>> From WXXI News.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made two and a half centuries ago when the American Revolutionary War was raging.

As filmmaker Ken Burns says, suddenly in 1776, there was something new in the world.

The idea that the average person would not necessarily be a subject in a kingdom or under the thumb of an authoritarian ruler.

In this sense, the American idea was exceptional.

So how much do you think you know about the American Revolution?

On Sunday night?

PBS premieres the new six part series from Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt The American Revolution brings a number of stories that the filmmakers found surprising or even entirely overlooked.

They've been working on this series for nearly a decade, and it's going to be a cultural event in this country.

We're going to be welcoming filmmaker David Schmidt in just a few minutes to this program, and we're going to talk about the decade long piece of work that rolls out with the first part of Six Parts on Sunday night.

We're excited for that.

And first in studio, let me welcome Dr.

Michael Jarvis, a professor of early American Atlantic and digital history and archeology at the University of Rochester.

Nice to see you here.

Welcome.

Thanks for being here.

>> Thank you.

Evan.

>> Well, I want to start just by asking you as we get ready to talk to David about this, what is going to be an I'm sure it's going to be an amazing film series.

I mean, Ken Burns always, in my view, is one of the great American storytellers.

But it's interesting.

Now, of course, we're near 250 years.

There's a big anniversary, but it doesn't feel like that's the only reason that this seems particularly pertinent or relevant now.

how important do you think it is right now for this country to be kind of rethinking and reevaluating our own history and maybe understanding those lessons very well?

>> Well, it's always useful to think where we started from to measure how far we've come and to realize everything that has gone into the making of this nation.

I'm particularly excited because right now I'm teaching two courses on the American Revolution.

And as we revisit and think about the 1760s and 1770s, there are so many events in points of of conflict developing that have echoes and resonances right in our, you know, in our today.

>> How well educated are your students when they come into your class regarding this issue?

>> they tend to, as I think many Americans have a sense that everybody was behind the Patriot cause, inspired by, you know, the rhetoric of the declaration.

And it was an incredibly popular movement when the reality was it was an incredibly messy, complicated, blurry, shifting sides.

and very much the revolution, depending on your perspective where you were experiencing this revolution from and so in classes and I really hope the documentary gets across just what a complex event this was.

And how many?

2.5 million plus participants, if you will.

>> The filmmakers at various points, I was listening to an interview with Sarah Botstein this morning, and she said that it is a Revolutionary War, of course, but it was a civil war that there were people in one household with multiple views.

There were loyalists, there were those who supported the revolutionary cause.

It tore apart families and streets and towns.

And in that sense, it wasn't just, as you say, a uniform idea that all of a sudden everyone wanted to throw the tea in the harbor and get on board this new country.

It was much more complex.

Bloody dangerous and fraught than that.

But so why don't we teach?

Why isn't that taught a little bit more?

directly in American classes, especially K through 12.

>> I think, because this is the conception and birth of the country and even participants at the time knew they were engaging in something unprecedented and historic.

There was a sense, especially in the early Republic, in 19th century, of telling a very patriotic, positive if you will, sanitized version of this story that was focusing on Founding fathers.

in a sense of inevitability of the prevailing of this new idea when really it was the successful outcome was was quite uncertain in various points of the war and because for the longest time this was a positive progressive male story that was who was emphasized.

And so women, African Americans, Native Americans, those one third of the population probably that remained loyal and fought to stop the Patriots or rebels in their eyes they all get written out if you will.

The victor writes the history, and we're only right now in the last 20 or 30 years on writing and expanding that Victor's history.

>> You're going to hear me probably a couple times this hour.

Refer to a Ken Burns quote when David Schmidt joins us.

But one of the things that Burns has said is that there's this idea that a lot of Americans have, that the revolution was just smart, smart guys in Philadelphia thinking smart thoughts, you know, and all of a sudden a new country is born.

You know, we had to throw some tea in the harbor, but, you know, it was a bunch of people using their monocles, sitting around having good talks about.

And it was so much bloodier and grittier than that.

But one of the things that Burns has pointed out is that we don't have photographs at the time.

So it starts to feel a little cartoonish.

in the attempts to recreate via painting and different imagery and that lack of video and photograph has made it a little bit more distant.

And we're not getting quite the pain, the suffering, the tragedy.

So let me just ask a little bit about that division that happened, given the fact that there was all that division, people would say, well, why would why would any have been a loyalist?

And from what I'm reading and hearing from the filmmakers, there's multiple reasons to this idea that, well, across the world, there's authoritarianism, but a monarchy isn't that bad.

It might be.

It might be the most free that you can get.

so it was it was kind of the lesser of the evils.

it was concerned about, of course, consequences.

What happens if you lose the war?

What else would you say?

Tell me a little bit about the complexity that people were feeling at the time, that maybe we get that is under-discussed here?

>> Well, usually in a standard teaching, you, you know, you end the Seven Years War and you get the Stamp Act, you get the proclamation line.

There's sort of a series of, you know, navigation acts and taxes that people fight or protest.

And then the next thing you know, there's bullets flying at Lexington and Concord if you really explode, that those different the proclamation line was a real issue, not so much on the frontier, but in Williamsburg and Philadelphia, where elite land speculators were being denied the chance to make a lot of money.

Folks on the frontier were, you know, happily just squatting and fighting with Indian Native Americans.

anyway, in port towns, it was taxes.

for staunch Protestants.

There was a act called the Quebec Act, which actually gave extended rights to French people in Canada who had been essentially for two centuries an enemy.

So different parts of the country came to really resent England for different reasons.

rather than any kind of unified thing.

so it was sort of a convergence of lots of regional dissatisfaction that until very late was all about restoring their British rights as subjects.

So the revolution, if we think about it as a planet revolving around the sun and coming back to its original place, is very conservative, whereas once the revolution with Tom Paine's argument is to throw off the monarchy, then it becomes a sharp break from the past and a reimagining of a new polity, a republican form of government.

So in a weird way, the run up to 1775 is one story, and then the entire thing turns on a dime.

In the first half of 1776. and it shifts why people are fighting.

And so the fact that we only turn to independence very, very late in the story is lost on most Americans.

>> I do think there's two things that seem to happen in the way we teach history.

So there's the simplification.

And that's when Ken Burns is saying, well, it was the smart guys in a room in Philadelphia with smart ideas, and the American Revolution was born.

So you have the simplification, but also you have this hagiography that happens about figures that, of course, seem mythic to us, including George Washington.

But but really many, many others.

And one of the things I appreciate about what Burns and his colleagues have done, and David Schmidt is one of the best, apparently, at really digging up individual accounts and personal histories that are real and not hagiography.

I think when we get the real story, the full story, the full picture, I think we are better citizens.

I feel better informed as a as I don't want the hagiography, but I feel like we get a lot of that in, in classes.

And, and maybe it's because there's not a lot of time.

I'm not a teacher, I don't want I'm not judging.

But what's the risk?

And when we only have the lionizing and not the real grit of a person and individual stories.

>> Well, as you pointed out, it's it's sort of reductionist.

and again, you get the sort of the victor.

It's very easy to praise George Washington.

And I think in my classes we debate about whether there's sort of a great man school where individuals drive history.

And to some degree, you can't argue that because we had Washington in charge of fighting this war from the very beginning of the war, right through the end.

He was incredibly important.

to both inspire and sustain, the movement.

he also made many blunders.

and, you know had to hang people and do all sorts of things that don't get mentioned.

but for every Washington, there had to be thousands and thousands of privates and people from all walks of life who were in those armies signing the enlistment in many cases, not deserting in the face of poor support and starvation and terrible winters.

>> And terrible odds.

Perhaps.

>> Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, in my class we argue, did the America win?

Or in some ways, was this conflict unwinnable from Europe?

but let's say Americans want it.

>> yeah.

There's a there's a lot of a lot of participation a lot of ebbs and flows of both faith in the Continental Army as well as the Continental Congress, which we have to remember, was run out of town when the British captured Philadelphia.

If we think about from a European standpoint, when you capture your enemy's capital, you win the war.

Yeah.

Whereas they you know, how did that and then Americans just kept fighting on the broke the sort of rules that the British were used to.

>> Well, I want to take Michael's class and I cannot wait for Sunday night.

And we're glad right now to be able to welcome David Schmidt, the co-director of the American Revolution.

It is a six part series from Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt.

It premieres on Sunday.

They've been working on this for the better part of a decade.

And David, it is an absolute honor to have you.

Thank you for making time for us.

>> It's an honor to be here.

Thank you so much.

>> I know you, Sara.

Ken, you've been sort of everywhere, and I love the fact that you've been on the podcast circuit.

I mean, you're reaching a lot of audiences, sort of large and small, new and familiar.

but for you, is it surreal getting close to Sunday night here?

I mean, when I read that it's been nine, ten years in the making, that is a long time to put together a series like this.

How are you feeling today?

>> It's a very long time.

it's surreal.

Yeah.

I don't know what to say other than that.

we've been working on this for so long, and I'd say around February, we more or less locked the the story of the film and most of the creative decisions.

And after that it was finishing and sound effects and licensing and all that.

So that was a real moment of catharsis for me.

to know that I wasn't going to be.

Well, I still stayed up late, but not as.

>> Much.

>> kept awake by the, you know, how are we going to do this?

How are we going to do this?

How are we going to do this?

And I've had the joy of the last several months of traveling with Ken and with Sarah around the country and hearing from people how thirsty they are for this information.

I think Americans know the American Revolution and its history is important, but I think Americans also know that they don't know the history of the American Revolution.

And I think they want to.

>> Well, and, you know, I was curious to know if the timing of this really was mostly about the 250th anniversary or was there anything else happening in sort of the culture and the zeitgeist that made the three of you think that this is the moment for this.?

>> It's really neither.

we ten years ago were finishing the Vietnam War film, and Ken turned to Sarah and said, I think we can make the revolution.

he had been looking at a fully rendered map of the Drang Valley in Vietnam from the third episode of our film.

And, you know, you kind of get a helicopters point of view flying over the mountains, in the valleys.

And he thought we could do this with the Battle of Long Island.

We could see the British approach towards Brooklyn.

so I think it was more that he realized he could tell it, and he realized he hadn't told it, and he knew how important it was.

I couldn't really get into his motivations beyond that.

But I could say that when he asked me to do it, first of all, you don't say no to that.

but I also I actually grew up in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia.

I like to say I grew up in 1774 wearing the stockings and the, you know, the leather shoes with the buckles, playing the fife, all that.

but I actually don't know.

Didn't know this history very well.

and I realized, hey, this is an opportunity.

And this is the case with any film that I've worked on with Ken to spend years learning.

and I'm a huge nerd.

So this was an incredible opportunity for me to get to learn so much about how this country was created and then to with, with our colleagues.

Sarah, Ken, Jeff Ward, who's the writer of this of this series and all of our other colleagues and all the historians we've met in the reenactors.

Et cetera, et cetera., to bring this story to the American people.

This is a story that belongs to everybody, and we want everybody who can, who wants to to see it.

And you get to see it for free on PBS on Sunday.

>> I, we all can't wait to get a six part series starting Sunday night, 12 hours total.

The American Revolution and one of the filmmakers, David Schmidt, is joining us here on Connections today.

your colleagues, Ken Burns and Ken and Sarah have been saying that you might be the best in the country at digging up and finding the stories of individual characters and stories that most people have never heard but probably need to understand.

And we're going to talk more about that coming up in a moment.

But first, let me ask you a question.

I apologize in advance for this question, but I think given the politics of the moment, how everything gets inflected, I just want to ask you this in case any listeners have this on their mind.

So I was listening to a podcast last week, and one of the hosts said that he hoped that this series coming up wouldn't be one of those.

Quote like historical things.

And I have to say, I found it so jarring to hear that.

But when I listen to Ken Burns, when he talks about in 1776, there was something new in the world, the idea that that rule by the mob is what a lot of the British monarchy was worried about, but also a lot of individuals wondered, can we really do this?

The world didn't hadn't really seen this before.

That is exceptional.

That's American exceptionalism.

Even if our execution of those ideals has been at times, tragically poor or not, up to our standards that were set out.

So I think in those ways, I think of Ken Burns as almost an American exceptionalist in that way, the idea being exceptional, being beautiful, being different, being revolutionary.

and yet here we are.

We've got some podcast hosts going.

Well, I hope this isn't like a woke thing.

So can you just address a little what it is like in this moment?

I gotta imagine it feels very different now, how everything gets inflected in this way.

>> Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I'm grateful that we have 12 hours to work with, so hopefully it won't be reduced to a single word in this guy's case.

but, you know, we're definitely not trying to do that.

I think Ken's a very patriotic person, and his his enthusiasm is infectious.

And I think if you come, if you watch this film, you know, I don't want to I don't want to tell anybody how they're going to think about this.

So maybe somebody will have that interpretation.

I don't at all.

I think that the story we tell is has a lot of room for the really great ideals that fostered the coalition that won this war, that inspired them to join the rebellion that gave us the United States that declared independence with the most beautiful sentences in the English language.

it also, you know, happens at the same time that a lot of people are fighting against that.

And you want to know and understand the motivations for why they're fighting against the creation of the United States.

When the war began it wasn't about independence, republic or union.

we know that it did win American independence.

It did create the republic that we still operate under.

And it did unite the states.

All that's true.

But the objective at the start was to liberate Boston to get things back to the way they were when we were happy under the British Empire.

And so, you know, what created the conditions?

Where it became this fight for liberty?

and was proclaimed in the name of equality and in the aftermath, there's the Constitution and then the Bill of rights that enshrines in law the freedoms that people were fighting for.

Well, great.

I'm grateful that we have the 12 hours to put on TV, and hopefully you have the 12 hours to spend with the information to learn how that all came to be.

and it involves a lot of people that, you know, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Abigail Adams.

And it involves a lot of people you don't know.

rank and file soldiers.

Joseph Plumb Martin, John Greenwood enslaved people fighting for the British Empire, for their chance for freedom, like Boston King or Harry Washington.

free black people fighting for the United States.

James Forten people.

Indian individuals and native nations that see in this American Revolution perhaps an opportunity to defend their sovereignty and their independence.

there's a lot to this story.

And I think that 3 million people live in the in the boundaries of the United States at the time of the American Revolution.

and we happen to have so many voices that were left behind because this is a much more literate population than I realized before going into this.

for going into this project.

And a lot of that stuff survives and has been surfaced by wonderful historians, including, I'm sure, your guest your other guest in the last, you know, 30, 40, 50 years.

And we can draw from that material and we can hear from more of the population.

This wasn't just a war.

I mean, it was a war, first of all.

And a lot of people just think of it as 55 guys signing documents.

It's a war, and it involves millions and millions of people, and it affects them.

And the choices that they make are really interesting.

And I think you're going to recognize yourself and your communities when you learn about them.

>> Dr.

Jarvis, in class for you.

I'm curious to know.

Same kind of thing here.

I mean, David is talking about some of the themes that you were talking about earlier before he joined us, which is that independence came.

you know, later and very suddenly.

But it wasn't initially the purpose.

There was a lot of misunderstanding in the American public about some of those details and what the full story was here.

but in general, how do you feel about the voices that get left out?

And do you have any students who come into your class and sort of challenge the way you teach or feel like, you know, it's some sort of a woke version of history?

>> Well, I guess I a little bit bothered by or reject the notion of woke, which is a judgment that I want to hear a particular version of this story.

And I don't want the inclusion of an awful lot of the people who are participating in it.

because if you can eliminate Native Americans and African Americans and women's participation and loyalists, you can reduce it to sort of a sanitized, you know, happy story.

But essentially wanting a limited version of the American Revolution is really rejecting the the messiness and, and in some ways, the, the atrocities, the, the bad things as well as the good things that happened the uncomfortable truths and facts of sort of the fighting of the American Revolution, especially here in Western New York, for instance.

this area is open for settlement because a particular campaign burns 50 towns.

And, you know, essentially kills or drives out women and children and civilians.

that's all part of the revolution.

That's part of the enormous transformation that occurred.

but if I guess it's safe to focus just on on the battles I don't have students who are upset by this.

I guess I'll get my course evaluations in a couple of weeks, and we'll find out.

But, I think seeing the American Revolution as a messy kaleidoscope is exactly what we should be doing, both through a documentary like this and in classrooms everywhere.

>> And it doesn't damage your students?

>> No.

>> To the contrary.

Right.

It's the opposite.

>> Yeah.

I mean, these are, you know, we're not sort of making up a liberal version of what happens.

These are events.

These are facts.

You have to you can't deny them.

the only thing you can really do is try to suppress the telling of it.

and actually, we kind of see that going on with presidential executive orders and essentially editing Smithsonian exhibits and things like that.

but just because you can, you know, edit some of these out doesn't mean they didn't happen.

and they kind of won't go away.

And I hope that with this documentary, we have an actual, you know conversation about the good, the bad you know, America was created not perfectly, but with the idea towards we can strive to perfection.

And we're still on our way there.

>> Well, let me also say listeners will take some comments from you in our second half hour.

Hoover will take your call coming up here in just a moment.

We'll take some emails.

and I want to welcome on the phone Dr.

Paul Moyer, professor of history at Suny Brockport.

I think we screwed up the calendar.

So poor Paul.

Paul supposed to be in studio, and that's our mistake.

But I'm grateful that Dr.

Moyer is able to join us.

And I just want you, Dr.

Moyer, to have a chance to kind of weigh in a little bit as well.

On how important you think it is that our attention as a country is, is on a subject that is much more complex than is often taught, especially K through 12.

>> Yeah, I'm I'm sorry.

I'm just having to kind of drop into the middle of this.

I'm not quite sure of the context of the, of the question.

So could you reframe the question a little bit for me?

>> Well, I'm curious to know how valuable you think it is that we're we're going to spend as, as a country hopefully having this cultural event starting Sunday night on PBS.

A lot of people will be not only watching the film as as your colleague Dr.

Jarvis has said, you know, there's going to be a lot of attention on this.

More than a K through 12 teacher can get more than a university professor can have.

And and hopefully it will spark deeper dives and more learning outside of the series to reading biographies, discussing in class, et cetera.

and maybe revisiting a subject that is more complex than we often are taught.

In K through 12, we get taught the simple version of history.

The hagiographies, the smart guys in the room, you know, writing interesting documents and signing them and throwing tea in the harbor.

So what can what could it do for our country if we had a better understanding of the complexity of our own history?

Dr.

Moyer.

>> Yeah, well, obviously, as a historian, I'm always a big fan of going back and looking at the past.

yeah, I think it's a it's kind of I'm teaching a class right now on the American Revolution, and it was sort of a bittersweet moment for me that I was teaching this class on the 250th anniversary of the start of the revolution, start of the fighting, at least.

And I think normally under normal circumstances, I would have been sort of elated by that fact.

It would have been kind of a almost a celebratory moment, but it would have been a positive thing.

But I think and to bring in the the present political situation, I think we're in a political situation now where it seems we're on the verge of turning away from perhaps much of what we gained from the revolution.

so I think it's especially important right now to explore this moment in our, our nation's history, because the present situation we're in right now, I mean, and even in class this semester, I've been able to make all kinds of Connections between the, the revolution and present day events.

You know, earlier in the semester, we were talking about the British sending in troops to places like Boston and the impact that that had.

And then we were saying, well, you know, does that have any parallels to what's going on right now in places like Los Angeles or Washington, D.C.?

So, yeah, I think it's an incredible opportunity for Americans not only to reflect on their past, but to reflect on the present.

>> And again, I want to move this away from politics.

And in a moment.

But part of the problem, I think, is everything gets so infected or inflected by the the current or the recent decade of American politics.

And so, Dr.

Moyer, to the extent that to the point that you make there there is a movement away from teaching the full history.

what do you think is driving that?

I mean, we have governors.

We have people in the administration talking about how we need to teach the good things about history.

We need to make students feel good.

I think they would say they're tired of hearing students emerge from classrooms feeling bad about themselves or their country.

What do you say.

>> To that?

Well, yeah.

Yeah.

>> And I, I understand that and it's kind of interesting the way I start the course I teach on the revolution is that I talk about nostalgia and how that's sort of a dangerous lens to to view the past.

And I basically bluntly tell my students that I want to return the, the horror and the violence and and the fear of the revolution.

Back to the story.

and I think some people dislike that they want a story that's completely celebratory, but I think it's a real disservice not only to ourselves, but for the people who lived through the revolution to sanitize the process.

It was not easy for them.

It brought death and destruction.

They were not clear that things were going to turn out well in the end.

So, you know, in my mind, telling the complete history of the revolution is valuable.

I guess I'm not.

I think people who are worried about, oh, I don't know what they woke, whatever term they use, are afraid of a history that is simply not celebratory.

And unfortunately, with almost every aspect of the past, and especially in war, I mean, it's I think it's kind of hard to be celebratory about war.

there there were victims, there were people, there were winners and losers.

And we need to look at both sides from the loyalist perspective.

The war is not a celebratory moment from Native American's perspective.

So I think that that fuller understanding of, of the past is not just, you know, doing a service to ourselves, but is doing a service to the people who went through this event.

>> Well, when we come back from our break, I'll get a couple of bits of feedback from listeners.

If you're on the phone, if you've sent some emails, and then I'm going to ask David Schmidt, the co-director of the American Revolution, about some of the names that you're going to get to know over these six nights, names that very likely you've never heard.

And David and his colleagues, Sarah Botstein and Ken Burns have been very excited for the American viewer to get to know so we can understand the fuller story of the American Revolution.

The American Revolution premieres tomorrow night, Sunday night.

I'm sorry.

It's Friday PBS the six part series, a 12 hour total series.

They're they've been working on it for nearly a decade.

And we'll come right back with one of the co-directors on Connections.

Coming up in our second hour, a conversation with the unlikely winners on election night, the breakers of the glass ceiling.

A Democrat who won in the town of Perinton for the first time since 1917, a Democrat who wins in Penfield for the first time since the 1980s.

Amorette Miller, the first black woman ever elected to town council in the town of Greece.

How did they do it?

We'll talk about it next hour.

>> John Lennon and Yoko Ono's message of nonviolence is pretty well known.

>> I think it's as simple as peace and love.

You know.

>> I'm Ailsa Chang, John and Yoko son, Sean Ono Lennon talks with me about what's less understood about his famous parents, especially his mom, and we get into the new documentary, 1 to 1 on All Things Considered.

From NPR news.

>> This afternoon at four.

>> This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

This is Hoover on the phone in Pittsford first.

Hey, Hoover, go ahead.

>> Hey, what a program again.

I don't know if there's an award we can give you for your outstanding.

>> Oh, get out of here.

Hoover.

>> Come on.

I'm giving you the business here.

Listen, your academics they worry about what their students are going to think.

Here's what I recommend in terms of if I was teaching a class first book I'd have anybody read is the new book that came out just a few months ago.

It's called History Matters.

It's all about David McCullough's unpublished lectures, and it's put together by his daughter.

her name is Lawson.

McCullough Lawson.

So it's about 200 pages.

I'd have every student read that.

It would give them a perspective they need.

There's a couple other books that are really important, because I hope this program by Ken Burns is going to talk about the Civil War that was going on that was bloodier than the war with the British there.

The southern colonies were anti-revolution.

They were pro Britain in the northern colonies weren't much better, except that there were there were a group of a cadre in Boston.

The thugs named John Hancock and Sam Adams.

They were like the Trumps people of today.

You were their way or the highway.

A lot of people were the highway, and they all moved to Canada.

They founded the Canadian cities of Halifax and up in New Brunswick.

All those people had to leave because their houses were being torn down and they were being tarred and feathered.

So talk about being nasty.

But so anyway, there's a couple books by called The American Tory written by Professor William Nelson from Rice University.

It's about 50 years old, and you can still get it on Amazon.

But I tell people, please read about what happened to the Americans who didn't want to participate.

And then there's a historical fiction book by Kenneth Roberts called Oliver Wiswell.

It's a real long 800 page book, and it talks about history, and it profiles a couple people who were loyalists.

And what happened to them.

And he goes through the history.

And also, you want to know that if the British generals weren't so incompetent, they could have easily defeated Washington in New York City, which was a loyalist town.

And other places where the American colonial forces were incompetent or insufficiently supplied or positioned.

But the British would gain an advantage, and then they would go back and sit on their butt and have a nice meal and forget about what they had just done.

So anyway, I could talk.

>> All right, all right.

>> Thank you for the phone call.

I can't fact check every aspect of that.

I will say, David Schmidt.

That you and your colleagues have talked a lot about the fact that we call this a Revolutionary War.

And it is, of course, but it should be understood as a civil war as well.

Do you want to weigh in on that, David?

>> Oh, it's so many different things.

and certainly from some perspectives, from certain American loyalists.

Yeah.

I think you might you might find agreement with them, but I think there's an awful lot of people of the 3 million or so living within the borders of the United States at the time of the revolution.

Who saw it differently?

and and certainly the, the British generals thought that they were doing the right thing.

And who knows what would have happened if they'd done things differently.

I do think that there's probably it's probably true that the best chance that they had to at least end Washington's war was, was on Long Island in 1776. it is a civil war.

early on and also later on.

But it's not a global war at the start.

It's unlike the Civil War, in fact, which is more of a sectional war north versus south.

This really is brother against brother in some cases.

if we want to go take the take an example from from the town of Boston just referenced Lucy Knox, the, I think, 18-year-old wife of Henry Knox.

When the war began 18-year-old, then pregnant her parents were avowed loyalists, and she lost her, as she says to her husband in a letter, her mother, father, sisters and brothers, sorry, sisters and brother in that war because of her decision to go with her husband.

he's the guy who brought the cannons from Ticonderoga to Boston that once they were erected on Dorchester Heights, Dorchester Heights actually made the British leave Boston and go to Halifax.

Like you're talking about with them.

When Henry Knox's in-laws went Lucy Knox's family.

So, you know, they I don't think she ever saw them again.

this is something that we don't often think about.

it did destroy families and communities.

it also created the United States.

All of these things are true.

it didn't begin as a war for independence, didn't begin as a war to unite the states, didn't begin as a war to give us the Republic.

We still operate under.

But it did do all of those things.

and I think what we're really grateful for, and I think I referred to this earlier, but with 12 hours, you have a chance to really marinate in there.

And spend some time and some other people's shoes.

consider some things you never did before.

But I think mostly what you're going to get or what most people will get from this.

Probably not our esteemed professors on the line, but other people is.

Wow, I didn't know that.

I think a lot of people want to learn this history.

It's it's been something that, you know, we haven't we an understanding of the American Revolution before we even have conscious memories.

It's on our flag.

It's on our currency.

It's the Fourth of July.

we learn about it in school, but we learn about it in usually a U.S.

survey course where the the teachers are worried they're not going to get to the 20th or 21st century if they give the revolution its due.

So you go buy it pretty quickly.

We're not out here to try to disprove what you learned in those schools, but we're we want to give you a lot more context so you understand why people are making the decisions that they are making.

and why it matters.

>> All right.

Let me ask Paul and Michael if they want to weigh in too.

And then we got to keep it moving here.

Dr.

Moyer, anything you want to add there?

>> Yeah, I would just.

There's two things that were just mentioned there that I think are really important.

And I hope that they receive a lot of attention in the documentary.

Is, number one, that the Revolutionary War is very much of a civil war.

and number two, the, the international dimensions of the war that this also becomes a global conflict.

And if you don't recognize that, you really can't understand the outcome of the war.

>> Yeah.

Dr.

Jarvis is nodding right along here.

I know that that's a big part of this.

Sarah Botstein in an interview I was listening to, said that that's one of the takeaways she wants people to have when they watch the six part series is this was not just a 13 colonies, and now there's a new flag and there's a new country.

It became a global conflict with global ramifications.

>> Yeah.

>> I mean, it's absolutely not.

>> All of us versus all of them, which I think we might consider without more context.

And also it's it's the French get involved in a big way.

the Spanish joined the war as allies of the French, the Dutch are involved and dozens of Indian nations are involved.

It's fought not just in those 13 colonies.

It's fought, as you guys know, in western New York.

It's fought across the Appalachians in Indian Country, there all the way to the Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast, in the Caribbean.

And, you know, off the coast of France and England, off the coast of Africa, it could be argued that it's being fought even in the Indian subcontinent.

And it all starts on Lexington Green, which is wild.

But that's history.

>> Dr.

Jarvis, you want to add to that?

>> Yeah, especially the maritime component.

it's very easy to focus on battlefields and redcoats and Continentals, but there were 3000 American privateers which far outnumbered the 50 or so Continental Navy ships.

And, you know, the the the war was being fought out on the Atlantic Ocean and in the Caribbean.

And those ships did incredible economic damage to the sugar islands.

and they captured vital supplies to land to support the Army and the war effort.

It a quote for the first two years of the war, almost all of the gunpowder fired by Washington's troops came from abroad.

America had no capacity to make gunpowder.

And so, really, foreign supplies, foreign loans, kept this war going for the first two years.

Certainly.

and put enormous pressure.

There's a whole British home front story 2/5 of Parliament did not vote in favor of funding a British army to go to Long Island in 1776.

So there's opposition in the war in England itself.

And as the war dragged on and that giant debt that in some ways started all the taxation kept growing you know, this needs to be considered from the British standpoint as well.

So there's a lot of factors going on.

It's not just simply the Continental Army or the Continental Congress.

There's a whole sort of exterior impact.

>> I wish we had three hours for this conversation.

Let me just keep moving as fast as I can through listener feedback.

Rick wants to know from your guests what age should a student be introduced to?

The whole story of the revolution?

Is it during elementary school, high school?

College?

I'm going to ask all three of you that we got to keep it tight.

David Schmidt you want whole families to watch this series starting Sunday night?

>> I mean, it's not it's obviously.

>> Going to depend on the family.

I watched the Civil War when I was eight, and I think it worked out for me.

I love this stuff and I'm still doing it.

but, you know, it might depend on on the people.

It's a war story and wars are really messy.

you're not going to see as much of that as you would with the Vietnam War, but you're going to hear a lot of awful stuff.

because that's what a war is.

But I think it's important.

I would I would give it to anybody you think is capable of hearing complex truth.

>> Okay.

>> Dr.

Moyer.

>> speaking for myself, I got interested in the revolution when I was six years old, during the bicentennial.

I still remember the first book I ever read was on George Washington.

So I'm in favor of getting them while they're young.

>> Okay.

>> Dr.

Jarvis.

>> I concur.

>> That was easy.

All right, there you go, Rick.

Thank you.

Jack and Greece next on the phone.

Hey, Jack.

Go ahead.

>> Oh.

Hi, Evan.

I'll try to make this as quick as I can.

There's so much to talk about.

First, I'd like to recognize WXXI.

My wife and I attended the session at the Little theater a week and a half ago or so, and I think the professors were there for that.

That was well done.

I'm looking forward very much to the to the series.

you know, it's over 55 years ago that I attended my last history class, and, but I became interested in the revolution in particular because there was a lot going on around patriotism and the Second Amendment.

So I read David McCulloch's book, Adams and his and his and his companion book, 1776.

And and that so and I've read other books since, but I was so impressed by how much I did not understand things like how difficult it was to travel on land or sea and, and the idea that the Patriots, I mean, they were going to be hanged if they lost.

I mean, they were really worried about that.

And the other was there was one paragraph by Adams.

There was a wonderful book, the book Adams and and he, he talked.

It was only a paragraph long.

And he made a comment about the Jewish people and how badly he felt, how the Jews were treated by the by his Christian fellow Christians.

It was like, wow, it just to hear, you know, to read his words.

Anyway, that's just what I wanted to share.

Thank you.

>> Thank you very much.

We appreciate you coming out for that event.

David Schmidt do you want to add anything there?

>> You know, I just think you reference what John Adams was writing about something that it sounds like you care a lot about.

And I think you might be surprised how often these people who lived and died so long ago are thinking about the same stuff that we're thinking about now, whatever it might be.

and I think you'll recognize a kinship in them.

There's a moment in our fifth episode where they witness a total eclipse.

It's like, oh, you guys in western New York witnessed a total eclipse last year, I think.

Right.

So you might you might resonate there.

>> there's so much.

Dr.

Jarvis, do you want to add there anything to add there?

No.

I'll say anything you want to add there, Dr.

Moyer?

>> well, we'll keep things moving.

>> Okay.

>> So I want to ask David, just.

>> Briefly.

>> If I mention a few names, a few names, can you just give me, like a paragraph snapshot of some of the color that we're going to see in the series coming up, Betsy Ambler.

>> Betsy Ambler was ten when the war began.

She grew up in New York, born and grew up in Yorktown, Virginia, and she lived most of the war as a refugee and spoiler alert her her town was destroyed in the war, and she tells him she's a great writer.

You're going to get to hear what she thought about all of that.

>> She left behind a trove of letters.

Right.

Thank goodness.

>> For that.

So.

>> She had she had a bunch of little sisters, three little sisters, and the two youngest were too young to remember what had happened.

So she wrote one of them to tell them their family's story.

And I love this because she's not writing for publication.

She's just writing to tell her sister what happened.

I think you can kind of respect her memory a little bit in a different way, because of that.

>> James Forten.

>> James Forten was born free in in Philadelphia.

He's black, and he was nine years old when he heard the Declaration of Independence.

Read for read to the public for the first time in July of 1776.

And took its its preamble to heart.

signed up as a privateer, I believe, in at age 14, was captured at sea and and, you know, ran the risk of being enslaved for the first time in his life, ended up on a prison ship in off Brooklyn.

And for seven months and then walked home.

His mom didn't recognize him when he got there, he was like 15.

When he got home.

And then afterwards became really, really wealthy and helped fund the abolition movement with those proceeds.

he's also a great writer.

And we got, of all people, Morgan Freeman to voice him.

So, hopefully he's happy with that.

>> John Greenwood.

>> John Greenwood, born in Boston, happened to be basically everywhere in the first few years of the war.

Also ended up being a privateer.

he saw the British land in 1768.

He shared a bed with somebody who one of the five fatal victims of the Boston Massacre in Wild Story.

His the sky was an apprentice to his father.

He ended up serving as a fifer.

beginning just after Lexington and Concord was at bunker Hill.

Was at the Battle of Trenton.

Went home and decided he was he wasn't done serving his country.

Went on to be a privateer.

Was captured at sea just like Horton.

and after the war ended up being a dentist whose most celebrated client was George Washington.

Can't make it up.

>> Wow.

>> and let's see here.

So, Ken Burns, I just want to read this one line from Ken Burns.

He says that nobody does history.

These personal stories like David Schmidt.

And he said that one of the things that he thought fascinating about Greenwood was that, you know, his story could have ended there it after the crossed the Delaware and, you know, he survives the Battle of Trenton, but he goes home.

His father's baking the clothes in the oven to kill the lice and covering him with sulfur.

I mean, that puts.

>> A grit.

>> To the survival aspect of this that we probably can't have without that kind of color.

David and I just want to thank you for doing the work to to dig up these stories.

I'm going to ask you, all three of you final thoughts about a minute, a piece here.

David.

I, I guess it's just going to be what you want us to take from this when when we emerge from these six nights, starting Sunday night?

what do you hope Americans take from this series?

>> Well, I hope they they learn their history.

and I hope they have something that they can share to talk to other people about.

I think also, everybody's going to have a different takeaway.

I think that's good.

I think the revolution meant something different to every individual who fought in it.

And the Revolutionary War film also should have similar similar effect.

but I also think that what one thing that I get from it is that the American Revolution was a moment of tremendous uncertainty.

And in that uncertainty, there's a lot of possibility.

And that motivated people on all sides of the equation.

In the revolution to choose to fight for or against the United States, to try to win their own freedom, to try to preserve their own sovereignty.

and if we live in a time of uncertainty today, which I think a lot of people believe we do, maybe there's some possibility in that, too.

>> All right.

About 45 seconds, doctor Moyer, what do you what are you looking for most in this film series?

>> Yeah, I think it is important.

And I hope the film series kind of portrays this is to keep in mind that people in 1775 didn't know how this was all going to turn out.

That would be one point.

The other point is, I think in the end, it the war did bring things that we see as, as as good as the creation of the United States.

But also there's nothing wrong with also keeping in mind the cost.

And there's nothing wrong with also telling the story of those who who considered the war as, as as a moment of loss rather than victory.

>> Dr.

Jarvis, about 45 seconds.

>> I hope people watch this and it starts conversations and it awakens curiosity and gets people to seek out some of the books that an earlier caller referenced.

And I hope that in terms of telling everybody's story, I think all Americans can hopefully find themselves in this past.

Women can imagine, you know, what it was like to be on either side.

African Americans can see their ancestors story.

Young Americans can imagine what they would do as a 15 or 20-year-old in this war.

and really just have, I guess, empathy and curiosity and try to see the complexity of, of the event.

>> I'm so grateful for what these teachers do in our classrooms and for students like Dr.

Jarvis.

Thank you for sharing your expertise with us.

Dr.

Moyer, thank you for taking the time for the program today.

And our thanks to David Schmidt, co-director of the American Revolution.

David, long, long time coming.

We're all going to be watching on Sunday night.

Thank you.

David.

>> Thank you.

>> David Schmidt, Sarah Botstein Ken Burns, the American Revolution Sunday night on PBS, WXXI TV six night event.

Going to be an outstanding cultural event.

We've got more Connections coming up in a moment.

>> This program is a production of WXXI Public Radio.

The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of this station.

Its staff, management or underwriters.

The broadcast is meant for the private use of our audience.

Any rebroadcast or use in another medium without express written consent of WXXI is strictly prohibited.

Connections with Evan Dawson is available as a podcast.

Just click on the link at wxxinews.org.