Speaker
Ken Burns
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1Podcasts
Quotes & moments
The American Revolution began in Lexington, Massachusetts, 15 months before the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia.
Burns argues America's imperial project began with the subjugation of 300 Native American nations across the continental United States, not with later overseas adventures.
At least a fifth, possibly a quarter, and in some places a majority of Americans during the Revolution were Loyalists, making it fundamentally a civil war.
A quarter of the population was enslaved at the time the Founders declared that all men are created equal, exposing the founding hypocrisy.
Ken Burns's Vietnam War documentary series ran for 10 episodes totalling 18 hours, opening with a North Vietnamese soldier's perspective.
Kennedy inherited 700 military advisors in Vietnam from Eisenhower; by the time of his assassination that number had grown to 17,000.
LBJ won 60% of the New Hampshire primary vote in 1968 but Eugene McCarthy's unexpected 40% was seen as a moral defeat that prompted Johnson not to seek re-election.
The American Revolution did not truly end until the Treaty of Paris, whose semi-quincentennial will be in 2033, not on July 4.
The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy comprised six nations — Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, and Mohawk — who formed their own political union more than 150 years before the Revolution.
Washington sent General Sullivan to destroy Native American settlements in upstate New York, resulting in 40 to 50 Indian towns being razed — earning Washington the name 'Town Destroyer.'
Before the first shots of the Civil War in 1861, four million Americans were owned as property by other Americans.
Ken Burns has already conducted 70 hours of interviews with civil rights foot soldiers in preparation for a documentary on Martin Luther King Jr.
American schoolchildren know Washington as the father of the nation. The Haudenosaunee knew him as the Town Destroyer. Washington ordered General Sullivan to raze 40 to 50 Native American towns in upstate New York — a scouting expedition for future white settlement.
LBJ alone passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act — things his predecessor, for all his charisma, likely lacked the political muscle to achieve. Then he inherited a foreign policy apparatus from Kennedy and the buck stopped with him on Vietnam. That's the tragedy.
The Continental Congress didn't call itself the Eastern Seaboard Congress by accident. Washington openly used the word 'empire,' warning rivals they were 'drowning our rising empire in blood.' From the very beginning, the Founders knew they wanted everything from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
A good grade in American school requires you to say the Revolution was about taxes and representation. Ken Burns says you have to add land, because at the heart of it is the fifth global war over the prize of North America — and that prize means Native American land.
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.
When Founders argued the British had 'enslaved' them through tyranny, they were signalling something to the people literally serving them in the room. Historian Jane Kaminsky calls it perfectly: 'the liberty talk is leaky.' Everyone heard it. Everyone wanted it. Of course they did.
Was Vietnam the moment America's imperial project became visible to itself? Ken Burns says no. The project began with the subjugation of 300 Native American nations across the continental United States. Vietnam just made it impossible to ignore.
A Marine and a North Vietnamese soldier describe the experience of war in almost exactly the same words. The opening of Burns's Vietnam series comes from Bao Dinh, a North Vietnamese soldier: 'The only people who want to know who won and who lost are the people who don't fight.'
LBJ had a White House taping system. Lady Bird had a reel-to-reel recorder she used every night as a personal diary. In 1965, when Johnson put boots on the ground in Vietnam, she recorded: 'Lyndon's not going to run again.' Three years later, she was right.
Teddy Roosevelt famously invited Booker T. Washington to the White House — then caved to political pressure and never invited another Black person again. He reflected the eugenics of his era. His fifth cousin Franklin was the more important president. We're lucky there was no war on TR's watch.
After 50 years filming America's wars, traumas, and hypocrisies, the answer is still yes — absolutely. America was more divided during the Revolution, the Civil War, and Vietnam than it is now. The ideas articulated in the most consequential revolution in history still hold: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — not objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas.
For 150 years before the Revolution, Native American nations were active economic, military, and diplomatic players on a world stage. They had been to London, Paris, and Madrid. Treating them as a footnote to the Revolution is as absurd as lumping all of Europe into one category.
Churchill said victors write history. Ken Burns says the Civil War proved the opposite. The Confederates lost the war but won the narrative, casting Reconstruction as bad, the KKK as heroes, and slavery as an afterthought. The South Carolina Articles of Secession mention slavery over and over — not states' rights.
Mark Twain said he didn't want the American eagle's talons in any other nation. Ken Burns loves Twain — but points out he conveniently forgot what was already happening to Native nations across the continent. The man who invented American literature couldn't see America's original sin.
Trauma occurs and recurs. Ken Burns lost his mother at 11 — and his father-in-law, an eminent psychologist, told him the films he makes are really about waking up his mother. Four million Americans were owned by other Americans in 1861. A group of people with the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land — what do you think that does?
Analysis
What they talk about
- History 92%
- Society & Culture 8%
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