The American Revolution: A Guest Post by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns

Prolific historians Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward, alongside a similarly prolific supporting cast, take us deeper into the American Revolution than ever before, spotlighting the struggle for independence and how it’s still rippling across the nation today. Read on for an exclusive essay from the authors on writing American Revolution.

2025 marks 250 years since the beginning of the war that led to our country’s founding. In our documentary (airing on PBS on November 16) and its companion book, THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, we examine how America’s formation turned the world upside-down. Thirteen British colonies on the Atlantic Coast rose in rebellion, won their independence, and established a new form of government that radically reshaped the continent and inspired centuries of democratic movements around the globe.

“What the American Revolution gave the United States was an actual idea of a moment of origin, which many other countries in the world don’t have. And it has invested these particular years and these particular people with a set of stakes that are so far beyond what any set of events and any set of people can plausibly carry, that it has made the way Americans think about this period very unreal and detached.” —Maya Jasanoff, historian

The American Revolution is our epic song, our epic verse, giving us the opportunity to ask ourselves questions central to the creation of the United States: What kind of government best serves human beings? Which side would I have been on? What would I have been willing to risk? Could I have killed someone—or given my life—in defense of an idea, a cause? What really happened?

As the historian Maya Jasanoff, who appears in our film and has a piece in the book, reminds us, as a country we are detached from that war’s complicated interiors, making “very unreal” our relationship to our own origin story, as well as the people who lived at that time and struggled with these issues. More often than not those important questions go unasked and unexplored. Like our best-known anthems, hymns, and carols, we are most familiar, if we know them at all, with just the first verse; essential detail, complexity, and nuance are permitted to atrophy, allowing, in this case, legend and the most superficial of stories to obscure and replace the often-difficult truths of our founding.

It is not the clear and easy story we would like to tell ourselves, but neither is it without extraordinary inspiration and individual acts of courage and conviction. Indeed, the Revolution becomes even more inspirational when the distractions of mythology and cloying nostalgia are replaced, not with unforgiving revisionism, but with the sometimes difficult truths of what actually happened. There is a comfort in complication; the collection of clichés—Washington crossing the Delaware (he was not standing up in the ice-filled river in the middle of a winter storm at night!); the execution of Nathan Hale (he did not say, “I regret that I have but one life to give to my country”); the cry at Bunker Hill (no one yelled, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” and the battle wasn’t even on Bunker Hill); Betsy Ross (we don’t know who made the first flag), etc.—those clichés collapse on closer inspection, but they are easily and more gloriously replaced by hundreds of other moments and stories and characters that give the Revolution dimension and so much more meaning.

For nearly ten years, we have worked to tell the story of the American Revolution, first in a six-­part, twelve-hour documentary series and now for this companion book. It has been a challenging and exhilarating journey; we will not work on a more important topic.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION will publish in November 2025.