- Hello, I'm David Crabtree.

In just a moment, we'll hear from filmmaker Ken Burns about his ambitious new film, "The American Revolution", and why it matters today.

- [Narrator] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] - "The American Revolution".

10 years in the making for this film.

It took a lot of courage to make this film.

- I think initially, these impulses to say yes to something inside are instantaneous, the way you make a friend, you know this person's gonna be a friend for life, or something curious in me wants to do it.

And so you say yes wholeheartedly.

And then you have to realize that this is going to be extremely challenging for a number of reasons.

One is obviously it's in the late 18th century, there are no photographs, there are no newsreels.

This is a complex story in which everyone is invested and knows something about it, and we've tended to smother the Revolution and kind of gallant, bloodless myth.

It's encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality.

We accept the violence of our Civil War and all of our 20th century wars, but we wanna just protect the big ideas of the Revolution, and so we've kind of sanitized it and made our appreciation of it superficial, or at least susceptible to the myths, "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes," "Never tell a lie," "Chop down a cherry tree," you know, the kinds of stuff that get in the way of a full understanding.

But this is a bloody civil war.

It needs to be represented as such by telling a complete story, all the people, not just top down, but bottom up, does not in any way diminish from the spectacularly inspirational, all-inspiring ideas that are a product, the main product of the American Revolution, which is simply that people could govern themselves.

Everybody before the Revolution was a subject, everyone afterwards was a citizen.

This is a tough, tough, tough story to sort of break the code of how you tell it.

And so it's challenging in the extreme, but that counterpoint is exhilaration.

- Truth can be jarring.

- Well, I think that we have... Because it's been a bunch of guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, we've neglected the complexity of it.

We have in our editing room, and have had for 15 years, a little neon sign in cursive that says, "It's complicated."

And it is.

And there's not a filmmaker alive that if the scene is working, you don't want to touch it.

But we're in the business for the last 50 years of opening up and touching those scenes that are working well because we've learned something new.

We've understood that while Wynton Marsalis said this does some jazz, that sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time.

And if you can hold that kind of balance, if you can hold that kind of tension, you've got the possibility of telling a story in which people can attach themselves to, because it feels like their own lives.

It feels like the relationships they have.

The people that are boldfaced names and seem unapproachable suddenly become dimensional and human, flawed, but in some ways, even greater.

I mean, the most important person in our story is still George Washington.

Without him, we don't have a country.

But you can also understand him as not just some inaccessible statue, but somebody who's real, flesh and blood, has feelings, has difficulties dealing with Congress.

Who doesn't?

All of the things that he undergoes, we wanted to experience with him.

But we also include a little girl from Yorktown, Virginia, who's, you know, six to 12 in the war, you know, a 14-year-old fifer from Boston who joins the Army, a 15-year-old fighter from Connecticut.

These are brave people that history, they've been mostly lost to history or obscured, but who I think fill out the portrait.

And that's the whole idea, is that you can tell a much more complete story when you understand all of the folks that are at stake.

There's a huge fifth of the population is Black, enslaved and free.

There's Native Americans obviously on the western border, many nations, they're distinct nations, separate, but they're also intermixed with people in the colonies.

People have been living among Native Americans, and they have been living among the European colonists for a long time.

So this is a dynamic that sort of radically alters the idea of the sturdy militiamen carrying his rifle at Lexington Green in a kind of, you know, noble effort to repel the British.

This is a complicated story that at the beginning, the odds were zero that they would succeed.

And then you have to ask yourself, what would I have done back in the time?

Would I have been a Loyalist?

There's nothing wrong with being a Loyalist.

A Loyalist is a conservative, a Loyalist is somebody who doesn't wanna upset the status quo.

Would I have been able to die for my beliefs?

What would I have done?

And if our film has people thinking about that, understanding that this is taking place in places that we know, that we're familiar with, and that people were making the kind of choices, and sometimes trying to avoid making choices, sometimes being forced to make a choice they didn't want to, then changing, you've got a dynamic that makes the story that much more interesting and that much more, I think, relatable to.

It then doesn't seem kind of... The powder on the wigs isn't getting in the way.

- I was talking with a friend of mine about that very thing this morning, and he very quickly said, "Oh, I would've been a Patriot."

And I said, "You say that now at age 55.

What if you were 18 or 25?

You had just started a family.

Life was okay for you.

How do you know what you would've done?"

- If we can... By not turning these people into cartoon figures or simplistic good guys, bad guys, white hat, black hat, if you can do that, then all of a sudden, it ought to be reflecting back at you some of these fundamental questions.

I'm not sure if 55, you'd wanna change.

Maybe at 18, you'd be impulsive.

You don't know.

And the experience is it's both and neither.

There are really complicated people that we'll introduce you to.

We have one moment where a Loyalist that we followed throughout the entire film kills one of his best friends growing up at the Battle of Bennington, who's coming at him and whose bayonet has gone in and deflected by the bone, and he is obliged, as he says, to destroy him.

And now that's the American Revolution, that John Peters can kill Jeremiah Post, his friend from growing up in New Haven.

We've been following him, and we know all the intricacies of his life and his family and their sort of being pushed out, exiled from their Vermont town, and some of the choices he's made and his beliefs, and it's not that we're on his side, we just have come to understand him, as we do a Quaker woman in Philadelphia who is not pleased with what's going on, as we do with a Swedish minister at a church in New Jersey who has his entire congregation sort of divided by this thing.

Some have been attacked by Loyalists and British soldiers, some have been attacked by Patriots.

Nobody knows exactly what to do.

He's allegiant as to the Swedish King.

What happens here?

And that's a different sort of New Jersey.

- There are obviously several hallmarks of your work.

Incredible photography, great editing, original music, wonderful narration, wonderful interviews.

People may not realize how much research goes into what you do.

So, during the research, and all of this time, was there a point above all others where you thought, "This can't be real, what we've just discovered"?

- You know, David, it happens all the time, where you just find... I mean, I just told you about, you know, John Peters.

Just the notion that you've got this guy who is forced to, by these circumstances, to kill a friend from childhood.

How does that happen?

Our American Revolution, we want to be a little bit tidier than that.

And it's those free electrons, it's those loose ends, it's that undertow that you feel in particularly placid water that then, I think, galvanize the story.

It makes it that much more interesting.

If you can understand how Washington is beset from other sides.

This is a deeply flawed individual.

This is someone who's rash, who rides onto the battlefield in three different battles that I can think of right now with incredible bravery, but also, you know, his aides are putting their hands over their eyes, expecting to see their commander killed, which would've ended the American experiment at that point, or grabbing the reins of his horse to pull him back, or everybody is mesmerized, and what is a retreat stops and becomes an advance.

And he also makes a lot of really bad decisions on the battlefield, and he's still the most important person to this story.

Still interested?

Of course you are.

What are those mistakes?

Why did he make the same mistake twice, at Long Island with his left flank, at Brandywine with his right flank?

How did he miss that and still be George Washington?

There is a kind of expansive nature to a style of storytelling in which we've been reading and reading and reading, collecting and collecting and collecting, editing for a long time, not to build something, but actually separate, separate stuff out.

Our cutting room floor doesn't have bad stuff on it.

It's all good stuff.

It's just, as they said in "Amadeus", you know, "Too many notes."

- I get that.

I also get your energy around this.

I mean, I don't know when you first had the idea to do this film.

- I know exactly when I had the idea.

- How long ago?

- It was December of 2015.

We were just beginning to lock the episodes of the Vietnam series that would be broadcast in September of 2017, and I said, just as I had said as we were finishing our film on World War II called "The War" in 2006, I said, "We're doing Vietnam next," I just looked up and I said, "We're doing the Revolution."

We had to do it.

It was impossible because of the absence of photographs.

It's exhilarating.

People come up and say, "God, 10 years, you've almost worked on it for 10 years, and don't you get bored, don't you get tired?"

And you go, "No, it's the exact opposite.

You get more and more into it."

The only thing that ameliorates the unbelievable grief I feel at having to walk away from this subject, working on this subject every single day, is right now with you, just being able to communicate the kind of enthusiasm that takes place when you engage something like that.

So it's an evangelical period that, at the end, allows you to sort of slip into the other projects that are already going on, but don't have the full attention that the Revolution has right now for those of us who've made it, Sarah Botstein, David Schmidt, and me.

- How did this work, this particular film, change you?

- I won't work on a more important project.

Now, let me make sure you understand a more important project.

I said this about the US and the Holocaust.

And I hope it means that other projects, like the Civil War, like baseball, like jazz, like the Roosevelts, national parks, certain biographies that we've done, and things that we will work on and are working on now, would be as important, but I know there's no subject that could possibly be more important.

Obviously we're moving into a consciousness and awareness of our 250th anniversary.

We've just passed April 19th, you know, '25, which is 250 years after Lexington.

We'll be moving next year to July 4th, 1776, 250th anniversary of that.

But we're also in a time of great division.

And these ideas brought us together.

There was nothing that would suggest that somebody from the Carolinas would have any interest or commonality with people who live in my state, New Hampshire, or Massachusetts, but we made common cause then, and out of it came the most important event in world history, I think, since the birth of Christ.

Still interested?

Of course.

And I think particularly right now, we may be able to find the language and the tools and the ability to have the courage to have those conversations with each other that helped dispel, to some extent, the divisions that seem to threaten us now.

And I hope that if anything comes outta the film, it's that willingness to reinvigorate, to promise, first to ourselves, and then to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, that we would find some energy, the energy of the founding, that could reinvigorate our own time.

- I think the majority of us who think we know American history, we know about it, we're pretty proud about that.

- Yeah.

- And then I'm watching a clip, and the first voice I hear is that of a Native American.

- Yeah.

- We weren't exactly taught that.

- No, we weren't.

And you hear this voice, who was a spokesman for the Six Nations, a man named Canasatego.

The Six Nations are six tribes, often called the Iroquois Confederacy, that had joined together and had a functioning democracy of self-interest and self-protection for hundreds of years.

And Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, the great student of America, who traveled up and down as the postmaster during the colonies and knew the place, was a publisher, listened to other people, had gotten ideas together among tradesmen, says, "This is a great idea.

Why don't we try that here?"

And he imports seven colonies to meet in Albany, and they agree on a plan of union.

And he painted a picture of a snake cut into pieces above the warning, "Join or die."

And they take it back to the original colonial capitals to sell it, and nobody buys it, nobody wants to give up their autonomy.

20 years later, it's the rallying cry in the most consequential revolution in history.

That's basically our hook, is to say, wait a second, everything you think is a little bit upside down, that the model for this had already been going on for a while with native tribes, you know, these incredible nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.

They're called the Haudenosaunee, this great, powerful thing.

And in one of the great ironies, you will learn in the course of it that the American Revolution will destroy their democracy, as tribes are forced to make choices between... The eastern tribes tend to side with the Americans, and the western tribes with the British.

And it destroys the cohesion of that, just as we're making our own democracy come together.

- I just thought about my own childhood in Tennessee, of how little I was taught about the Trail of Tears, as an example, which just led me to think of the immense responsibility you carry in the creation of your films to help educate those of us who are uneducated about certain things.

- So, here, it's a really good point, and we feel this responsibility, David, all the time, every single day.

It's not with an arrogance of, "Oh, we're teaching," it's just, we gotta get this right.

And it means that, too often with history, there's a sort of pendulum.

It swings back and forth between this, you know, oh, this is just the story of great men, capital G, capital M. Oh, no, it's not, it's actually this bottom up story.

And we throw one side out with the other.

There's a kind of unforgivingness to our revisionism.

We wanna be ecumenical.

We wanna invite all these stories in.

There's no reason why they can't coexist, because they did at the same time.

It is complicated, and we're willing to tell this.

And I think unfortunately, for most of the history of our country, we've been willing to accept an abbreviated version, in some cases, a mythological version of what's taken place at various signal events in our past.

And it just doesn't fly.

We need to tell a complete story.

And it doesn't in any way, as I said, diminish the spectacular nature of the ideas that were generated, our revolution.

In fact, I think it puts it in even bolder and prouder relief for the rest of us to know that out of all of this violence, out of all of this division, we found common cause.

We designed a system that created the greatest country on earth.

We created citizens and not subjects, and that we required our citizens to be virtuous.

And what our founders meant by virtue was to participate in lifelong learning.

You couldn't be a citizen unless you were constantly educating yourself.

That's the pursuit of happiness.

Not the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideas.

That's thrilling and exciting to understand.

And nothing like this had ever happened before.

The Bible says there's nothing new under the sun.

It's right.

Human nature doesn't change, usually.

We had a moment where there was something brand new under the sun.

You could even hear it anticipated in Thomas Paine's "Common Sense", in which he's talking about an asylum from mankind.

That's our episode title for our second episode.

And it ends with the Declaration of Independence, in his words in "Common Sense" that give Americans the kind of courage, the collective intellectual courage, as well as the physical courage, to confront this idea of monarchy and to declare our independence.

And he said, "Not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to remake the world," right?

So think about what that means.

A flood, a biblical flood, comes and destroys everybody but a handful of human beings and a pair of each animals.

And he sees the experiment of the United States as this gigantic human reset that had to do with freedom and liberty and the agency of each individual to help shape their own destiny, which had not taken place.

You had farmers who were coming over from Wales or Ireland or Scotland who had lived dependent lives, their families had lived dependent lives, working someone else's land for 1,000 years, and all of a sudden, they owned a piece of land in North Carolina that was theirs, that was theirs.

And there's complicated dynamics to that, because there's people who are owned by other people at the same time these universal rights are being expressed to the world.

There are people not just on the borders, but within the communities, native peoples who've been there for hundreds of generations that are going to be displaced.

We don't call it the Eastern Seaboard Congress.

We don't call it the Eastern Seaboard Army.

We call it the Continental Congress and the Continental Army.

We have already dreams of empire.

We like to pretend, "Oh, well, we weren't like those other empires because we didn't take over lands."

We ended up taking over 300 separate nations in the course of our expansion.

So, we can own that, we understand it, it doesn't mean it's all bad or all good, it's just what happened.

So we're umpires.

We call balls and strikes.

We have no political agenda.

We're not putting our thumb on the scale.

We do like the ideas that come out of the Revolution.

We understand how unevenly they were initially applied and how much work still has to be done.

But it's nothing that we say in the film, with neon signs and stern lectures, we just tell you a complicated story, strike one.

I mean, I could I accurately tell you that Babe Ruth struck out a lot.

Fine.

Can we move on?

And you go, "But, but..." Oh, right.

He also hit a lot of home runs.

- You bring a sense of urgency around this.

Obviously 250, 275 years ago, there was a great sense of urgency.

We seem to have lost the sustaining of any sense of urgency.

- I agree.

I think that a lot of it has to do with just how much, like the sorcerer's apprentice, the information we get has just multiplied and multiplied and multiplied, and that too many of us are susceptible to places in which the information is suspect or downright untrue.

And so you then have to go back, I think this is all human dimension.

To say that there wasn't disinformation during the American Revolution is to not tell the complete truth of it.

To say that there weren't manipulators, you know, Samuel Adams, who, ironically, in today's world, was a failure as a brewer, was a great, you know, diatribe writer.

He said his job was to keep his fellow colonists alive to their grievances.

You know, we know what that's like.

We have a media environment in which people are very much trying to keep people alive to their grievances.

- Stirred up.

- And stirred up, you know?

And when things are lying fallow and the British seem to have yielded here, and it's not that he's saying, "No, no, no, it's gonna get worse," you know, and in some ways, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And so you just sort of say, you know, maybe human nature doesn't change.

I think you'll recognize a lot of things that are going on now.

You know, people like to say history repeats itself.

It never has.

No event has happened twice.

Mark Twain is supposed to have said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

If he did, it's just a perfect statement.

We've never made a film where we haven't finished.

And I have to tell you and promise you that we spend our time diligently focused on telling this story, not on going, "Let's include that because it's so much like today."

It's only when we're done, we lift up and go, "This is very much like today."

And remember, we started this in December of 2015, a very, very different world.

Barack Obama had 13 more months to go in his presidency.

And there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then.

But the facts of the Revolution that we've been able to ascertain and discover haven't changed.

So, we've changed, we've undergone things, and the Revolution still, you know, no matter what the balls and strikes are that we've called, they still speak to us in some way, shape, or form.

- Balls and strikes, nine innings for that game.

You talked about the cutting room floor earlier and said there was nothing bad there.

- Nothing there.

- How in the world do you say, "It's only going to be 12 hours," when you could have gone 15 or 16, because of all that we don't see?

- It's a funny thing, David.

I would say that one of the determining factors that this isn't 18 hours, the way our Vietnam was, or 15 hours the way our Roosevelts was, or World War II was, is that we didn't have photographs and newsreels.

But that's not enough.

We figured out a language that works and sustains itself.

It's just as we got going, it's what the material kind of dictated.

We first thought maybe five, but almost immediately, it was six episodes.

The second and the sixth are both a little bit over two hours.

The rest are comfortably under two hours.

It had to do with the material, and we let the material speak to us.

Another way of understanding this is that imagine that you're a sculpturist, and you bring to your studio a block of stone.

Now, the gallery or the museum, wherever this piece ends up, will reflect what she has done.

She, on the other hand, will also know what's not there, the negative space of creation, what's rubble now on the floor of her studio.

We have to be aware of that constantly.

And the last weeks of editing are the most minute adjustments, sometimes of two frames, on how long a shot lasts.

That's a 12th of a second.

And sometimes they're just qualifying something.

We're not feeling comfortable to be as definitive.

So we might add the word perhaps to something.

Or we might say, "You know what?

This introduction works really well, but it'll be do better with one less thing."

And you pull out what had been heretofore for months a celebrated and important part of it, and it made it stronger.

Or you realize that in the course of editing early on, you adjust because you couldn't conceive of the whole story, had gotten rid of this story, but now suddenly, you could bring it back.

It exists as a ghost in our script.

It's in italics.

We take it out, and it stays there in the script in italics, and then after a couple passes, it disappears.

But I turned to David Schmidt and I go, "But didn't we have something else a few passes back?"

And he goes, "Yeah, there was this quote."

I said, "Now this will work.

Let's bring this back and see if it works."

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, but you've got this incredible responsibility not just to the thing you're making, but to all the stuff that isn't in it, the negative space of creation.

That's the cutting room floor.

I mean, even now, we just screened something the other day in Washington, and it was the end of a particularly wonderful scene in episode five about Baron von Steuben and George Washington, and the last shot is someone, a cutaway from a talking head who's saying, "Without Washington, we don't have a country."

And it's this beautiful shot in a helicopter, drone shot, over a misty, just beautiful American scene.

And I had had some second thoughts about it and replaced it with an exterior shot at night of a candle flickering in a window, you don't see the candle, but it's candlelit, and there is a general's or an officer's jacket, continental officer's jacket, draped over the back of a chair.

And we're talking about Washington.

And we drift slowly into that window.

And it looks better than the gorgeous, you know, live shot of the misty whatever, because you're thinking he's in there, he's working for me, and wherever he is, he's up getting a piece of paper, maybe he's going to say something to Martha, but that's where he's sitting, and I thank God I know that we had him, that he was ours, and for all the complications of who he was and the complications of this story, without him, we don't have a country.

- You've been at this a long time.

When did you realize the economy of words matters as much as it does?

- Well, I think I've known that for an awfully long time.

I mean, the greatest speech in American English is two minutes long by Abraham Lincoln, 10 sentences, at Gettysburg.

I'm not sure I've learned it.

I'm always kidded for making long films which critics are sure nobody's gonna watch, but they do.

And now they don't make that.

- But the narrative is so tight.

- It is so tight, and that's because... Look, I could tell you, let's say I needed $30 million to make a film about the American Revolution.

I could walk in with my track record to any premium cable service, any streamer, and in 20 minutes, walk out of there with $30 million.

What I couldn't walk out with is 10 years to make it.

And that's only public media that permits that to happen.

Just like you've given a grant from the National Institute of Science to go try to find this disease, it's not saying, "And by the way, you have to find this cure in 18 months."

We have one foot tentatively in the marketplace, and the other proudly out.

And it's that proudly out that permits us to spend 10 and a half years making "Vietnam", to spend nine years and 11 months from start to finish on "The American Revolution" when it's broadcast and released in November of 2025.

And all the time, we've been able to incubate it, to be able to polish the stone, to work on the narration, to say, "That's not quite right," to add a sentence, more importantly, to subtract a sentence, to basically shrink it, to compact it, to make it, as you say, you know, important.

And of course, because I've been working in American history my entire professional life, I've got unbelievable models.

You know, "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.

The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the next generation."

That's the State of the Union speech called the Message to Congress in December of 1862 by Abraham Lincoln.

"The better angels of our nature" from his first inauguration.

"With malice toward none, with charity for all," from his second inauguration.

All the language of the declaration, the language of the preamble of the Constitution.

Thomas Paine.

In fact, every single one of our six episodes is named for a phrase from Thomas Paine, who was the guy, the working class articulator of these universal rights that the big minds had distilled a century of enlightenment thinking he could add it to the biblical understandings that everybody had in the United States, and fuse it with this utterly, you know, anti-monarchical, anti-authoritarian rhetoric that just woke people up.

I mean, even George Washington said, "Wow, I love what 'Common Sense'," the great pamphlet that he wrote in January, or released in January of 1776, "Did for the movement towards what was called independency."

At that point, people were saying, you know, "We're not sure we actually wanna leave, you know, start our own thing.

Maybe we can... This war which had started in April, maybe the previous April, maybe we can figure something out."

But Paine is saying, "You don't wanna be in a place where some guy sets him and his family up in perpetual rule," right?

That's not who we are.

We're about something else.

We're about this thing called freedom, about liberty, about due process, about, you know, kind of these universal rights that were being articulated, were being spoken out loud for the first time in human history, and we put it into practice.

- Wow.

You just used two words, actually, three, but two together, liberty and due process.

Words we hear today, just today, but possibly with a different implication than what Thomas Paine was saying.

Or maybe it's the same.

It lands on us differently.

- I think it's the same, and it does land on us differently, because we find ourselves in different circumstances, in different situations, in different whatever.

But I think that the ideals of the Revolution are kind of constant, and they can... If we examine them in a light that acknowledges the complication that we've both been saying is essential, not just to this story, this is our biggest story, our origin story, but to all human things, then we have a chance for them to reinvigorate our processes now, however frayed the tapestry may seem, however divided we may appear to be.

I mean, nothing was more divided than a time.

Our civil war is not a civil war, it's a sectional war.

Our revolution?

That's a civil war.

From New Hampshire to Georgia.

A civil war.

And there are, you know, battles in South Carolina and North Carolina, New Jersey, in which, you know, Americans are killing other Americans, particularly in the Carolinas.

And you might have one British officer leading some Loyalist brigades, but, you know, with the exception of him, the casualties are all Americans killing other Americans.

- You know, we have a lot of new people coming into North Carolina every day.

It's amazing, the migration to this state.

Many may have not thought about, this is one of the original colonies.

- Oh, absolutely.

- So our role is significant.

- Yes, every one of those 13 colonies sent people to the Continental Congress.

Before that, wrote letters, protested, suggested sort of solutions to this intractable problem of the fact that Britain was exerting an increasingly more despotic control over what was going on.

And then more importantly, all sent human beings, going back to those original questions.

What would I be willing to die for?

What idea would be impressionist enough?

What would I be?

Would I be a Patriot?

Would I be a Loyalist?

You know, where would I stand?

A lot of people who were disaffected played it either way.

Some people, you know, finally said, "Okay, the British are definitely gonna win.

I'll sign this declaration of dependency and get a pardon."

And then all of a sudden, you know, the British are, you know, smashing up your China and stealing your wood and breaking up your farm and slaughtering your animals, and all of a sudden, you're a Patriot, but you're a guerrilla, and you're assassinating somebody at distance and getting away.

This is messy and difficult to completely acknowledge.

It doesn't fit into a sanitized Madison Avenue version of what we usually say is the Revolution.

But it's much realer, it's much gutty, and we recognize ourselves in it.

We recognize the same sort of choices that we're faced with.

- So let's again talk about North Carolina and North Carolina's role in the war, places within this state that played crucial moments.

- Well, I think the most important place sort of military-wise, we know that North Carolina sent lots of people to fight for the Patriot cause, a lot of people who were Loyalists, a lot of people who went up to Philadelphia to add their voices to the voices of protest, to the voices that actually created the United States.

That's a given.

There's an important battle that takes place called Guilford Court House, and it's fought by Nathaniel Green, hoping to repeat the tactics of his subordinate, Daniel Morgan, who he had split his army in two and sent Daniel Morgan down into South Carolina.

He went into another part of South Carolina.

And at the Cowpens, Daniel Morgan just kind of outwitted Banastre Tarleton, the evil villain of the British cavalry, and deservedly so, this arrogant, take no prisoners kind of guy, who's already decimated a lot of the retreating soldiers from the surrender at Charleston earlier in 1780.

But Cowpens is a victory.

Guilford Court House is not... Green did not have the reinforcements that he needed to sort of complete what had happened.

But in many ways, it's as much of a victory as Cowpens, because what happens is that the British are steadily losing people they can't instantaneously replace.

The Patriot fortunes are growing, particularly in the Carolinas, and they are being supplemented all the time.

The Home Office is 3,000 miles away.

"Houston, we have a problem."

You know, this is every time.

And even some of Green's soldiers say, you know, "We fight, we get beat, we retreat, we fight again, we get beat," and they're winning.

The cost to the British is so extensive.

So Guilford Court House on paper is a loss, but in the larger sense, it's the continuing victories of a guerilla insurgency, you know, choosing a time and place often where they fight a battle, but at the same time, living to fight another day by retreating.

This is Washington's genius.

He never surrenders.

He loses a lot of battles, but he lives to fight another day.

And what people are saying, Joe Ellis says that Washington learns, and it seeps down through the whole army, down to Francis Marion, the Swamp Foxes, you don't have to win, you just can't lose.

The British have to win, and it's looking increasingly like they will not be able to win because of the size of the continent, the instability of knowing what the weather's going to be, and the fact that it takes so long to get orders, it takes so long to be reinforced, and they're out in this gigantic country, and they just have not appreciated how big this landscape is and how much that works against them and for us.

- All of these films you've done have been about American history with the exception of "Leonardo".

- "Leonardo", yeah.

- I also know what you did with Vietnam.

For those of us who grew up and came of age during that war, I did not serve, but when I saw former enemies, still alive, talking about what they had gone through or with each other, it was truly life altering.

- Thank you.

I was of the same generation.

I had a high draft number.

Was not selected.

- Do you remember your number?

- I thought, I had been laboring under the idea that it was in the low 300s, but it turned out that David Schmidt, who was working on that project with me, found out it was in the high 280s, I think it was.

I missed it.

They weren't taking anywhere near those numbers by the time my number was pulled up.

But the thing is, is that I don't know why I've spent so much of my professional life studying war.

It's the worst manifestation of human beings.

It also strangely and paradoxically brings out the best in human beings, and not just necessarily on the battlefield, but elsewhere, in acts of courage and conscience that take place everywhere.

And what we hope in these cathartic life-changing moments that you talk about, life-changing for us as well, you just want human beings to somewhere along the lines say, "Why don't we skip to that reconciliation moment?

We're eventually gonna hug each other at reunions.

Let's just bypass all this killing."

It's never gonna happen.

But you'd hope that if you were gonna make a film about a war, its purpose was not to glorify it, but to show its unbelievable cost, and to suggest that human nature has this possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation, and there may be ways in which in the future we can avoid.

Or I'll tell you, the best review I ever had to any film, in August of 1990, Kuwait was invaded by Iraq.

It wasn't until January that we began the air campaign of January of '91.

In September the next month, '90, my series on the Civil War was aired.

In the intervening time, something like 85% of Americans were excited to go to war.

Like, were really excited to go to war.

And after the Civil War series, that number dropped by 25%.

That's the best review I've ever had.

Because that excitement for war comes from our continual ability to forget what its cost is, in blasted lives, in amputated limbs, in missed opportunity, in treasure, in all of those sorts of things.

Mothers without children, wives and husbands without their spouses, children without their parents.

And that if your enthusiasm could be checked by the black and white grainy images of Americans killing other Americans in our civil war and say, "You know what, I'm not as excited to do this," no, you know, five star review from any critic would come close to what that means.

- Isn't it a gift and such a privilege to do what we do, to be involved in media at any level?

- Yeah.

No, it's so, so great.

- Matter how much attack we may be under for doing it at times.

- No, no, it's really important.

And I think the more you're attacked, the more you begin to see the essence of what our founders felt, our First Amendment, right?

no establishment of religion, freedom to assemble, to petition the government for redress, and to have a free press.

The ability to tell what you think is the story, and to have people argue about this and have informed arguments.

The problem is now we've kind of devolved into, we get our information where we think we should get it from that will ratify the ideas that we had.

You know, my little town in New Hampshire had a gazette, the "Walpole New Hampshire Gazette", and it was read all the way down in Georgia.

People exchanged ideas a little bit more freely, and they read those ideas.

And maybe they're conspiracy theories, maybe they're just people exercising their grievances, and maybe somewhere along there, there's a good idea.

I mean, "Common Sense" is a political pamphlet.

You know, that's what it is, it's a tract, you know, it's addressed to the inhabitants of North America and it's signed an Englishman.

And he's just saying, you know, "Let me add my voice to this," and it turns out to be the way, "We don't understand why this is a bestseller and this is a runaway hit," it turns out to be a galvanic moment in American history that says, "Yes, no more monarchs.

Yes, no more autocrats.

Yes, we want due process, we want representation.

We want to be able to express ourselves as we see fit."

This is the whole great glory of the American experience, and a lot of people paid a huge ultimate price for us to enjoy that.

And yes, I do feel like, you know, I have, you know, have the best job in the world.

- I think we may be at another galvanic moment with "The American Revolution" for America 250, airing on PBS and PBS North Carolina.

Ken Burns, thank you for sharing the stories, thank you for sharing your insight, and above all, thank you for sharing your humanity.

- Thank you, David.

Thank you.

[triumphant music]