(calm music) - Ken Burns is a household name in America, and deservedly so.

His multi-part documentaries have examined Earth-shaking conflicts, the Civil War, World War II, and the Vietnam War, working from his home in New Hampshire burns his mind subjects including jazz, baseball, and country music.

To examine what makes America tick, he shines a light on the complicated aspects, both the good and the bad of our national story.

(bomb blasting) - A shot rings out.

- The latest project from Burns and his team is "The American Revolution", a six-part 12 hour documentary premiering on Ocean State Media on November 17th.

So, what significance does that conflict hold for our current moment and how does Burns see the outlook for understanding the complexity of history in the age of social media?

I'm Ian Donnis, and that's just some of what we talked about in this in in-depth conversation.

(calm music) Ken Burns, welcome to "One on One".

- Thank you.

- Your documentaries have covered so many subjects, World War II, the Civil War, baseball, the Vietnam War, you call the American Revolution, one of the most important events in the history of the world.

Why did it take until 2015 for you to begin work on this project?

- You know, we don't choose the subjects in any particular order.

We're certainly not in public media interested in focus groups telling us what to do, you're sort of following your own gut.

So, the first several films that I had worked on the "Brooklyn Bridge" and "The Shakers" and "Huey Long" and "The Statue of Liberty", seemingly completely diverse things prompted me to do "The Civil War".

They all had "The Civil War" as a determining factor.

And after that we said, "We're not gonna do any more wars."

And went into a lot of biographies and other things like baseball and jazz.

And then we had to do World War II, and before the ink was dry on that, I had a gut that we should leapfrog over Korea and do Vietnam.

And while we were finishing Vietnam, or in the last, you know, 18 months of finishing it, we decided to do the revolution.

And it's not a sense of that we needed to do anything in chronological order, but that maybe we had the chops, maybe we understood a relationship of how we could delve into this subject matter, which has no photographs, that has no news reels, I'm a person that has up to now really avoided reenactments, I don't like that, I sort of feel like if you're gonna reenact, you might as well make a feature film and that's not my job, I like documentaries.

But here we thought, "Well, maybe we could do it in a different way."

We could spend years as we did filming reenactor all up and down the East Coast and all different kinds of uniforms in all weather in an impressionistic way, not to have them recreate the Battle of Bunker Hill, but to get enough critical mass of stuff that you can evoke what it must have been like to be in that army and in a way then that's better than any evidence that you have and combine it with maps and paintings and drawings to make it come alive.

It's as you're approaching it and as you're getting to understand it, that you begin to realize that centrality or the importance or this new pivot in all of human history that the American Revolution represents.

Before that people are subjects.

And after it, a few people living on the East Coast are citizens and that's a really important thing.

- Do you sum up the story of how "The American Revolution" succeeded as being one that is violent, scary, and complicated.

You're a student of history, you've been studying America for a long time, what was the most surprising thing you learned about that?

- Well, I think the fact that the United States is born as the historian Maya Jasanoff says in our film out of violence, is a really important thing to come to terms with.

I think that we've accepted the violence of our Civil War.

We've accepted the violence of all the 20th century wars we've been involved in.

But I think for some reason, maybe to protect the big ideas that are taking place in Philadelphia at the Declaration and of course at the Constitution, maybe it's because there are no photographs and it's just paintings and they seem at some distance from us, they don't seem quite like us and they're exactly like us, that we've sort of diminished or played that down.

We found that by acknowledging how bloody a revolution it was.

And 18th century warfare is no fun at all, it's really bad stuff as all wars are.

That it didn't diminish those ideas, it made them bigger.

But this is not just a revolution, it's a Civil War, a bloody Civil War and a World War and probably the fourth world war over the prize of North America.

So, once you say, "Look, we wanna understand who those guys were in Philadelphia."

And not just as superficial people.

And I think we've done that, made them a little bit more real.

We also introduce you to scores of other people, so-called bottom up, who are doing the fighting and dying, who are in the British Army, who are loyalists, who are patriots from New Hampshire to Georgia, who are women who are free and enslaved Black Americans, who are native people who are coexisting or assimilated within the 13 colonies and certainly those nations distinct and intact and distinct from one another on our Western border.

All of those players help you understand the revolution much better.

And so all of that was a revelation.

It isn't just big ideas in Philadelphia, those ideas are as big as they come in human events, but it's also to make them real and tangible and to have us relate to it, to have us right now where we are on the eve of our 250th birthday, understanding what was at stake, you have to delve deep into all of this story.

It's like any great saga, it's like the Bible, it's just filled with all sorts of dimensions of personalities and characters and narratives that are going on that somehow, "What does this mean?"

And then all of a sudden it has meaning coming back.

And so we've spent nearly a decade trying to wrestle this story to the ground.

And the we is not royal in the United States.

We aren't about royal, it's Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt who are my co-directors.

It's Geoffrey Ward, the writer, a team of editors and folks who are delving, finding those archives, finding the paintings, finding the maps, finding the locations.

Cinematographer, Buddy Squires, I've been working with for over 50 years.

So, it's been a kind of intimate handmade film by about a couple dozen people who've been working assiduously over the last nearly decade.

- As you say, the nation was founded in this kind of mix of violence, the ideas of the enlightenment, at the same time the founders, many were slave holders, it was this kind of stew of big stuff, what is the legacy of that for us today?

- Well, I think it is that, you know, I have had for many years in my editing room, a neon sign in lowercase cursive that says it's complicated.

There's not a filmmaker who when they have a scene that's working, doesn't wanna touch it.

But when you're dealing with history, you have to yield, the art always has to yield to the facts.

And so I think it's really important to tell this complex story.

If you take for example, this issue of freedom and liberty at the heart of our founding, and that many people who were engaged in the patriotic struggle were also owners of other human beings, you can get completely focused on the hypocrisy of that, but you can also understand that in a way, by bringing this up, it was over, slavery was going to be over.

It took a long time, four score and nine years before it was over.

Women who are a majority of the population who are central to the story, they keep the resistance going on in the years leading up to the revolution.

There are Black Americans who are trying to decide who to fight for, which is the daylight to freedom.

And so what happens is, is that you can turn it into a binary, good or bad, or you can accept the complexity of this human dynamic and begin to understand as this epic human drama in which there are, is there hypocrisy?

Yes, there is.

But there are also new ideas in which when Thomas Jefferson, who owns hundreds of slaves says, "All men are created equal."

He means all White men of property.

We don't mean that.

And the word all alone, as the scholar Yuval Levin spoke to us recently just meant that it's over.

You know, the door is going to open, the foot is there, and you can try to shut it, you can try to go back, but once you've introduced these universal ideas of human freedom in the midst of what starts off as a struggle over Indian land and taxes and representation, we know that from grammar school, suddenly becomes big idea land, then all of a sudden everybody is hearing that the people who are serving those planters are hearing what the historian Jane Kamensky calls the liberty talk.

And it's very leaky.

And another scholar that appears in our film, Maggie Blackhawk, a legal scholar, says that the Declaration was deeply significant to people at the margins.

So, while we can, if we choose focus narrowly on the hypocrisy or the limited nature of it, at that moment you forget the fact that there are people hearing these words who are going, "Yes, I want that too."

And that is going to be the story of the planet for the next 200 plus years as people, as revolutions based on ours, take hold in Europe, take hold in South America, take hold in Asia and Africa.

And this notion in this one, as we could say, perhaps hypocritical, perhaps limited phrase, all men are created equal, has essentially been the headline of the last 200 plus years.

- Nathanael Greene was a celebrated general during the Revolutionary War.

Who are some of the other Rhode Islanders who played significant roles in the conflict?

- Well, I think you could sort of begin and end with Nathanael Greene.

He's certainly the person that Washington trusted the most, the general, he was betrayed by one of his top generals, one of his fighting generals, Benedict Arnold, who was great.

And in our film appears in the opening seconds of our second episode.

And it isn't until well into the sixth that you understand what happens.

And he's the hero at the Battle of Saratoga, which is the decisive battle that the French then decide to come in and support us.

And without their support, we don't have it.

But Greene is there all along.

Washington gives him really important tasks like putting the army together and being the quartermaster after the horrible winter at Valley Forge, and then gives him the Southern Department, so he's really important.

You know, there's a wonderful, beautiful moment when Stephen Hopkins, who signs the Declaration, a man from Rhode Island is said to have had palsy.

And when he signed it he said that my hand may shake, but my heart does not.

And it's a beautiful thing.

And then there are Rhode Islanders.

Rhode Island along with Connecticut offered freed and enslaved Blacks or enslaved Blacks, their freedom after the war for fighting.

And the first Rhode Island is notable for that.

And Rhode Island is trying to figure out how to compensate the owners, you know, a very delicate thing at this time.

And so you have stories of people at every level engaged in this story in every single colony, soon to become a state, and what's so beautiful about it is that the questions that we don't ask ourselves now, we can play the patriotic music and we can think about the big ideas, but the questions should be, "What would I have done?"

These are people who are willing to die for an idea that was brand new in the world and the fact that they come from Massachusetts or New York or Rhode Island or Georgia or South Carolina or Virginia, this is less important than I think the fact that people did make this choice, as they said, as what Stephen Hopkins signed, the last line is, "We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

And then they signed it and that was a compact in blood.

- Speaking of the concept of patriotism, we see how different people sometimes try to appropriate some of the ideas or symbols of the revolution.

The Tea Party movement got a lot of attention 15 years ago before the January 6th riot at the Capitol, flags were flown with the Appeal to Heaven, and don't tread on me messages, what did the research for your latest documentary tell you about how this stuff lives on centuries after the revolution?

- Well, our job is to focus on the revolution and we back up our series about 20 years to begin with what we call the French and Indian War, what the rest of the world calls the Seven Years' War, one of the world wars over over North America.

And then we go through Washington's two terms very, very briefly at the end.

And so we're not really attempting to score some points or make some comments about what's going on today or what's not going on today or what may or may not be used, the term patriot comes from England and it was defenders of constitutional government and the wigs were part of that and the British never called us patriots, they called us rebels.

They saw us as that.

There's a wonderful quote of a German soldier that we follow throughout the war.

One of the hired Hessians who said, "Who would've thought a hundred years ago that out of this multitude of rabble could arise of people who could defy kings."

So, those rabbles did some interesting things.

Somebody said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

And I think that it is, you know, innate to human behavior that you kind of use things and abuse things and take things superficially from, I remember the Vietnam War protests that had all those flags, the same flags that flew minus the Confederate flag at January 6th.

So, people were saying, "Don't tread on me, join or die."

All of the sort of slogans.

And I think that people appropriate it, and I think they do so without knowledge.

And so a good story, which we hope our film is, is a way to remind people that there's actual meaning and sacrifice, not just sort of the, you know, the appropriation of an idea, but real action and real sacrifice behind the story of patriotism in this case, those people who rose up against the British Crown and created the United States.

- On a related note, you're fond of quoting Lincoln on how in his view, internal divisions were more of a threat in the US than any external enemy.

We're obviously at a moment of sharp division in the US.

Given your long view of history, what are your thoughts about our current moment?

- Well, you know, I think Lincoln is absolutely right.

As a young man, he wasn't even 29 years old, he was 28 at the Young Men's Lyceum and he was just saying, you know... And I think he's essentially without saying it acknowledging the force field that two oceans provide us, protecting us in a way from foreign enemies.

He said, no armies from Europe, Asia, or Africa could take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track in the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years.

If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

As a nation of free men, we will live through all time or die by suicide now.

So strange that he would preside over the closest our country has ever come to national suicide in the Civil War.

And I think that it is part of the sort of narcissistic self-absorbed moment that we always think that our moment is the biggest crisis.

You know, we're so divided now is what people say.

Well, I invite you to watch "The American Revolution", and you'll see Americans really divided.

Or revisit our series of 35 years ago on the history of "The Civil War", we're really divided.

And the Vietnam period the same thing.

And so I think what you can do and this is the great gift of history, is it provides you with the ability, much like a financial advisor who's averaging out the returns on various accounts that you have to just calm things down a little bit.

And I also think that having made a film with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt about this story of our founding, it provides everyone who calls themselves an American a place to enter and participate in that story.

And that goes to the second half of your question, that I've had the great privilege of making films about the US, all of the majesty, the complexity, the contradiction, and even the controversy of that.

But I've also made films about us that is to say the lowercase two letter, plural, pronoun, all of the intimacy of we and our and us.

And I think here we have an opportunity for everybody no matter how they're divided, and we don't make this in public media, we don't make it for one group of people as opposed to another, we make it for all citizens who are curious, the ability to have a story that then helps to put, as I've said, the us back in the US.

- You're closely related with public media, all of your documentaries have appeared on PBS and you've likened public media to the Declaration of Independence as a public resource.

We've seen more recently how the Congressional majority clawed back funding for public media both radio and TV and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has in the past funded some of your projects no longer exist.

So, does this show that supporters of public media have failed to make a convincing case for its value?

- No, not at all.

Nor does a loss by George Washington at a particular battle mean he goes home and says, "Okay, it's all over."

It's an incredibly shortsighted decision.

The rescission that took place in the summer of 2025, it will hurt strangely enough, rural stations much more than it will hurt urban ones.

It took $4 million away from budgets for future films that we've been working on like this.

We'll survive, we'll figure out how to do it, PBS will survive, it will figure out how to do it.

All the stations that are able to survive will do that.

It just means you sort of lost this skirmish but there are many, many other to have.

And I think we prove again and again the importance of public broadcasting.

The reason why I called it the Declaration of Independence applied to the world of communication is because when our founders said, Jefferson said, "The pursuit of happiness."

He did not mean the pursuit of wealth in a marketplace of objects and material things, he meant lifelong learning, all the founders meant that.

And if you look around the landscape, what entities, the local library, the educational institutions, provide that kind of lifelong learning.

And particularly with our superb children's programming and our primetime, but also continuing education and classrooms of the air even, you know, for those rural stations, the warnings, the Homeland security alerts, the things that tell you that the river is overflowing, now, you don't have it.

There'll be places that will be news deserts and that means nobody's covering the school board, nobody's going to the city council meeting, all the news is coming from less reliable sources that may not necessarily be as interested in the facts as we are we have to be every single day going in and out.

That will be a loss for those communities and perhaps that's the intention.

But I think in a democracy where you count on not only a free press, but the free flow of accurate information, this is incredibly shortsighted decision and it just becomes incumbent upon the rest of us who perceive and understand the value of public broadcasting to just work that much harder in different ways to offset these lawsuits.

It may mean that people who are listening to us who aren't a member, and we know that the membership is a small fraction of the people who actually avail themselves will say, "Maybe this is the time I'm gonna contribute and get my tote bag."

- Your documentaries take a long time to come together, 5 years, 10 years in some cases.

What is the process, the distinct chapters, if you wanna produce a great multi-part documentary on the American Revolution, the Vietnam War, how do you break down the distinct aspects of moving forward with that?

- Well, that's a really good question, and I think it's central to the importance of public media in our country in that I could probably go and in one pitch raise all the money I need to do the Vietnam War.

$30 million took us 10 1/2 years.

And I'll admit I spent 10 of those years also trying to raise that money.

I could get that from a premium cable or a streaming service, but they wouldn't give me the 10 1/2 we needed to do that.

We never stopped researching, we never stopped writing, we never stopped shooting.

And we begin, we record our music early on, not added at the very end to give it dynamics.

It attenuates it, but it allows us to make ourselves cordial.

That is to say, willing to understand that new scholarship could come in and take that good scene and have us open it up, destabilize a scene that's working because it's complicated and we are willing to spend that time and we found that we needed around a decade to figure out how to tell the story right from the scholarship, from the collection of the images, making sure... I mean, the last weeks of editing on this, we were just literally arguing over commas, and adding the qualifying word, perhaps, because new scholarship suggested that that word 16 battleships or deaths or months wasn't as accurate as the three or four scholars in our footnote had suggested and so maybe we could save our bacon by putting the word perhaps.

I mean, we're down to that level and I'm proud of that.

I think that's important.

There are very, very few institutions of information in our country that are that, you know, assiduous in it.

I can think of the fact checkers of The New Yorker, or The New York Times and their rigorous standards and we have that in public media and we should be very, very proud of that.

And I am happy to be involved as I know Sarah Botstein is and David Schmidt are in an organization that forces us to ask a question about every word and every comma in every film we make.

- There's consternation in some quarters today about the effect of social media on Americans in their discourse.

You're on Instagram, you're on X, it's kind of the antithesis of your deep dives via documentaries.

How do you think the founders would regard this?

Would they just see social media as another tool or would they see it differently?

- Well, there are a lot of questions there.

First of all, I am not on those things.

Other people are on my behalf, I have zero idea.

I'm mainly interested in the real stuff.

I don't think social media is, there's nothing social about it.

It doesn't have some of the governors on its engine that we expect from traditional media about fact checking, about being wedded to facts and not superstition and conspiracy and opinion.

"The American Revolution" is born out of a good deal of social media of its time.

And people who were in the case of Samuel Adams up the road in Boston who is a failure, by the way as a brewer, but really good as a propagandist who said his job was to keep people alive to their grievances.

Sounds super familiar for a lot of outlets that don't have the sort of integrity that public media and other mainstream media have imposed quite correctly on themselves.

So, I think they'd recognize that, you know, people have been telling lies for as long as there have been people, that people have been inventing things for as long as there have been people.

You can sort of, you know, wring your hands and chicken little the current moment because the proliferation is so great and it's so overwhelming and no one begins to know where to start and to control it.

You don't need to control it, you need only to look back at our founding and ask what the founders were asking of us, which was to control ourselves, to be involved in the virtuous pursuit of lifelong learning.

And if you do that, if you're responsible for yourself, then you've liberated yourself from the tyranny and toxicity of social media.

- In closing, I have one last question.

I hope you don't think this is a cliche, but if you could invite five people from the course of human history for a dinner party, who would you pick?

- I would pick Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Louis Armstrong, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and I guess Jackie.

I don't think George would give you much information 'cause he's really keeps it pretty close to the vest.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton is just central to women's equality in the United States and a beautiful, beautiful writer.

Everybody knows why you'd pick Lincoln and Jackie and I think that Louis Armstrong, nobody agreed when we were making jazz about anything, but they all said that he was a gift from God or an angel and I'm certain that if I live a good lifetime, I'll get a chance to hear him blowing Gabriel out of the clouds.

- Ken Burns, thank you so much for sitting down.

- Thank you.

- Thanks for watching.

You can find all of our past interviews on the Ocean State Media's YouTube channel.

We'll see you next week on "One on One".

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