The Incoherence of Ken Burns’s ‘The American Revolution’

Ken Burns has set himself the impossible task of retelling a national origin story that all Americans will embrace as their own. He began work on the resulting six-part, twelve-hour series, The American Revolution, nearly a decade ago, just as the so-called Great Awokening got going. The years 2015-2025 have been energizing and inspiring for culture warriors and historical polemicists. But Burns is neither. His craft consists in conveying, intelligently, artfully and respectfully, the mainstream historical consensus. And that consensus has become so politicized it no longer meaningfully exists. Burns’s earnest effort to reconjure it merely results in incoherence. 

The American Revolution includes a few obvious nods to the culture wars of the past several years. We are reminded that the Patriots tore down statues, that General Washington compelled his troops to get inoculated from smallpox, and that a “handful” of women dressed as men to fight as soldiers in the war. How many women constitute a handful, the documentary does not say. (In my experience as a married father of three daughters, one is enough.)

But the problem goes deeper than these asides. The documentary consists of three overlapping narratives. One is a traditional military history of the War for Independence. The second tells the story of American slaves struggling to realize their own freedom, a struggle that sometimes aligned them with the Patriot cause and more often arrayed them against it. And the third is the story of Native Americans fighting to maintain their ancient sovereignty as a new nation emerged among them. 

What ties these conflicting stories together is an argument that Americans have never been a unified or harmonious people. American history was made by Americans who hated, oppressed and occasionally killed other Americans. That is our collective heritage, and to share it, Burns suggests, requires a decent respect for all those who made it. The greatest misconception about the American Revolution, one featured historian observes, accurately enough, is that it unified Americans. The opposite was true. What we remember as the Revolution was experienced at the time as a civil war. This tends to be true of all revolutions. As the final words of the documentary remind us, “the Revolution is not over.”