Ken Burns’ new American Revolution docuseries is a revelation

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

There’s never a bad time to explore and consider the origin story of the United States, but now feels like a particularly relevant period for reexamining who we are and what we stand for as a nation.

Legendary documentarian Ken Burns has tackled the monumental task with a six-part, 12-hour series simply titled The American Revolution, which premiered Nov. 16 with all episodes streaming on pbs.org.

It is a more than worthy effort, with Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt as directors, a cast of voice actors that reads like a Hollywood honor roll and featuring some of the true titans of U.S. historiography.

Despite the fraught socio-political and cultural moment during which it has appeared, filming for The American Revolution actually began in 2015 and covered more than 150 locations in all kinds of weather. 

Unlike Burns’ many docuseries, such as The U.S. and the Holocaust, Muhammad Ali, Hemingway, The Vietnam War, Jazz and others, The American Revolution does not benefit from photography or other recordings. Rather, Burns and his crew have mined 18th- and 19th-century portraiture, hundreds of artifacts, maps both from the time period and those created for the series, reenactments and — most stunning — the American landscapes on which the events took place.

As with Burns’ other pieces, it’s a beautiful production to behold and brought to life through the voices of the likes of Kenneth Branagh, Josh Brolin, Hugh Dancy, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Morgan Freeman, Paul Giamatti, Tom Hanks, Ethan and Maya Hawke, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Keaton, Laura Linney, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Meryl Streep, the inimitable Peter Coyote and many others.

Drawing on letters, diaries, speeches, pamphlets and newspapers, the dialogue of the era comes not just from iconic personalities like George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and the other “Founding Fathers,” but no-less important figures like Abigail Adams and Phillis Wheatley, as well as scores of others from British commanders and Indigenous leaders, to rank-and-file soldiers and civilians on all sides of the conflict and from all conditions of freedom, indentured servitude or enslavement.

Those performances and the quality of the filmmaking would be enough to hold viewers’ interest for the full 12-hour runtime, but Burns also managed to pack The American Revolution with contemporary analysis and commentary from historians, writers and other scholars like Bernard Bailyn (who died at 97 in 2020), Maggie and Ned Blackhawk, Annette Gordon-Reed, Maya Jasanoff, Alan Taylor, Gordon Wood and more — all of whom students of early American history consider among the biggest celebrities in the discipline.

Aside from the casting and production, the real achievement of The American Revolution is managing to see past the various mythologies that have built up over the past 250 years and complicate the historical underpinnings, trajectory and personalities who steered, suffered and otherwise experienced the explosive events from the mid-1750s until the 1780s and beyond.

This is no hagiography — the inherent tensions and hypocrisies of the Founders are on full display, but take nothing away from the significance of their ideas and actions. Likewise, there is no bright line drawn between glorious patriots and craven loyalists — Burns and his experts are at great pains to underscore that the revolution in British North America was a true civil war. 

Meanwhile, the complex political and cultural roles played by Indigenous and enslaved people are put in the foreground, with a reframing of the causes of the revolution away from a purely economic and philosophical conflict over taxes and representation and toward one that reveals colonists’ yearning for a continental, slave-powered empire to the west.

Fans of big ideas and military history will find both in abundance in what may end up being Burns’ most significant contribution to Americans’ self-understanding, and that’s saying something.

Stream all episodes at pbs.org.