The American Revolution: An Inside Look

NARRATOR: 250 years ago, a new nation was born.

This fall, Ken Burns tells the story of the American Revolution.

BURNS: We want to convey what it was like to experience the birth of our country.

NARRATOR: Now get an exclusive inside look at what it takes to bring history to life.

Don't miss "The American Revolution: An Inside Look."

Coming up next on PBS.

Corporate funding of a revolution, a most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of nations.

Objects of the most stupendous magnitude and measures in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested, are now before us.

John Adams.

We were locking our film on the Vietnam War, and just as we had decided to do that, as we were locking the film on the Second World War, I just had this thought: The next war we had to do was the American Revolution.

As horrible as wars are, they tell us hugely important things about who we are and the period that we're in.

You began to realize that the whole question of this American project, which has been my project, is born in the Revolution, and to ask questions of the Revolution seemed absolutely imperative.

RICK ATKINSON: War never follows the script that you have written for it when you set out to make war.

The British objective is first and foremost to suppress the rebellion.

It's to teach the rascals a lesson.

It's to force them to acknowledge the primacy of Parliament and the authority of the King.

And so now the decision has been made that we will use force.

And there's a presumption that it won't take much... but it's going to go on for 8 years.

8 years.

Blood, treasure, catastrophe, really, for the British Empire.

The Revolution is obviously in some ways the central, most important war in our history.

All wars leave us with myths.

What did Patrick Henry actually say?

What was Paul Revere's midnight ride actually about?

What happened in the Boston Tea Party?

Did Washington cross the Delaware in the daytime or the nighttime?

Who made the first flag?

When did the war start and when did the war end?

It's been an extraordinary journey to try and tell the story about our founding, about our origin story.

JANE KAMENSKY: I think to believe in America, rooted in the American Revolution, is to believe in possibility.

That, to me, is the extraordinary thing about the Patriot side of the fight.

I think everybody on every side, including people who were denied even the ownership of themselves, had the sense of possibility worth fighting for.

When we think about war in our lifetime, it tends to be away from the United States.

A lot of people, a lot of Americans have lived through war, but it's not in our backyard, typically.

This war was.

What we have to first understand is that it's a civil war.

Maybe a quarter of all the civilians in the colonies are loyalists and remain loyal to the Crown and the laws, and they don't want to upset the apple cart.

And so this is a bloody, bloody civil war.

ALAN TAYLOR: The loyalists are essentially the conservatives.

They're the people who believe in law and order.

They don't like mobs.

They don't like committees telling them what to do.

They don't see King George the Third as a tyrant.

VO: We are preparing for war.

To fight with whom?

Not with France and Spain, whom we have been used to think our natural enemies.

But with Great Britain, our parent country.

My heart recoils at the thought.

Andrew Eliot.

SCHMIDT: The American Revolution is our story.

It's everyone's story.

It's where the country began, and so much of who we are today came from the story of the American Revolution.

The revolutionary generation thought about us, the unborn millions.

They talked about posterity.

In 1777, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail and said, "Posterity, you will never know what it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom."

And I think this is our opportunity to let our present generation know what they did, what they went through, and how much it matters to us today that they did.

BOTSTEIN: This is a young war.

George Washington is in his forties.

Thomas Jefferson is in his thirties.

People fighting the war are 14 to 50.

It is a young country and a young war.

They were rebellious, feisty, youthful patriots trying to figure it out.

The people we all have heard of in grade school, middle school, high school, maybe studied in college.

And all the people we haven't heard about whose histories haven't been told.

War exposes the best and the worst in all of us.

It inspires and repels us.

War is, unfortunately, the history of the human experience.

BURNS: It turns out that this film is arriving just before the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

And so we're very happy to have our film come out in advance of that, to help lead what we hope is a much more dynamic conversation, one that is not sort of suffused with nostalgia, but something that has a little bit more complexity.

I think everyone will find something to identify with, because the story is our story, and it is not just one set of us.

It's all of us.

And that's the story that we struggled for a long time to try to tell.

WILLIAM HOGELAND: Once it's a shooting war, as with Lexington and Concord, it's a war.

There's no doubt about that.

But independence was not in any way officially on the table as a goal of the Americans at that point.

The idea of independence was still controversial.

The official position was that the fight was essentially for redress, for "Let's get back to the way things used to be, back when things were good, when you left us alone."

Making a film about the American Revolution poses instantaneously some pretty obvious challenges.

First of all, there are no photographs or newsreels, and so it forces us to recalibrate, in every sense of the word, how we're going to use imagery to tell a very, very complex story.

So live cinematography becomes hugely important, as it always has been for us.

But in this case, our traditional aversion to re-enactments, we actually had to lean into.

Some of my favorite footage in the film are the very high-up drone shots where you're seeing the re-enactors and it's incredible.

You just, you could be a bird in the sky looking at what's happening.

We haven't worked a lot with re-enactors, and these re-enactors were an extraordinary part of our process.

BURNS: We have worked with dozens and dozens of groups all up and down the East Coast.

BOTSTEIN: We spent a lot of time with them, before we had cameras on, to learn from them.

And they are fastidious in how they study, where they go, how they move, what they're reading.

They get really into it.

BURNS: We film them very impressionistically.

It gives us an ability to see the war but not see their faces and be disturbed by a kind of modern context.

The re-enactors give that kind of intimacy.

BOTSTEIN: We would find ways to film the big reenactments that they do every year or two, and then work with small groups of them to try to demonstrate what it was like for a soldier in his group of 5 guys in the middle of a blizzard going up a mountain.

And we did that.

And Megan Ruffe, our extraordinary Producer, just toughed it out with Buddy Squires, and I think it's some of the most unusual live cinematography that we've ever filmed.

There is a kind of mystery and a poetry to the reenactments that helps tell the story, and helps fill in for the absence of photographs.

You begin to have a visceral sense of what happened when you see people, just feet going through mud, or snow, or hands trying to warm themselves by the fire, or gripping a musket.

They help you realize what it's actually like.

ATKINSON: A shot rings out.

No one knows where the shot came from.

MAN: Fire!

ATKINSON: That leads to promiscuous shooting... mostly by the British.

It's not a battle.

It's not a skirmish.

It's a massacre.

We shot all over the East Coast and beyond.

Colonial Williamsburg, Saratoga National Battlefield, Yorktown.

These places are preserved to look as much as they could like they did then.

The film is a celebration of the vast, beautiful landscape of North America.

We were able, over the course of 6 or 7 years, to film in every part of the 13 colonies in almost every season.

Imagining fighting a war at the hottest, most awful, humid months in the South to the coldest, most horrific freezing temperatures in the north.

That all happened.

One of the great improbable forces in this film is weather.

I walk where I live in New Hampshire, out every day, and I suddenly realize where I was walking was little changed from the 18th-century world that this is taking place.

And so I would start taking movies.

There's snowstorms that I filmed in, and it's that wonderful textural quality in the film.

NATHANIEL PHILBRICK: America is this huge continent.

There's tornadoes, there's hurricanes, there's winter storms.

Turns of weather that we know are coming for weeks on end hit the people of the 18th century completely by surprise.

They're not just fighting each other.

In a profound way, they are fighting the American climate and geography and topography.

This is a difficult place to conduct a war.

One of the great archives of the time that are accurate archives of the time are the maps.

The French made maps, the Brits made maps, the Germans made maps, we made maps.

We are using more maps in this film than in all the other films combined.

When we think about what animates a story that we want to tell, maps take on huge significance.

We have CGI 3-dimensional maps.

We've taken these beautiful works of art, archival maps, to show intimacies in the midst of these grand schemes.

It's been exhilarating.

Challenging but exhilarating.

And I think that one of the constants for me throughout the process was mastering the complexity of the story.

NARRATOR: The American Plan called for two small, noisy, diversionary feints to draw defenders away from the attack's real targets.

Meanwhile, Arnold and his men would circle around Quebc City from the north, while General Montgomery would approach from the south.

Together, they would storm the citadel's steep walls.

BURNS: We want to convey, in the most direct and honest way, what it was like to experience the birth of our country in violence, not just all those great inspiring ideas.

VO: I did not solicit this command, but accepted it after much entreaty.

As soon as the public gets dissatisfied with my service, I shall quit the helm with as much satisfaction, and retire to a private station with as much content as ever the weariest pilgrim felt upon his safe arrival in the Holy Land.

George Washington.

I'm interested in the U.S., but I'm interested in us.

And too often I think our history books have presented a kind of top-down history.

Nothing wrong with it.

The most important person in our story is, without a doubt, George Washington, and I will defend that to the end.

We don't have a country without him.

But there are lots of people who contribute to this; bottom-up stories.

And if you're going to tell that, you've got to be faithful to the whole cast of characters.

SCHMIDT: I previously worked on a film about Benjamin Franklin, who was an extraordinary individual, but he is only one person.

And I'm very grateful to have this opportunity to work on a film about 3 million Americans.

And if there's 3 million people, there's a lot of stories that most of us don't know yet.

I think we were all surprised to find how many people left behind their memories.

BOTSTEIN: There are wonderful young men who signed up for the war when they were, I would consider, boys, 14, 15 years old and served valiantly and patriotically through the whole conflict.

There are Native Americans who made decisions to side with the British and those who decided to fight with the Patriots.

And we tell both those stories.

DARREN BONAPARTE: For us, the Mohawk people, it was survival--period.

And you didn't know which side was going to be the best choice.

We kind of gravitated mostly to the British because they had kind of won our respect, beating the French and pretty much having our interests when they dealt with the regular colonists.

VO: The disturbances in America give great trouble to all our nations.

The Mohawks, our particular nation, have on all occasions shown their zeal and loyalty to the Great King.

Thayendanegea.

BURNS: You get to know a Native American warrior named Joseph Brant, who's--has his painting painted.

He's allied with the British; he's trying to help them.

There are African-Americans who are trying to make a huge decision whether to go with the British, who are, in some cases, offering them freedom if they'll leave their rebel, as the British called us, or Patriot owners.

And so, you've got huge dynamics: Do I go with the British, do I fight for the Patriots?

VINCENT BROWN: We know that about 15,000 Black people actually joined the British, or ran away to the British lines, versus about 5,000 ultimately entering the Patriot cause.

And that's because for many of those enslaved people, the British represented freedom.

The Patriots did not.

We've always been a country with a wide variety of people, a wide variety of cultures, a wide variety of opinions.

We tell the story of Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved woman who goes to court for her freedom in Massachusetts and has an amazing story.

Judith Jackson, who was an enslaved woman who sided with the British and wanted to leave and had to be separated from her daughter at the end of the war.

And Phillis Wheatley, who was the first published African-American in the United States, who was a beautiful poet, corresponded with George Washington himself, and came here on a slave ship.

VO: I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat: What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?

Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd: Such, such my case.

And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

Phillis Wheatley.

One of the characters whose stories we follow is Joseph Plumb Martin of Connecticut.

He was, I think, 15 when he signed up in 1776, and he served for the duration of the war.

He was at Yorktown, he was at Germantown.

And in the 1830s, he wrote a memoir of his experience.

VO: Our sergeant major informed us that the regiment was ordered to Long Island.

It gave me a rather disagreeable feeling, as I was pretty well-assured I should have to sniff a little gunpowder.

The horrors of battle then presented themselves to my mind in all their hideousness.

I must come to it now, thought I. Joseph Plumb Martin.

He talks a little bit about the Battle of Fort Mifflin.

He was bombarded for weeks, along with his fellow Connecticut soldiers, by the British Navy.

He says, you've never heard of this battle because there wasn't a Washington or a Wayne there.

But I was there.

VO: What could officers do without such men?

Nothing at all.

Great men get great praise.

Little men, nothing.

SCHMIDT: He really gives us an opportunity to understand what the average soldier went through.

When you can bring all of those stories together and all of those thoughts together, all those people's perspectives together, you just get a much better understanding of, of the war.

The voices are so varied.

They represent all of us.

Rebecca Tanner, who is a Native American woman, loses 5 sons in the American Revolution fighting for the Patriot cause.

VO: No suffering which Britain can inflict will reduce America to submission.

The thunder of their artillery may lay waste the cities, but the spirit of the people is unconquerable.

Mercy Otis Warren.

We're really lucky that people like Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren were writing as much as they were about what they experienced and what they thought during the war.

There are many women you haven't heard of before.

Betsy Ambler, who was a 10-year-old when the war began in Yorktown, Virginia, and wrote beautiful musings for her sister to understand what their family had lived through.

VO: The plan laid down for our education was entirely broken in upon by the war.

Instead of morning lessons, we were to knit stockings.

Instead of embroidering, to make homespun garments.

And in place of the music of the harpsichord, to listen to the loud, clanging trumpet and never-ceasing drum.

For in every direction that we traveled, and heaven knows we left but little of Virginia unexplored, we heard naught but the din of war.

Our late peaceful country now became a scene of terror and confusion.

Betsy Ambler.

You allow a story to have many different perspectives.

You have hundreds of voices of people: civilians; loyalists; Native Americans; Black, free and enslaved; patriots; women; and then you understand there is a much more complex story.

18th-century war is not mechanized.

You either walk by foot or a four-legged creature is taking you.

And men didn't go alone.

They went with their families.

So, behind the armies are their wives, their children.

And the women, therefore, are supporting the troops in a way that many of us are unfamiliar with.

Women are always at the center of a story of war.

VO: In the new code of laws, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.

Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.

BOTSTEIN: Women in war are enormously brave, enormously strong, enormously important to the cause.

They made hundreds of shirts.

They publicized the actions of their husbands.

They not only took care of everybody, but they made the revolution something people wanted to be a part of, and they participated in it in many, many ways.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Crisis changes people, and it gave women different ideas about what they should be doing.

KATHLEEN DUVAL: Women were the main consumers in colonial society, and they were the ones who made sure the boycotts worked.

Women stopped drinking tea.

Women started making their own fabric.

Women started making toys for their children.

And they didn't just stop buying British things and start making their own things.

They publicized it.

TAYLOR: One of the key forms of political theater during the resistance movement would be for a local minister to invite the women of the community to come down to the church and to spend the day spinning and weaving cloth.

And it would be a competition to see which community could produce the most homespun.

It would be published in the newspaper.

And these women would be praised as great American patriots for having produced so much homespun cloth.

BURNS: This is a story in which women are a central part of the resistance initially, and the revolution later.

SCHMIDT: We're going to be able to hear a lot of their stories because the war and the Revolution impacted them personally and impacted millions of people within the original 13 colonies and beyond.

It really was just a world-shattering event.

That's cool.

[Violins playing] BOTSTEIN: One of the big elements in all of our films is the music.

We set out to try and imagine what was the sound of North America.

So, there's obviously classical and baroque influences.

There are folk and traditional influences.

There are religious influences.

There is the music that free and enslaved black people were listening to.

There's the range of Native American music and voices, and how do we put that all together?

So, I grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and I worked in Colonial Williamsburg.

I'm really happy that I had the opportunity to walk and experience something that came before that mattered.

I played the fife.

I walked in shoes with buckles.

I wore knee-length pants and stockings.

One song that you'll hear in the film is a song called "Over the Water to Charlie," which came right out of my fifes and drums sheet music.

We only have that song, I--I realized later, because one of the main characters in our film, John Greenwood, had kept his sheet music from the war, and it was transcribed from that by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

And we got some of the professional musicians to re-record it for this film.

VO: I was so fond of hearing the fife and drum played by the British, that somehow or another I got an old split fife and fixed it by puttying up the crack to make it sound, and then learned to play several tunes.

I believe it was the sole cause of all my travails and disasters.

JOHNNY GANDELSMAN: I was thinking maybe I-- I mean, we have the arrangement from--from Mayna for the quartet in--in F. And I was thinking maybe if it was you guys, it might be nice in D?

Man: Yeah.

And like, how-- you know, what kind of... [Playing several notes] [Snapping fingers and humming] We were extremely fortunate to work with a wonderful music producer, Johnny Gandelsman, who helped us corral and figure out and curate all the different musicians and music that we recorded for the series.

And then Rhiannon Giddens came in and Yo-Yo Ma came in, and a wonderful Tuscaroran woman, Jennifer Kreisberg, came in.

Dave Cieri wrote some of the most beautiful original music for this series that he's ever done, some of it really inspired by Haydn, Handel, Bach, and the classical harpsichord music of the time and some just the dissonant, lonely, scary sounds of war.

And we made a soundtrack that reflects the unique sounds that were thriving in--in North America in the 18th century.

BURNS: This is narration 6.094 take 1, when you're ready.

PETER COYOTE: When the time came to choose the first president under the Constitution, George Washington was the only choice and won the vote of every single elector.

[Horse whinnies] He was inaugurated in New York City on April 30, 1789.

We have a cast of first-person voices that bring to life what the country sounded like.

We read with Joe Keery, Josh Hutcherson, Alden Ehrenreich... Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Samuel L. Jackson... SAMUEL L. JACKSON: I need not point out the absurdity of your exertions for liberty while you have slaves in your houses.

Sir Kenneth Branagh, Damian Lewis, Paul Giamatti... SCHMIDT: Morgan Freeman, Jon Proudstar, Laura Linney.

To hear Maya Hawke read Betsy Ambler's words and to bring life to what we found was incredibly gratifying.

BOTSTEIN: Thomas Paine is a great voice throughout the film, brilliantly read by the unbelievably talented Matthew Rhys.

Josh Brolin as George Washington, Jeff Daniels as Thomas Jefferson, Liev Schreiber as Nathanael Greene has been one of the great performances in any film I've worked on.

LIEV SCHREIBER: People coming from home with all the tender feelings of domestic life are not sufficiently fortified with natural courage to stand the shocking scenes of war.

BURNS: And what they do is they read off-camera these diaries, these letters, these journals, these military dispatches, the newspaper reports, and all of a sudden you realize they're real people, they experience things the way I do.

SCHMIDT: And we're just so lucky that all these people offered of themselves their time and their experience, their expertise, their skill to tell our story, our history.

BOTSTEIN: They lent their craft.

They got really into it.

They love bringing history to life in this way, and we're really lucky to have worked with all of them.

[Gunfire] ATKINSON: It's our creation myth, our creation story.

It tells us who we are, where we came from, what our forbearers believed and what they were willing to die for.

That's the most profound question any people can ask themselves.

[Shouting and gunfire] BOTSTEIN: One of the best parts of my job is to figure out who the historians are who have spent their lives studying this subject.

Who is a scholar of this period in the war?

Who is a writer about this conflict, this battle?

[Gunfire] We take that story of the American Revolutionary War, and we infuse it with interpretations of those moments with leading scholars on the subject.

We have about 2 dozen of them.

Many of them are on camera, and they hold our feet to the fire the whole time.

They want to get it right, too.

FRIEDERIKE BAER: This inability to really figure out who is the enemy here is a problem.

They're marching through the countryside and they don't know-- this farm-- is this farm--is this-- are these loyalists?

Are there--are there rebels in there?

Are you gonna shoot at us out of the window?

Which does happen.

[Gunfire] Who do you trust?

BOTSTEIN: We spend a lot of time thinking about those people and going to meet them and get to know them.

And then we build a board of advisors.

Some of them are on camera, some of them are behind the camera, some of them do both.

And they're with us all the way from the first drafts of the scripts 'til the locked shows are fact-checked.

There's not a objective truth, but there's lots of different ways to see this.

And so what you want to do is employ as many different scholars and writers who know about things-- military folks, people who understand the Native American dimension.

What you do is, you aggregate a number of people, not saying that one particular philosophy of history is right or one particular view of history is the only way to see it.

You allow a story to have many different perspectives.

TAYLOR: Throughout, it's very visceral, and I think the quotes were all great.

I liked seeing the Aiken episode, but I think you want to reconsider sticking it between Fort Washington and Fort Lee falling.

KAMENSKY: I think it'll go well in episode 1.

It's a breadcrumb for what you do here.

BURNS: And there is a good reason, therefore, to use it, but I thought, Maya, that we got to it a little bit too soon.

CHRISTOPHER BROWN: Part of what happens in the years before the American War is that liberties are kind of broken out of a national context.

These are not English liberties.

These are transcendent liberties.

These are liberties that all individuals have by the nature of being human.

One of the reasons that I love making films for Public Television is that the films live on in the classroom.

PBS reaches every classroom in the country, and we're privileged to meet a lot of those history and social studies and English classrooms.

To see somebody light up with the fact that history gives you a kind of sense of you've just taken a very powerful vitamin, and it gives you a perspective on this moment.

Film is a powerful teaching tool, and I think every school kid in America, every high school kid, every college kid, every person who watches the film can hopefully find some thing in this history that relates to them.

I don't know a greater teacher than history.

It tells you where we've been in order to figure out where you are in order to know where you're going.

BURNS: Well, we're pretty much booked up to the end of the decade.

We're working on a massive series called "Emancipation to Exodus" about Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War, one of the most misunderstood periods in American history.

How people were self-emancipating, the Emancipation Proclamation, what it did with the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendment, and then what the country did struggling in the years afterwards to try to make good on the promises of the Civil War and then the aftermath.

The Exodus is, of course, the beginning of the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South to enjoy, as Richard Wright said, "the warmth of other suns."

I'm serving as an Executive Producer on a film that Lynn Novick is producing and directing and writing called "Crime and Punishment;" the history from the pillories and the shackles of our colonial period up to the present day.

I'm serving also as an Executive Producer on a film about Henry David Thoreau.

Yes, that's how you say it-- Thoreau (Ther-ow)-- and his wonderful, prescient years before his time, decades before his time, understanding of nature and climate change, even, and--and all sorts of things.

And then, you know, we're already thinking in our head about different projects.

Sarah Botstein and I are also working on a film, and we've been working on it for years about "LBJ & the Great Society."

BOTSTEIN: I'm very fortunate to be working on a film with Ken and Lynn and Geoff Ward again about LBJ.

I think the farther we get from his presidency, the more interesting it is to study.

And there are extraordinary tapes, not just of his voice, which I think many audiences are used to hearing, but Ladybird kept an audio diary, so you'll hear them in conversation in the film.

And we're really excited about that show.

We're now going back.

We're just about to start up interviews on that, now that we see the light at the end of the Revolutionary tunnel.

It's a few things.

TAYLOR: So, what's gonna come out of this revolution is attempts to create an American national identity.

And somebody like George Washington becomes quite eloquent in trying to persuade people.

"You're not Carolinians, you're not New Yorkers, you're not New Englanders.

we're all Americans."

[Horse whinnies] BURNS: I love my country.

My favorite holiday is the Fourth of July, by far.

And every Fourth of July at the lake, I get up, and after a big meal, I make everyone listen as I read the Declaration of Independence out loud.

And my 4 daughters have had to suffer through this years and years and years.

I've been doing this for 50 years, making films about American history.

And I had the supreme pleasure in this film to do a scene on the Declaration of Independence as full and as complete and as, I think, as triumphant and joyful and complicated as you could possibly ever imagine.

BOTSTEIN: The 2 or 3 things that I was surprised to learn were so central to the history are, one, how unlikely it was that we were gonna win.

[Gunfire] And I think Washington knew, as a great leader, that he wasn't gonna win big; he just couldn't lose.

North America sat on the global stage at this time.

It really was a global war.

The prize of North America was an important piece of a global chess board that everybody was looking toward as these empires were shrinking and growing.

And so, the American Revolution is much more than 13 colonies throwing off the Crown and trying to figure out and establish what the United States might be.

SCHMIDT: The more you learn about the people of the revolutionary generation, the more you read about them, the more you know what they did and what they saw and what they felt, the more you realize they're people just like us.

And I think that demystification actually makes me love them all the more.

These are people, and they went through an extraordinary time, and we are the product of that, we are that legacy.

I'm glad that we're gonna give people the opportunity to know more about them.

BURNS: We've tried really hard as we lock the film to make sure in that, "speak now or forever hold your peace," that this is the right length of a shot, that this is the right music for a shot, that this is the right movement of the arrow on the map of the shot, that we were able to gather all this material and put it in service of a complex narrative that I think will be riveting to Americans who are curious about that simple question.

My question: Who are we?

But in this case, where did we come from?

What is our moment of origin?

That's the whole thing.

I don't think you'll come away from these 6 parts and 12 hours without a sense of your own ownership of this story.

STEPHEN CONWAY: The American Revolution changed the world.

It's not just about the birth of the United States.

It has ramifications across the globe.

[Gunfire] So, studying The American Revolution, understanding it, and putting it in a global context, I think, is vitally important for us to understand why we are where we are now.