As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, the documentarian who helmed 1990’s Emmy Award-winning PBS mini-series The Civil War, and many other film histories, is back with what’s arguably his greatest work.
Ken Burns’ The American Revolution is a six-episode exploration of what caused the Revolutionary War. It includes a painstaking record of the violent struggle to overthrow King George III’s royal rule over the thirteen colonies. The stirring series opens with a quote from the revolution’s most radical rabblerouser, Thomas Paine (voiced by Matthew Rhys): “From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen not to be extinguished.”
Along with co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt and screenwriter Geoffrey C. Ward, Burns cinematically strives to portray an eighteenth-century story that occurred before the invention of photographs, audio recordings, or film. Instead, they use paintings, lithographs, and sketches from and about that hoary era, when the printing press was the main means of mass communications.
Scholars and historians, including Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed, winner of a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for The Hemingses of Monticello, appear onscreen to provide insightful commentary throughout the series. Burns also uses costumed reenactors more than in previous productions—although, say, the Continental Army soldiers at Valley Forge never appear in close-ups or when speaking.
A star-studded cast of actors bring alive, via voiceovers, words written or spoken in the era’s letters, speeches, pamphlets, and declarations. Besides Rhys as Paine, the series features Tom Hanks as various colonials, Jeff Daniels as Thomas Jefferson, Josh Brolin as George Washington, Meryl Streep as Mercy Otis Warren, Ethan Hawke as “Mad” Anthony Wayne, Laura Linney as different colonial women, Michael Keaton as Benedict Arnold, Damian Lewis as King George III, Paul Giamatti as John Adams, Claire Danes as Abigail Adams, Mandy Patinkin as Benjamin Franklin, and Kenneth Branagh as General Thomas Gage, Samuel Johnson, and other Brits.
But far more important than how the filmmakers recount their annals of the War of Independence is what their sprawling documentary has to say. As television’s greatest film historian, Burns uncovers hidden, long-forgotten facts. For instance, in one of the bitterest ironies in history, it was the monarchist British—not the purportedly liberty-loving Americans—who first offered slaves their liberation, in Lord Dunmore’s 1775 proclamation granting manumission for enslaved people who joined the British army.
According to The American Revolution, at least 800 enslaved Black men joined what was called Lord Dunmore’sEthiopian Regiment to fight for Britain and their own eventual liberation, while up to 100,000 enslaved people fled to the British army throughout the Revolutionary War. Dunmore’s proclamation led to desertions from Washington and Jefferson’s own plantations. According to one of the series’ experts, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, formerly national director of the Association of Black Women Historians, an enslaved man named Harry Washington “was the first to flee Mt. Vernon.”
The documentary also notes that the first patriot to die during 1770’s Boston Massacre was a free Black man, Crispus Attucks, and that more than 5,000 Black soldiers served in the Continental Army. Narrator Peter Coyote observes this was the most “integrated the U.S. Army would be in almost two centuries.” Morgan Freeman voices African American James Forten, who served as a privateer for the Patriots when he was only fourteen years old, and went on to become a leading abolitionist, helping finance William Lloyd Garrison’s paper The Liberator.
The American Revolution also exposes an ulterior, self-serving motive for why Washington—a land surveyor who came to head the Continental Army and become the nation’s first President—sought, as fellow enslaver Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “to dissolve the political bands which have connected” Britain and the colonies. King George III had issued a 1763 proclamation barring Anglo-American colonists from settling beyond the Appalachian Mountains, impeding Westward expansion. Yale History professor Ned Blackhawk notes that some of the founders, prominently including Washington, were land speculators who “secured land beyond the Appalachians.”
In the film, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill history professor Kathleen DuVal, winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for her book Native Nations, calls the revolution “a war for empire.” She notes, for instance, that what colonists called a War of Independence was, for Indigenous tribes, Independence Lost, as the title of her 2015 book contended. In the documentary, Burns chronicles how the British and Americans vied with one another to form allegiances with various Indigenous nations.
The American Revolution rousingly recreates what narrator Coyote calls “the most consequential revolution in world history.” Burns unflinchingly shows the contradictions, hypocrisies, and flaws of a revolution wherein an enslaver boldly declared “all men are created equal.” Nevertheless, near the conclusion of this production, as in the opening, Paine is quoted, writing in 1783: “The times that tried men’s souls are over—and the greatest revolution and completist the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.”
Of course, that was 242 years ago, and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Rick Atkinson warns of the “perpetual challenge of the American experiment.” The struggle today is to make 1776’s loftiest ideals applicable to all—not just to white male property-owners. The American Revolution is Ken Burns’ crowning achievement—a documentary about the shot heard ‘round the world perfect for today’s “No Kings” protests.
The American Revolution premieres Sunday, November 16, and airs for six consecutive nights through Friday, November 21 (check local listings) on PBS. The series is available to stream beginning Sunday, November 16, at PBS.org and on the PBS App.