Ken Burn: Why the American Revolution Still Matters
Clip: 11/4/2025 | 49sVideo has Closed Captions
Ken Burns reflects on reconnecting with America’s founding to rediscover our shared purpose.
Ken Burns urges us to move beyond nostalgia and sentimentality to engage with America's founding truly. By revisiting our origin story with honesty and clarity, he believes we can rediscover a shared sense of purpose, recalibrate our direction, and find our collective “North Star.” This deeper understanding, he suggests, may hold the key to revitalizing our democracy today.
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Ken Burn: Why the American Revolution Still Matters
Clip: 11/4/2025 | 49sVideo has Closed Captions
Ken Burns urges us to move beyond nostalgia and sentimentality to engage with America's founding truly. By revisiting our origin story with honesty and clarity, he believes we can rediscover a shared sense of purpose, recalibrate our direction, and find our collective “North Star.” This deeper understanding, he suggests, may hold the key to revitalizing our democracy today.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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I think it' possible for us to reinvigorate the sense of purpose that we have had and have, perhaps fearing that we have lost by going back and understanding that origin story, which is for most Americans unfortunately, sort of encased with the barnacle of sentimentality and nostalgia and needs to be liberated from that, maybe it's that there's no photographs or newsreels, maybe they have buckled shoes or powdered wigs, but somehow we've kept them at arm's length.
And yet, in this complicated story is, I think, the beginnings of our salvation our recalibrating where we want to go, what our North Star might be.
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Clip: 11/4/2025 | 1m 45s | Ken Burns explains how the American Revolution unintentionally gave birth to democracy. (1m 45s)
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Clip: 11/4/2025 | 44s | Yuval Levin reflects on how American citizenship has evolved to embrace both diversity and unity. (44s)
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Clip: 11/4/2025 | 50s | Yuval Levin reflects on why the legislative branch is central to American democratic life. (50s)
Sarah Botstein: Why the American Revolution Still Matters
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Clip: 11/4/2025 | 1m 22s | Sarah Botstein shares why the American Revolution still matters in today’s civic and political life. (1m 22s)
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Major funding is provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Funding is also provided by The Travelers Companies, Inc. , the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, and viewers like you.