THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: a discussion

NOISY REALITY PRESENTS
Monday, December 1st, 2025 at
12:30 PM East Coast Time

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: A film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt.

A discussion with Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt, producers and co-directors of THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION airing on PBS.

Invite ZOOM Link
[https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86411768499?pwd=UitCdlJuWFR2QkZZTDVOQ2w0anVZUT09](https://url6.mailanyone.net/scanner?m=1ufzqk-00000001NT1-2XL0&d=4%257Cmail/90/1753616400/1ufzqk-00000001NT1-2XL0%257Cin6p%257C57e1b682%257C10977208%257C9441127%257C688611D2E102A7F39A3CED6050A4F4BA&o=/phts:/utsoe02m.zowb6/.u1/84sj?817w99p64lid=uCdJUtZ2WFDkZTRQn2VOZ0aVQw90TU&s=15kBFtxZsbF80IpvbopfXVWX74I)

HOW TO WATCH IT
WEBSITE FOR THE AMERCAN REVOLUTION All episodes are streaming for free.
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-revolution

https://www.vermontpublic.org/about-us/2025-11-17/watch-ken-burns-american-revolution

ALL ARE WELCOME

Sarah Botstein
Sarah Botstein has produced some of the most popular and acclaimed documentaries on PBS. Her work with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick includes Jazz (2001), The War (2007), Prohibition (2011), The Vietnam War (2017), College Behind Bars (2019), and Hemingway (2020). The recent U.S. and the Holocaust marked Botstein’s debut as a co-director. That series, which premiered in September 2022 to widespread critical acclaim, tells the story of how the American people grappled with one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies in history.
Besides these television broadcasts, Botstein is also an original contributor to Ken Burns UNUM, a web-based platform that highlights historical themes across Florentine Films’ extensive body of work. Botstein works closely with PBS LearningMedia and WETA-TV to develop educational content for programming as part of the Ken Burns Classroom.
Currently, Botstein is working on an epic six-part series on the American Revolution and a three-part series about the life and presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.

David P. Schmidt
David P. Schmidt is the producer and co-director, along with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, of The American Revolution, the six-part, 12-hour series premiering on PBS in the fall of 2025.
Schmidt began working with Florentine Films as a researcher and apprentice editor for The Roosevelts (2014), while also supervising the documentary’s seven-episode script. His research on The Vietnam War (2017) won him the “Jane Mercer Footage Researcher of the Year” award. He worked closely on the Vietnam project with writer Geoffrey C. Ward and helped coordinate postproduction. With Burns, Schmidt also produced the two-part biography Benjamin Franklin (2022) for PBS.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION by Florentine Films and co-directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt has recently been broadcast to critical acclaim, from November 16th to November 21st. The series is a six-part, twelve-hour documentary. Its broadcast is the culmination of ten years of work that began in 2015, in the wake of the widespread popularity attained by HAMILTON: AN AMERICAN MUSICAL by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
This important new television series centering on the American Revolution lands squarely in the midst of the United States’s ongoing and metastasizing culture wars regarding the interpretation of American history and American “values” in general. American battles over historical “memory” have always addressed the period of the American Revolution and its significance for the present. Over decades political arguments to defund National Public Radio, the Commission for Public Broadcasting, and the Public Broadcasting Service have focused on what the Right has deemed politically “biased” mass-educational programming. Programs aired by PBS have drawn right-wing attacks of bias since the network began broadcasting. The current political regime, Trump 2.0, has accelerated the desire to create a purged notion of so-called “patriotic” history.
The Pentagon, National Parks, The Smithsonian Institute recently recently become targets of right-wing scrutiny to “cleanse” themselves of what Trump’s White House calls “a divisive, race-centered ideology….. [that] portrays American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” Even Arlington National Cemetery has scrubbed information from its website. And multiple National Parks have removed references to prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members and mentions of the Civil War. Exhibits related to slavery have been removed from multiple American National Parks.
The Trump administration intends to ban classroom lessons about systemic racism in Kindergarten through 12th-grade education. From painting over a Black Lives Matter mural to scrubbing stories about Navajo Code Talkers on the internet, the Trump administration is literally trying to erase non-white history. For example, the Administration has banned books on certain topics from gift shops at federal parks and museums. Banned publications include the 1619 Project on the history of slavery in America and a picture book about former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet Secretary.
A recent manifestation of the Trump 2.0 campaign to rewrite American history is vividly illustrated in the removal of historical exhibits on the impact of Black American soldiers at an American World War II cemetery in the Netherlands. This episode has generated controversy and has obliged Dutch politicians to appeal to U.S. officials this week to reinstall the historical displays. These exhibits were added to the Netherlands American Cemetery’s Visitor Center in September 2024, after historians and relatives of service members had criticized the site for not addressing the experiences of African-American soldiers. One of the new exhibits featured the story of George H. Pruitt, a Black soldier in the 43rd Signal Construction Battalion, who died trying to save a comrade. Another one highlighted how Black American service members were “fighting on two fronts” — for freedom overseas but also for their civil rights at home.
The removal of these displays, American and Dutch critics have remarked, signifies an erasure of Black Americans’ contributions in the war and their work to liberate the Netherlands from the Nazis. Such prejudiced actions are but one example of myriad measures taken by the Trump administration in their campaign to alter American history. This is done under the rubric of eliminating what the Adminstration deems “diversity, equity and inclusion interpretations” of our past.
In his renowned novel 1984, George Orwell warned us: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” The erasure of history and communities is part of the Trump administration’s agenda to undermine democratic processes and principles, a tactic long used by extremists and authoritarians — from the burning of books by the Nazis to the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. These tactics aim to eliminate different points of view, quell social movements and calls for justice, and, ultimately, consolidate power in the hands of authoritarian or fascist regimes.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION series enters the fray with a nuanced and sophisticated look at key issues that permeated the Revolution as it occurred over time. This new cinematic look at the American Revolution incorporates the insights of years of scholarship on this fundamentally important subject. The creators of the series synthesize historians’ views of the American Revolution as a civil war situated within a global war and marked by an influential tide of Loyalism to King George III. But within that broad narrative the producers do not shy away from intricate detail. Their thrilling story considers the impact of slavery, the role of women and the important but often forgotten impact of indigenous people on events. But George Washington and Thomas Paine remain pivotal characters. Specific military events are documented by 100 maps clearly explaining 36 important military campaigns and battles.
Carefully integrated throughout are the voices of roughly 150 historical characters read by 61 different voice actors. The cinematography is superb, as one has come to expect in Ken Burns’s productions. Over two dozen historical consultants offer their insights over the course of the episodes. They range from the late Bernard Bailyn of Harvard to Christopher Brown and Michael Witgen of Columbia University, all proponents of different perspectives that enrich the meaning of the six-part series.
In view of the proven capacity of PBS series like THE CIVIL WAR , BASEBALL, JAZZ, THE WAR, THE VIETNAM WAR, and COUNTRY MUSIC to reach tens of millions of people it is clear that THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION will achieve a comparable impact. Some statistics clarify the mass impact of these televised series. The first episode of THE CIVIL WAR, which aired in 1990, drew an estimated 15 million viewers and averaged 14 million viewers every night during its five-night broadcast. It reached at least 40 million people with its initial run. BASEBALL premiered in 1994, and its ten episodes garnered an estimated 43 million viewers. The JAZZ series of 2001 had 12.6 million viewers its first night and an average of 10.3 million VIEWERS every night thereafter over the airing of the ten part series. THE WAR, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, was the most-watched series in the last ten years on PBS when it broadcast in 2007. The initial broadcast premiere (September 23–October 2, 2007, including weekend repeats), reached 37.8 million people. THE VIETNAM WAR, produced and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, written by Geoffrey C. Ward, and narrated by Peter Coyote, premiered on PBS in September 2017. It reached 39 million unique viewers across its premiere and encore telecasts. COUNTRY MUSIC in 2019 drew close to 25 million viewers. And in all these series we are not including the ongoing impact of streaming versions, published books and mass educational use which increase the viewership even more.
What is noteworthy now is that the very issues swirling around during the American Revolution and underlying the writing of the Constitution itself once again permeate many aspects of our contemporary political life. On a daily basis news reports are dominated by headlines blaring the “lessons learned” from the Revolution. “No Kings Day” demonstrations and the ongoing attempts to create an Article II dictatorship we have been living with since January 20th certainly call out the relevance of looking afresh at the American Revolution.
The discourse recorded by James McHenry on September 18, 1787, the last day of the Constitutional Convention, is haunting to contemplate today. A lady asked Dr. Franklin , “Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy – A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.” Then McHenry added: “The Lady here alluded to was Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia. The new six-part series illuminates the complexity of that comment and provides a jumping off point for debate and reflection. Ken Burns described in an interview in the Journal of American History of 1994 what positive impact he desired to achieve with his films. “When an individual has, say, anidentity crisis, you send him to a therapist. The first thing the therapist wants to know is, where did you come from, who are your parents, that is to say, what is yourhistory? In the exploration of the nooks and crannies of that history, however painful, are the seeds of healing; and history, if done in that open-ended way, can be about something tragic and divisive like race relationships, apartheid, segregation, lynchings, and at the same time, through an honest and, I would say,artistically presented investigation, it has the possibility of healing by shedding light on the traumas that exist not just in our individual psyches but in our national psyche.”
We will see how THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION contributes to this process in our intensely divided times.

Invite Link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86411768499?pwd=UitCdlJuWFR2QkZZTDVOQ2w0anVZUT09