– A Terribly Tragic Civil War –
by Vanessa Armstrong | Smithsonian Magazine | November 13, 2025
Ahead of the PBS production’s premiere, the legendary filmmaker and co-director Sarah Botstein share insights on their research process and the surprising, long-overlooked stories featured in the six-part series.
The American Revolution is shrouded in myth. But the war that created the United States was much more than the oft-told tales of the founding fathers. It was a bloody, gritty affair, a tragic civil war and a global conflict as much as it was a war for independence.
To portray this complexity and piece together how the history Americans think they know actually unfolded, acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns and co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt spent more than nine years interviewing scholars and researching first-person accounts of the Revolution. The result is “The American Revolution,” a six-part, 12-hour documentary series that premieres on PBS on November 16.
Debuting ahead of America’s 250th anniversary in July 2026 (and just before Thanksgiving, a much-mythologized American holiday), the highly anticipated series covers the beginning of the French and Indian War in May 1754 through the end of the Revolution in 1783, in addition to touching on the creation of the Constitution in 1787 and George Washington’s election as the nation’s first president in 1789. Burns and his colleagues recount battles and key events through the eyes of everyday people, as well as historical leaders like Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Narrated by prominent actors, including Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Samuel L. Jackson, the documentary conveys the grim reality of war—for instance, the lice and frostbite experienced by soldiers—and examines how the American resistance morphed from angry mobs in Boston looking to resolve specific issues with England into an organized militia fighting for self-rule.
Burns’ work as a documentarian spans decades, from his award-winning, nine-part 1990 series, “The Civil War,” to a ten-part 2017 documentary on the Vietnam War. “The American Revolution” is the equal of these projects in breadth and scope, but it surpasses them in terms of accompanying fanfare. A 600-page companion book co-written by Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward is now available in stores. This year, the filmmakers traveled to more than 35 locales across the country to hold screenings and participate in public discussions; more dates are planned for 2026. The documentary’s launch also features a classroom component, with educational resources and materials provided to teachers. Finally, Burns and his colleagues are collaborating with groups like the National Constitution Center, the Museum of the American Revolution, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution to commemorate the country’s founding through outreach and engagement with the public.
Smithsonian spoke with Burns and Botstein to learn what their research revealed about the American Revolution, as well as the stories that viewers of the documentary might find surprising. Read on for a condensed and edited version of the conversation.
Everyone has an understanding of the American Revolution. But it might be mythologized, or perhaps they haven’t thought about it in depth since high school. Watching “The American Revolution” will be eye-opening for a lot of people. What do you hope are viewers’ biggest takeaways from the series?
Sarah Botstein: The Revolution was a terribly tragic civil war: neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, families and communities broken apart. Neighbors made different choices, and we tried to provide some context and understanding for those choices. It was a civil war. Americans were breaking themselves into pieces.
The other thing is that it was a world war for—as one of our scholars says—the prize of North America. That dovetails into how much the American Revolution was also about Westward expansion, land and empire itself.
It’s a very surprising underdog story. We needed allies, particularly the French, to actually win the war. It’s a violent and bloody war. Many, many, many people died, and we stand on their shoulders. That’s an important piece to remember when we think about the Revolution, so it’s not just, as Ken always says, “smart guys in Philadelphia thinking really good thoughts.”
Ken Burns: The grittiness is what I think is going to be surprising. A lot of that has to do with this superficiality that attends the Revolution—because maybe it’s not even in high school, but in eighth grade, that [people studied] it last with any significance. It’s just an incredibly difficult war, and the [lack of] photographs makes it seem cartoonish. The sacrifices are different than watching somebody fall as they’re climbing up the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. But it is, of course, all of that and much more.
As Sarah is suggesting, it was a big land thing. Somewhere along the line, [American colonists] woke up and said, “Actually, we want this. Not the French. Not the Spanish. We want this.” And that means tragedy for Native people.
What was your process for finding first-person accounts of the Revolution?
Botstein: David Schmidt deserves a lot of credit for digging up and finding those characters. He grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and is a great student of the 18th century. He’s a little obsessed with finding unusual characters—not just finding them, but finding things people haven’t seen, quotes that are less familiar. That actually goes for the big, fancy names, too. He loves to find the things in the archives that people don’t often get to see or hear.
We’re all really interested in the lesser-known characters and how they influence history, how they experience history and how they can help us understand what was happening. There was a little girl, Betsy Ambler, who was a character that we added in as we were making the film, because we thought, “Oh, we need a child’s voice.” [Editor’s note: Born in Yorktown, Virginia, in 1765, Elizabeth Jaquelin Ambler, better known as “Betsy,” moved to Richmond with her family during the Revolution. She left behind a trove of letters detailing the hardships posed by the war.] We had one quote from her, and then we were like, “Oh, she’s terrific. Can we really pepper her in through the whole show?”
Some of the soldiers who were fighting were so surprisingly young. James Forten [a Black patriot who served on an American privateer as a teenager] at the end of the documentary is one of the most moving stories in the whole show and just a great American story. There are also interesting family dynamics, like Lucy Knox [wife of American General Henry Knox]. I care more about Henry Knox because I know about Lucy Knox and what happens to her family. Any time you can make the story you’re telling feel more relatable because it’s a family, a town, a community, a place, a child or a mother, it just helps bring the history to life.
Burns: A lot of the people that we think we know, we don’t know. And by getting their collective writings together, you can infer some things about them and who they are.
There’s John Greenwood, who’s 14 years old when he joins the patriot cause, and Joseph Plumb Martin, who’s more well known within Revolutionary War scholarship [due to his late-in-life, matter-of-fact memoir] but is nevertheless an amazing character. He’s the grunt, and he’s 15 years old when he signs up, and he gets into the biggest battle of the Revolution right away. And it’s not pretty, and it’s not fun. He’s like every complaining soldier of every war, either Vietnam or World War II. You just go, “Oh, the soldiers must have said that back in ancient Greece.”
I remember learning that Greenwood had a lice infestation when he went back home. That stuck with me.
Burns: And just remember, he survived the Battle of Trenton. If you think about it, he’s been in the boats crossing into Delaware. Nobody is standing up like in the painting. It’s ice-filled. It’s night. There’s a storm. He gets there, it’s so cold that he wants to quit, and he’s just rotating his body. We all know what he’s doing, and two of his comrades who did lie down are the only two American deaths [that Washington recorded] at Trenton. You just think, we could have ended the story right there with Greenwood. It’s amazing. But then he goes home, and you see the scene, his father baking the clothes in the oven to kill the lice and covering him with sulfur. You can’t make this up. And that’s the beauty of a deep dive. You don’t have to make anything up in order for history to be rich and dynamic and complicated.
Historically, Indigenous people and enslaved people haven’t been highlighted or even considered in accounts of the Revolution. How did you find primary sources about these individuals?
Botstein: We stand on the shoulders of this new generation of scholars. Since the bicentennial in 1976, there’s been a huge amount of scholarship finding those voices and doing that research and going into different historical records to bring those characters to life.
Burns: 99.9 percent of people didn’t have their portraits made, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. The question is, how do you resurrect them? Maybe they’ve left a written record. Maybe they’re just a name signing up some place. Maybe it’s a gravestone. But you can figure out how that resurrection could take place and show they did live full lives. Sarah and I are so thrilled that the thing you remembered was John Greenwood going home to be deloused, because this is the stuff that is true, and you can’t make it up.
Photography hadn’t yet been invented during the American Revolution, so paintings, illustrations and sculptures serve as the main visual record of the conflict. Did that change your research process compared with, for example, your Civil War documentary?
Burns: The process is the same, but yes, it forces us to recalibrate the balance. Sometimes we’ve got a modern subject like Vietnam, where we can talk to the veterans. Here, we have no veterans, so we rely on scholars, whereas for Vietnam, we decided we wouldn’t have scholars unless they were veterans of the war. So there are just different levels of first-person voices, different levels of talking heads.
The absence of photographs and newsreels makes the Revolution harder for us to gain purchase with. I normally eschew re-enactments, but in this case, it was really clear you’re going to have to do them. We’re not asking [the re-enactors] to re-enact this battle—we’re filming them doing what they’ve always done, and filming them at dawn or dusk in a very intimate, impressionistic fashion, so that we can collect a critical mass of imagery that can then be used with the paintings, with the maps, with the commentary, with the first-person voices, to help bring everything alive. So it’s just a recalibration of what live cinematography means in this particular film. But the process of how the story emerges, how we research, how we bring characters alive, is exactly the same.
Did your preconceived notions about any specific events or historical figures shift over the course of the research?
Burns: Every single one, from who George Washington was to what happened at Lexington and Concord or Bunker Hill or Trenton or Yorktown. Everything got dimensionally more complicated and more interesting. And that’s the whole point of this. We’re not here to tell you what we know, but what we learned, and not to share or just pass along the familiar tropes, but rather a much more complex one that makes those big ideas in Philadelphia that much more inspiring.
This is one of the most important events in all of world history. And it’s a sea change in the course of human events. Jefferson got it, understood it as he was writing [the Declaration of Independence]. That’s why it’s framed the way it is. All we want to do is add dimension to it.
And we need to say it: None of this happens anywhere else but PBS. Nobody else is going to give us ten years to build a history of the Revolution. No one. The willingness to dive deep into this, to be able to excavate stories, to depend and rely on scholarship … the Corporation for Public Broadcasting helped us really pursue this.
I’d guess that most Americans today assume they would have been a patriot rather than a loyalist. But then I remember the first episode of the documentary, which shows people hanging tax collectors in effigy and robbing and setting houses on fire in response to the Stamp Act. I wonder, “What if I had lived in Boston and saw those mobs in the street?”
Burns: That’s it! Who would I be? And if you call balls and strikes, if you don’t make a loyalist wrong, then who would you be? And more importantly, would you be willing to fight for a cause, sacrifice your life, your fortune, as they said in the Declaration? George Washington may have been the richest person in the country, and he lived in a tent for most of six and a half years and definitely risked his life and his fortune and his sacred honor for this thing. It’s a big, big deal.
Whether you would die for a cause or kill someone else for the cause, it’s abstract: The difference between British constitutional monarchy and this fledgling republic idea that nobody’s ever done before—is that worth dying for? It’s complicated. It’s about land and your money, your honor; about lots of really interesting things. And then finally, it has that element, as Sarah was saying, of the civil war, which provides an opportunity to settle old scores. South Carolina is a horrible place to be during this war—so many of the battlefield deaths take place there, but there’s also lots of civilian-on-civilian violence. It’s in New Jersey. It’s in Pennsylvania, to some extent, but really in South Carolina.
In a way, our Civil War isn’t a civil war, it’s a sectional war. There are very few civilian deaths outside of Missouri and eastern Kansas in our Civil War. But it’s happening all over in the Revolution and the leadup to it. Not just deaths, but harassment and kicking people out of town that are loyalists. It’s really tough stuff. Benjamin Franklin’s own son [William Franklin] was the deposed royal governor of New Jersey. He was imprisoned and then released under the presumption that he would go to England. And he stayed and started a terrorist organization that killed patriots. And there were lots of patriot organizations killing loyalists.
What might viewers find surprising about the stories told in “The American Revolution”?
Burns: One way is to think about it as absence. Nobody in the film says, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” The name Betsy Ross is not mentioned. We’re not confident enough about Nathan Hale’s final words to say, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” We know that a British officer remarked that [Hale had] gone to his death with “great composure.” There’s no chopping down a cherry tree or throwing a coin across the Potomac. There’s a lot of stuff that just necessarily can fall by the wayside and make room for more intimate and, I would suggest, more interesting stories.
[We focus on real people like] Margaret Corbin, whose husband is killed at the Battle of Fort Washington in Upper Manhattan. She takes over the battery and is so effective at it that the German fire is directed at her. She’s wounded in the jaw and the breast. She ends up getting one of the first pensions that a woman ever got, of course at half the rate of the men. But that becomes a more interesting story than more familiar ones, like Molly Pitcher. That means that something inevitably is going to go, and what’s good to go are all those mythologized moments.
Another surprising thing is that Benedict Arnold shows up in the first moments of our second episode, but it’s not until early in the sixth that you find out he’s Benedict Arnold. Before that, he’s one of the best generals that Washington has. Washington sends him up to Saratoga to help, and he’s the hero of Saratoga. And that victory at Saratoga, without Washington anywhere nearby, is what convinces the French to give us the money that’s going to allow us to win the war.
Do you want to share any parting thoughts about the documentary with readers?
Burns: We’re in a moment that people have described as existential, certainly a moment of division. Maybe there could be some understanding that during this revolutionary period, we were more divided than we are now. And maybe by going back and reinvesting some time in this origin story, we’ll be able to put the “us” back in the U.S.
If you find out what we really believed in, democracy is not the object but rather a byproduct of it. Consider the dimensionality of people that [weren’t honored with] “marble statues,” as [historian] Jane Kamensky says, but are real people that have flaws. George Washington: Without him, we don’t have a country. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t make two huge, bad blunders on the battlefield, or that he was rash in riding out or that he owned other human beings. You don’t have to have that unforgiving revisionism to replace the old top-down narrative. As I said earlier, we just call balls and strikes. This is who that person is.
Botstein: It is such an important moment to think about and celebrate this great American experiment, and to look back and learn from the mistakes and the things that we’ve not done well, and to be inspired to do better. [Historian] Annette Gordon-Reed says at the end of the film that the founders wanted us to be engaged and to care and to do something with this country, and we have it in our hands to do so.
Read the rest of the original article at Smithsonian Magazine