Quote · Empire: World History
374. Ken Burns on the American Revolution and Empire
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Welcome & Ken Burns: America's Historian
At 3:51 · chapter starts 3:02
Anita sets the scene with precision: America marks its 250th birthday in July 2026, and there is no better guide to what the nation promised versus what it delivered than Ken Burns, whose career spans half a century of documentary filmmaking. Burns receives the flattering label 'America's Historian' with characteristic self-deprecation — he lives in a tiny village in New Hampshire, and notoriety there buys you fifty cents and a cup of coffee. The framed New Yorker cartoon in his kitchen says it all: three men burning in hell, one muttering that apparently his over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing. Burns's real interest, he explains, is telling complicated stories that resist the temptation to reduce everything to a dialectic or a simple on-off switch — because the real stories are always more nuanced, and there are no true opposites in nature.
America marks its 250th birthday in July 2026, the context for Burns's new Revolution documentary series.
Americans relate to the Revolution in a way that is 'detached and unreal,' says historian Maya Jasanoff in the opening of Burns's film. Nobody would stand up in a boat in an ice-clogged Delaware River. The Revolution isn't a postcard — the United States is born in violence.
The American Revolution began in Lexington, Massachusetts, 15 months before the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia.
