NARRATOR: 250 years ago, a new nation was born.
This fall, Ken Burns tells the story
of the American Revolution.
BURNS: We want to convey what it was like
to experience the birth of our country.
NARRATOR: Now get an exclusive inside look
at what it takes to bring history to life.
Don't miss "The American Revolution: An Inside Look."
Coming up next on PBS.
Corporate funding for the production of
"The American Revolution" was provided by Bank of America,
with funding from The Better Angels Society and its members.
And by the following...
By members of The Better Angels Society,
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
and by Viewers Like You.
Thank you.
VO: We are in the very midst of a revolution,
a most complete, unexpected, and remarkable
of any in the history of nations.
Objects of the most stupendous magnitude
and measures in which the lives and liberties
of millions yet unborn are intimately interested,
are now before us.
John Adams.
We were locking our film on the Vietnam War,
and just as we had decided to do that,
as we were locking the film on the Second World War,
I just had this thought:
The next war we had to do was the American Revolution.
As horrible as wars are, they tell us hugely important things
about who we are and the period that we're in.
You began to realize that the whole question
of this American project, which has been my project,
is born in the Revolution, and to ask questions
of the Revolution seemed absolutely imperative.
RICK ATKINSON: War never follows the script
that you have written for it when you set out to make war.
The British objective is first and foremost
to suppress the rebellion.
It's to teach the rascals a lesson.
It's to force them to acknowledge
the primacy of Parliament and the authority of the King.
And so now the decision has been made that we will use force.
And there's a presumption that it won't take much...
but it's going to go on for 8 years.
8 years. Blood, treasure,
catastrophe, really, for the British Empire.
The Revolution is obviously in some ways
the central, most important war in our history.
All wars leave us with myths.
What did Patrick Henry actually say?
What was Paul Revere's midnight ride actually about?
What happened in the Boston Tea Party?
Did Washington cross the Delaware
in the daytime or the nighttime?
Who made the first flag?
When did the war start and when did the war end?
It's been an extraordinary journey to
try and tell the story about our founding,
about our origin story.
JANE KAMENSKY: I think to believe in America,
rooted in the American Revolution,
is to believe in possibility.
That, to me, is the extraordinary thing
about the Patriot side of the fight.
I think everybody on every side,
including people who were denied
even the ownership of themselves,
had the sense of possibility worth fighting for.
When we think about war in our lifetime,
it tends to be away from the United States.
A lot of people, a lot of Americans
have lived through war, but it's not
in our backyard, typically.
This war was.
What we have to first understand
is that it's a civil war.
Maybe a quarter of all the civilians
in the colonies are loyalists
and remain loyal to the Crown and the laws,
and they don't want to upset the apple cart.
And so this is a bloody, bloody civil war.
ALAN TAYLOR: The loyalists are essentially the conservatives.
They're the people who believe in law and order.
They don't like mobs.
They don't like committees telling them what to do.
They don't see King George the Third as a tyrant.
VO: We are preparing for war.
To fight with whom?
Not with France and Spain,
whom we have been used to think our natural enemies.
But with Great Britain, our parent country.
My heart recoils at the thought.
Andrew Eliot.
?
SCHMIDT: The American Revolution is our story.
It's everyone's story. It's where the country began,
and so much of who we are today
came from the story of the American Revolution.
The revolutionary generation thought about us,
the unborn millions.
They talked about posterity.
In 1777, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail and said,
"Posterity, you will never know what
it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom."
And I think this is our opportunity to let
our present generation know what they did,
what they went through, and how much it matters
to us today that they did.
BOTSTEIN: This is a young war.
George Washington is in his forties.
Thomas Jefferson is in his thirties.
People fighting the war are 14 to 50.
It is a young country and a young war.
They were rebellious, feisty, youthful patriots
trying to figure it out.
The people we all have heard of
in grade school, middle school,
high school, maybe studied in college.
And all the people we haven't heard about
whose histories haven't been told.
War exposes the best and the worst in all of us.
It inspires and repels us.
War is, unfortunately,
the history of the human experience.
BURNS: It turns out that this film is arriving just before
the 250th anniversary of the signing
of the Declaration of Independence.
And so we're very happy to have our film come out
in advance of that, to help lead what we hope
is a much more dynamic conversation,
one that is not sort of suffused with nostalgia,
but something that has a little bit more complexity.
I think everyone will find something to identify with,
because the story is our story,
and it is not just one set of us.
It's all of us.
And that's the story that we struggled
for a long time to try to tell.
WILLIAM HOGELAND: Once it's a shooting war,
as with Lexington and Concord, it's a war.
There's no doubt about that.
But independence was not in any way
officially on the table as a goal
of the Americans at that point.
The idea of independence was still controversial.
The official position was that the fight
was essentially for redress,
for "Let's get back to the way things used to be,
back when things were good, when you left us alone."
Making a film about the American Revolution
poses instantaneously some pretty obvious challenges.
First of all, there are no photographs or newsreels,
and so it forces us to recalibrate,
in every sense of the word, how we're going to use imagery
to tell a very, very complex story.
So live cinematography becomes hugely important,
as it always has been for us.
But in this case, our traditional aversion
to re-enactments, we actually had to lean into.
Some of my favorite footage in the film
are the very high-up drone shots
where you're seeing the re-enactors and it's incredible.
You just, you could be a bird in the sky
looking at what's happening.
We haven't worked a lot with re-enactors,
and these re-enactors were an extraordinary
part of our process.
BURNS: We have worked with dozens and dozens of groups
all up and down the East Coast.
BOTSTEIN: We spent a lot of time with them,
before we had cameras on, to learn from them.
And they are fastidious in how they study, where they go,
how they move, what they're reading.
They get really into it.
BURNS: We film them very impressionistically.
It gives us an ability to see the war
but not see their faces
and be disturbed by a kind of modern context.
The re-enactors give that kind of intimacy.
BOTSTEIN: We would find ways to film the big reenactments
that they do every year or two,
and then work with small groups of them to try to demonstrate
what it was like for a soldier in his group of 5 guys
in the middle of a blizzard going up a mountain.
And we did that.
And Megan Ruffe, our extraordinary Producer,
just toughed it out with Buddy Squires,
and I think it's some of the most unusual
live cinematography that we've ever filmed.
There is a kind of mystery and a poetry
to the reenactments that helps tell the story,
and helps fill in for the absence of photographs.
You begin to have a visceral sense of what happened
when you see people, just feet going through mud, or snow,
or hands trying to warm themselves by the fire,
or gripping a musket.
They help you realize what it's actually like.
ATKINSON: A shot rings out.
No one knows where the shot came from.
MAN: Fire!
ATKINSON: That leads to promiscuous shooting...
mostly by the British.
It's not a battle. It's not a skirmish.
It's a massacre.
We shot all over the East Coast and beyond.
Colonial Williamsburg, Saratoga National Battlefield, Yorktown.
These places are preserved to look as much as
they could like they did then.
The film is a celebration of the vast,
beautiful landscape of North America.
We were able, over the course of 6 or 7 years,
to film in every part of the 13 colonies
in almost every season.
Imagining fighting a war at the hottest, most awful,
humid months in the South
to the coldest, most horrific
freezing temperatures in the north.
That all happened.
One of the great improbable forces
in this film is weather.
I walk where I live in New Hampshire, out every day,
and I suddenly realize where I was walking was little changed
from the 18th-century world that this is taking place.
And so I would start taking movies.
There's snowstorms that I filmed in,
and it's that wonderful textural quality in the film.
NATHANIEL PHILBRICK: America is this huge continent.
There's tornadoes, there's hurricanes,
there's winter storms.
Turns of weather that we know are coming for weeks on end
hit the people of the 18th century
completely by surprise.
?
They're not just fighting each other.
In a profound way, they are fighting
the American climate and geography and topography.
This is a difficult place to conduct a war.
One of the great archives of the time
that are accurate archives of the time are the maps.
The French made maps, the Brits made maps,
the Germans made maps, we made maps.
We are using more maps in this film
than in all the other films combined.
When we think about what animates a story
that we want to tell, maps take on huge significance.
We have CGI 3-dimensional maps.
We've taken these beautiful works of art, archival maps,
to show intimacies in the midst of these grand schemes.
It's been exhilarating. Challenging but exhilarating.
And I think that one of the constants for me
throughout the process was
mastering the complexity of the story.
NARRATOR: The American Plan called for two small, noisy,
diversionary feints to draw defenders
away from the attack's real targets.
Meanwhile, Arnold and his men would circle around
Quebéc City from the north,
while General Montgomery would approach from the south.
Together, they would storm the citadel's steep walls.
BURNS: We want to convey,
in the most direct and honest way,
what it was like to experience the birth of our country
in violence, not just all those great inspiring ideas.
?
VO: I did not solicit this command,
but accepted it after much entreaty.
As soon as the public gets dissatisfied with my service,
I shall quit the helm with as much satisfaction,
and retire to a private station with as much content
as ever the weariest pilgrim
felt upon his safe arrival in the Holy Land.
George Washington.
?
I'm interested in the U.S., but I'm interested in us.
And too often I think our history books
have presented a kind of top-down history.
Nothing wrong with it. The most important person
in our story is, without a doubt, George Washington,
and I will defend that to the end.
We don't have a country without him.
But there are lots of people who contribute to this;
bottom-up stories.
And if you're going to tell that, you've got to be
faithful to the whole cast of characters.
SCHMIDT: I previously worked on a film about
Benjamin Franklin, who was an extraordinary individual,
but he is only one person.
And I'm very grateful to have this opportunity
to work on a film about 3 million Americans.
And if there's 3 million people,
there's a lot of stories that most of us don't know yet.
I think we were all surprised to find
how many people left behind their memories.
BOTSTEIN: There are wonderful young men who signed up
for the war when they were, I would consider, boys,
14, 15 years old and served valiantly and patriotically
through the whole conflict.
There are Native Americans who made decisions
to side with the British
and those who decided to fight with the Patriots.
And we tell both those stories.
DARREN BONAPARTE: For us, the Mohawk people,
it was survival--period.
And you didn't know which side
was going to be the best choice.
We kind of gravitated mostly to the British
because they had kind of won our respect,
beating the French and pretty much having our interests
when they dealt with the regular colonists.
?
VO: The disturbances in America
give great trouble to all our nations.
The Mohawks, our particular nation, have on all occasions
shown their zeal and loyalty to the Great King.
Thayendanegea.
BURNS: You get to know a Native American warrior
named Joseph Brant, who's--has his painting painted.
He's allied with the British; he's trying to help them.
There are African-Americans who are trying to make
a huge decision whether to go with the British,
who are, in some cases, offering them freedom
if they'll leave their rebel,
as the British called us, or Patriot owners.
And so, you've got huge dynamics:
Do I go with the British, do I fight for the Patriots?
VINCENT BROWN: We know that about 15,000 Black people
actually joined the British, or ran away
to the British lines,
versus about 5,000 ultimately entering the Patriot cause.
And that's because for many of those enslaved people,
the British represented freedom.
The Patriots did not.
We've always been a country with a wide variety of people,
a wide variety of cultures, a wide variety of opinions.
We tell the story of Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved woman
who goes to court for her freedom in Massachusetts
and has an amazing story.
Judith Jackson, who was an enslaved woman
who sided with the British and wanted to leave
and had to be separated from her daughter at the end of the war.
And Phillis Wheatley, who was the first published
African-American in the United States,
who was a beautiful poet,
corresponded with George Washington himself,
and came here on a slave ship.
VO: I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:
Such, such my case.
And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
Phillis Wheatley.
One of the characters whose stories we follow is
Joseph Plumb Martin of Connecticut.
He was, I think, 15 when he signed up in 1776,
and he served for the duration of the war.
He was at Yorktown, he was at Germantown.
And in the 1830s, he wrote a memoir of his experience.
VO: Our sergeant major informed us that the regiment
was ordered to Long Island.
It gave me a rather disagreeable feeling,
as I was pretty well-assured I should have to
sniff a little gunpowder.
The horrors of battle then presented themselves
to my mind in all their hideousness.
I must come to it now, thought I.
Joseph Plumb Martin.
He talks a little bit about the Battle of Fort Mifflin.
He was bombarded for weeks, along with his fellow
Connecticut soldiers, by the British Navy.
He says, you've never heard of this battle
because there wasn't a Washington or a Wayne there.
But I was there.
VO: What could officers do without such men?
Nothing at all.
Great men get great praise.
Little men, nothing.
SCHMIDT: He really gives us an opportunity to understand
what the average soldier went through.
When you can bring all of those stories together
and all of those thoughts together,
all those people's perspectives together,
you just get a much better understanding of, of the war.
The voices are so varied. They represent all of us.
Rebecca Tanner, who is a Native American woman,
loses 5 sons in the American Revolution
fighting for the Patriot cause.
VO: No suffering which Britain can inflict
will reduce America to submission.
The thunder of their artillery may lay waste the cities,
but the spirit of the people is unconquerable.
Mercy Otis Warren.
We're really lucky that people like Abigail Adams
and Mercy Otis Warren were writing as much as they were
about what they experienced and what they thought
during the war.
There are many women you haven't heard of before.
Betsy Ambler, who was a 10-year-old when the war began
in Yorktown, Virginia, and wrote beautiful musings
for her sister to understand
what their family had lived through.
VO: The plan laid down for our education
was entirely broken in upon by the war.
Instead of morning lessons, we were to knit stockings.
Instead of embroidering, to make homespun garments.
And in place of the music of the harpsichord,
to listen to the loud, clanging trumpet and never-ceasing drum.
For in every direction that we traveled, and heaven knows
we left but little of Virginia unexplored,
we heard naught but the din of war.
Our late peaceful country now became a scene of terror
and confusion.
Betsy Ambler.
You allow a story to have many different perspectives.
You have hundreds of voices of people: civilians; loyalists;
Native Americans; Black, free and enslaved;
patriots; women; and then you understand
there is a much more complex story.
18th-century war is not mechanized.
You either walk by foot
or a four-legged creature is taking you.
And men didn't go alone. They went with their families.
So, behind the armies are their wives, their children.
And the women, therefore, are supporting the troops
in a way that many of us are unfamiliar with.
Women are always at the center of a story of war.
VO: In the new code of laws, I desire you would
remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable
to them than your ancestors.
Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.
Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.
BOTSTEIN: Women in war are enormously brave,
enormously strong, enormously important to the cause.
They made hundreds of shirts.
They publicized the actions of their husbands.
They not only took care of everybody, but they made
the revolution something people wanted to be a part of,
and they participated in it in many, many ways.
ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Crisis changes people,
and it gave women different ideas
about what they should be doing.
KATHLEEN DUVAL: Women were the main consumers
in colonial society, and they were the ones
who made sure the boycotts worked.
Women stopped drinking tea.
Women started making their own fabric.
Women started making toys for their children.
And they didn't just stop buying British things
and start making their own things.
They publicized it.
TAYLOR: One of the key forms of political theater
during the resistance movement would be for a local minister
to invite the women of the community to come down
to the church and to spend the day spinning and weaving cloth.
And it would be a competition to see which community
could produce the most homespun.
It would be published in the newspaper.
And these women would be praised as great American patriots
for having produced so much homespun cloth.
BURNS: This is a story in which women are a central part
of the resistance initially, and the revolution later.
SCHMIDT: We're going to be able to hear a lot of their stories
because the war and the Revolution
impacted them personally and impacted millions of people
within the original 13 colonies and beyond.
It really was just a world-shattering event.
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[Playing banjo]
?
That's cool.
[Violins playing]
BOTSTEIN: One of the big elements in all of our films
is the music.
We set out to try and imagine
what was the sound of North America.
So, there's obviously classical and baroque influences.
There are folk and traditional influences.
There are religious influences.
There is the music that free and enslaved black people
were listening to.
There's the range of Native American music and voices,
and how do we put that all together?
So, I grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia,
and I worked in Colonial Williamsburg.
I'm really happy that I had the opportunity to walk
and experience something that came before that mattered.
I played the fife.
I walked in shoes with buckles.
I wore knee-length pants and stockings.
One song that you'll hear in the film is a song called
"Over the Water to Charlie,"
which came right out of my fifes and drums sheet music.
We only have that song, I--I realized later,
because one of the main characters in our film,
John Greenwood, had kept his sheet music from the war,
and it was transcribed from that
by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
And we got some of the professional musicians
to re-record it for this film.
VO: I was so fond of hearing the fife and drum
played by the British, that somehow or another I got
an old split fife and fixed it by puttying up the crack
to make it sound, and then learned to play several tunes.
I believe it was the sole cause of all my travails
and disasters.
JOHNNY GANDELSMAN: I was thinking maybe I--
I mean, we have the arrangement from--from Mayna
for the quartet in--in F.
And I was thinking maybe if it was you guys,
it might be nice in D? Man: Yeah.
And like, how-- you know, what kind of...
[Playing several notes]
[Snapping fingers and humming]
We were extremely fortunate to work with
a wonderful music producer, Johnny Gandelsman,
who helped us corral and figure out and curate
all the different musicians and music that we recorded
for the series.
And then Rhiannon Giddens came in and Yo-Yo Ma came in,
and a wonderful Tuscaroran woman,
Jennifer Kreisberg, came in.
Dave Cieri wrote some of the most beautiful original music
for this series that he's ever done,
some of it really inspired by Haydn, Handel, Bach,
and the classical harpsichord music of the time
and some just the dissonant, lonely, scary sounds of war.
And we made a soundtrack that reflects the unique sounds
that were thriving in--in North America in the 18th century.
BURNS: This is narration 6.094 take 1, when you're ready.
PETER COYOTE: When the time came
to choose the first president under the Constitution,
George Washington was the only choice
and won the vote of every single elector.
[Horse whinnies]
He was inaugurated in New York City on April 30, 1789.
We have a cast of first-person voices that bring to life
what the country sounded like.
We read with Joe Keery, Josh Hutcherson,
Alden Ehrenreich...
Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Samuel L. Jackson...
SAMUEL L. JACKSON: I need not point out the absurdity
of your exertions for liberty
while you have slaves in your houses.
Sir Kenneth Branagh, Damian Lewis, Paul Giamatti...
SCHMIDT: Morgan Freeman, Jon Proudstar, Laura Linney.
To hear Maya Hawke read Betsy Ambler's words
and to bring life to what we found was incredibly gratifying.
BOTSTEIN: Thomas Paine is a great voice throughout
the film, brilliantly read by the unbelievably talented
Matthew Rhys.
Josh Brolin as George Washington,
Jeff Daniels as Thomas Jefferson,
Liev Schreiber as Nathanael Greene
has been one of the great performances
in any film I've worked on.
LIEV SCHREIBER: People coming from home
with all the tender feelings of domestic life
are not sufficiently fortified with natural courage
to stand the shocking scenes of war.
BURNS: And what they do is they read off-camera these diaries,
these letters, these journals, these military dispatches,
the newspaper reports, and all of a sudden you realize
they're real people,
they experience things the way I do.
SCHMIDT: And we're just so lucky that all these people
offered of themselves their time and their experience,
their expertise, their skill to tell our story, our history.
BOTSTEIN: They lent their craft. They got really into it.
They love bringing history to life in this way,
and we're really lucky to have worked with all of them.
[Gunfire]
ATKINSON: It's our creation myth, our creation story.
It tells us who we are, where we came from,
what our forbearers believed
and what they were willing to die for.
That's the most profound question
any people can ask themselves.
[Shouting and gunfire]
BOTSTEIN: One of the best parts of my job is to figure out
who the historians are who have spent their lives
studying this subject.
Who is a scholar of this period in the war?
Who is a writer about this conflict, this battle?
[Gunfire]
We take that story of the American Revolutionary War,
and we infuse it with interpretations
of those moments with leading scholars on the subject.
We have about 2 dozen of them.
Many of them are on camera,
and they hold our feet to the fire the whole time.
They want to get it right, too.
FRIEDERIKE BAER: This inability to really figure out
who is the enemy here is a problem.
They're marching through the countryside
and they don't know-- this farm--
is this farm--is this-- are these loyalists?
Are there--are there rebels in there?
Are you gonna shoot at us out of the window?
Which does happen.
[Gunfire] Who do you trust?
BOTSTEIN: We spend a lot of time thinking about those people
and going to meet them and get to know them.
And then we build a board of advisors.
Some of them are on camera,
some of them are behind the camera, some of them do both.
And they're with us all the way from the first drafts
of the scripts 'til the locked shows are fact-checked.
There's not a objective truth,
but there's lots of different ways to see this.
And so what you want to do is employ as many different
scholars and writers who know about things--
military folks,
people who understand the Native American dimension.
What you do is, you aggregate a number of people,
not saying that one particular philosophy of history is right
or one particular view of history
is the only way to see it.
You allow a story to have many different perspectives.
TAYLOR: Throughout, it's very visceral,
and I think the quotes were all great.
I liked seeing the Aiken episode,
but I think you want to reconsider sticking it
between Fort Washington and Fort Lee falling.
KAMENSKY: I think it'll go well in episode 1.
It's a breadcrumb for what you do here.
BURNS: And there is a good reason, therefore, to use it,
but I thought, Maya, that we got to it
a little bit too soon.
CHRISTOPHER BROWN: Part of what happens in the years before
the American War is that liberties are kind of broken out
of a national context.
These are not English liberties.
These are transcendent liberties.
These are liberties that all individuals have
by the nature of being human.
One of the reasons that I love making films
for Public Television is that the films live on
in the classroom.
PBS reaches every classroom in the country,
and we're privileged to meet a lot of those history
and social studies and English classrooms.
To see somebody light up with the fact that history
gives you a kind of sense of you've just taken
a very powerful vitamin,
and it gives you a perspective on this moment.
Film is a powerful teaching tool,
and I think every school kid in America,
every high school kid, every college kid,
every person who watches the film
can hopefully find some thing in this history
that relates to them.
I don't know a greater teacher than history.
It tells you where we've been in order to figure out
where you are in order to know where you're going.
BURNS: Well, we're pretty much booked up to the end
of the decade.
We're working on a massive series
called "Emancipation to Exodus" about Reconstruction,
the period after the Civil War,
one of the most misunderstood periods in American history.
How people were self-emancipating,
the Emancipation Proclamation,
what it did with the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendment,
and then what the country did
struggling in the years afterwards to try to make good
on the promises of the Civil War and then the aftermath.
The Exodus is, of course, the beginning of
the Great Migration of African-Americans
out of the South to enjoy, as Richard Wright said,
"the warmth of other suns."
I'm serving as an Executive Producer on a film
that Lynn Novick is producing and directing and writing
called "Crime and Punishment;"
the history from the pillories
and the shackles of our colonial period
up to the present day.
I'm serving also as an Executive Producer on a film
about Henry David Thoreau.
Yes, that's how you say it-- Thoreau (Ther-ow)--
and his wonderful, prescient years before his time,
decades before his time, understanding of nature
and climate change, even, and--and all sorts of things.
And then, you know, we're already thinking
in our head about different projects.
Sarah Botstein and I are also working on a film, and we've
been working on it for years about
"LBJ & the Great Society."
BOTSTEIN: I'm very fortunate to be working on a film
with Ken and Lynn and Geoff Ward again about LBJ.
I think the farther we get from his presidency,
the more interesting it is to study.
And there are extraordinary tapes, not just of his voice,
which I think many audiences are used to hearing,
but Ladybird kept an audio diary, so you'll hear them
in conversation in the film.
And we're really excited about that show.
We're now going back.
We're just about to start up interviews on that,
now that we see the light at the end
of the Revolutionary tunnel.
It's a few things.
TAYLOR: So, what's gonna come out of this revolution
is attempts to create an American national identity.
And somebody like George Washington becomes quite
eloquent in trying to persuade people.
"You're not Carolinians, you're not New Yorkers,
you're not New Englanders. we're all Americans."
[Horse whinnies]
BURNS: I love my country.
My favorite holiday is the Fourth of July, by far.
And every Fourth of July at the lake, I get up,
and after a big meal, I make everyone listen
as I read the Declaration of Independence out loud.
And my 4 daughters have had to suffer through this
years and years and years.
I've been doing this for 50 years, making films
about American history.
And I had the supreme pleasure in this film to do a scene
on the Declaration of Independence as full and as
complete and as, I think, as triumphant and joyful
and complicated as you could possibly ever imagine.
BOTSTEIN: The 2 or 3 things that I was surprised to learn
were so central to the history are, one,
how unlikely it was that we were gonna win.
[Gunfire]
And I think Washington knew, as a great leader,
that he wasn't gonna win big; he just couldn't lose.
North America sat on the global stage at this time.
It really was a global war.
The prize of North America was an important piece of a global
chess board that everybody was looking toward
as these empires were shrinking and growing.
And so, the American Revolution is much more than
13 colonies throwing off the Crown and trying to figure out
and establish what the United States might be.
SCHMIDT: The more you learn about the people
of the revolutionary generation, the more you read about them,
the more you know what they did and what they saw
and what they felt,
the more you realize they're people just like us.
And I think that demystification actually makes me
love them all the more.
These are people, and they went through an extraordinary time,
and we are the product of that, we are that legacy.
I'm glad that we're gonna give people the opportunity
to know more about them.
BURNS: We've tried really hard as we lock the film
to make sure in that, "speak now or forever hold your peace,"
that this is the right length of a shot, that this is
the right music for a shot, that this is the right
movement of the arrow on the map of the shot, that we were
able to gather all this material and put it in service
of a complex narrative that I think will be riveting
to Americans who are curious about that simple question.
My question: Who are we?
But in this case, where did we come from?
What is our moment of origin?
That's the whole thing.
I don't think you'll come away from these 6 parts and 12 hours
without a sense of your own ownership of this story.
STEPHEN CONWAY: The American Revolution changed the world.
It's not just about the birth of the United States.
It has ramifications across the globe.
[Gunfire]
So, studying The American Revolution, understanding it,
and putting it in a global context, I think, is vitally
important for us to understand why we are where we are now.
Wisconsin, and I hope you
enjoyed that. Look into Ken
as much as I did. And ifn
will call and make a pledge
1-800-236-3636 to give you
This is a challenge break
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That makes possibleommunity.
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This is a challenging time
probably aware that federal
was removed this year, but
PBS Wisconsin is not going
resolve is stronger and it
support from viewers like
right now. We're going for
challenge. Drivethis
>> And it is a challenge
help us make PBS Wisconsinn
gift, you are supportingur
Revolution and othererican
Wisconsin, like Michael was
making a gift and becomingr
$20 a month level, we wille
Revolution six DVD set, or
an intimate look at thekes
Revolution. It's againn
glass and really going into
more about the American
something you saw tonightas
would like to know morely
what you need at the $25 a
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So it would be a wonderful
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PBS Wisconsin. All it means
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do the same thing for some
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There's less paperworkonsin.
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to your operator about that.
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way, call (800) 236-3636.r
certainly not the only
you'll see a history where
place you'll see one quitey
have a quote here from Ken
anywhere else but PBS.ppens
give us ten years to build
No one. The willingness ton.
able to excavate stories. I
to depend and rely onories
that dedication to quality
apart PBS documentaries,
essential to us, to the
understanding of the world
only get that on PBSnd you
is funded by viewers likeS
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all of you collectively.u,
part of that group, or as
you are but you but you, if
your support now during a
money is doubled, is ther
a call 1-800-236-3636.ve us
for you spending yourful
enjoying this fantastic Ken
able to continue to bring
because of viewers like you,
the difference. So whether
month level, or you're$5 a
level, every gift makes an
continue forward. So maybe
you decide you're going to
you make a gift as a $20 a
you that six disc DVD setnd
Or again, if that book isn.
we can send you the bookou,
level, you will get both.th
dive. Some of the maps that
documentary are included in
many intricacies and things
explore that book. It alsou
the person you're sitting
as well, you can scan that
now so you can reach us at
>> And if you call and
one of our suggested levels,
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your membership, and it'sof
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schedule information for
Wisconsin Channel, and
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information about special
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benefit of your support, so
you call and pledge your
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Wisconsin. And there's a
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important part of that. His
if you will, in publicndary,
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documentaries to national
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All worth your support. All.
(800) 236-3636.w to
Ken Burns documentaries.
about that, the $100 a
where you get all the theas
number of them. But, you
talk about the next fours
You know, a normal person
one project, he had four,
and punishment in America,
Henry David Thoreau, LBJ
mean, this man doesn't rest,
it broadens our horizonsat
of you is that you get ask
work ethic and say, you
of that. I can call andart
get it doubled atht now,
>> Thanks so much to
contributed this evening.
you here with us. Remember,
break and we have fivenge
cross that finish line ands
Your support just makesll.
through those thank youo
At $20 a month, we'll send
six set DVD, or we can send
The Intimate History of the
a month, we will send you25
book, and at 100 dollars a
entire Ken Burns DVDthe
the American Revolution,
baseball, and them,
PBS Wisconsin, or give us a
>> The outpouring of36.
has been a bright spot in
challenging times with the
but it's also anfunding,
individual and for the an
show your support for PBS
member, you can become a a
by calling one of ournight
at pbswisconsin.org. Ifine
you can increase the amount
PBS Wisconsin. Do that with
you can again, can do that
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[MUSIC]in at (800) 236-3636.
?
NARRATOR: Corporate funding for the production of
"The American Revolution" was provided by Bank of America,
with funding from The Better Angels Society and its members.
And by the following...
By members of The Better Angels Society,
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
and by Viewers Like You.
Thank you.
fantastic PBS Wisconsinl
Fantastic Kindnessonsin
1-800-236-3636.e. But but
those many years. One way
Tiger's Neighborhood, gift.
created for us will bend
photography back then,
this yearning to make sure
Burns is certainly ank
cross that finish line andl