now: “The sky is falling, it’s all over. This is the end. We’re so divided.” And the first thing we say is, “We were really divided then.” This was a civil war. There were a lot of civilian deaths in our revolution. And that’s something that’s really hard for people to get around.
The divisions were so entrenched between loyalists and patriots, between those who were disaffected and everybody else. And I think people will be stunned by it. What happens at the end is a very, very complicated story of not just the beginning of the U.S., but the beginning of us. Regardless of what their political points of view are, there is a place in this film for everybody to find a way in, a portal, a door. That’s what good history should do.
SB: Remember that we’ve been working on the film for nearly a decade. So the ways that the film somehow resonates or asks people to think about the present or how the history dovetails into the present keeps changing and changed the whole time we were making the film. So we just put our heads down and make the movie. But I think with any work of both history and art, what we’re trying to do is have people begin to think and listen — listen to one another, listen to themselves, and also have empathy and understanding to try to get at, “Why have we been a nation that’s always been divided?” That’s one of our great strengths, actually, not a great weakness.
KB: I remember sharing about a year ago with a dear friend, the introduction to the series. And she just stopped and said, “It kind of makes you wonder which side I’d be on. Would I be willing to fight? Are there ideas that I would defend with my life? Could I kill someone in defense of those ideas?” And I was so shocked because of course that’s the central thing for any feeling person who is receiving the story. That’s a priceless gift.
More than making you think, it makes you feel.
KB: That’s correct. I mean, I was raising money when I looked like a 12 year-old for my first film and I said that we were interested in an emotional archeology, not just dry dates and facts and events. And I don’t mean to suggest that this has anything to do with nostalgia or sentimentality, which are the enemies of anything good. But there are higher emotions that animate us. In fact, our founders thought that these higher emotions would be released if people could be trusted to govern themselves, if they could acquire virtue. That’s a word that resonates in every episode of our film: if you can be virtuous, then you can earn the right of citizenship. It’s a pretty amazing challenge to all of us right now.
Why have we been a nation that’s always been divided? That’s one of our great strengths, actually, not a great weakness. — Sarah Botstein
One last question: What is it like, as you’re promoting this film, to see the kinds of threats that the country is facing to history and education — with the lack of federal funding for PBS, and the comments that Trump has made about the Smithsonian Museum and portraying negative aspects of history?
KB: We don’t have to respond to it. I think we just offer a good story. Complication is exactly what a good story is all about. It’s like if you watch the series, Succession; if everybody’s black and white, it’s not a very interesting story. And if you could pare things down to “one thing,” then you’ve missed the possibility of understanding the full joys and values of the American Republic. PBS isn’t going to go anywhere. The funding cuts are hurting, mostly in rural places, but we’re not going anywhere. In fact, the response to it has actually been spectacular in support.
SB: As we move into this year, we’re going to celebrate 250 years of America and hopefully really think about the story of the American Revolution, and what the founders debated themselves in this big moment. They really believed in an educated populace and they were torn about who should have the right to vote because it was a very small group of people at the time. But over the last 250 years, we’ve really done well to make good on that promise. And I think we want to inspire as many people as possible to be involved and engaged and to celebrate our teachers and our classrooms and education and a free press because those are foundational principles to the American experience that are undeniable.
KB: When Thomas Jefferson said, all men are created equal, he meant all White men of property, free of debt. We do not mean that now. As the scholar Maggie Blackhawk says in our film: The Declaration was deeply significant to people at the margins, people who are serving people like Jefferson. They’re hearing those ideas. They’re not deaf. And those ideas have as much — and perhaps in some spaces, more — meaning because of what those people do not have and will not have in their lifetime. But somebody along their line will. And that’s the ongoing story. We’re in pursuit of happiness, a more perfect union. This is a nation in the process of becoming. That’s what we celebrate in all our works.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the narrator of the documentary.
MORE ON HISTORY IN PHILADELPHIA