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Americans, and Philadelphians in particular, might think they know a lot about the American Revolution. We watched cartoons about it on Saturday mornings, celebrate it annually with fireworks and, in Old City, we are surrounded by the historic sites that gave birth to the United States.
But documentary filmmaker Ken Burns says you don’t know the half of it.
“Our Revolution is smothered in gallant, bloodless myth,” Burns said.
“The main figures are just marble statues. We don’t know all of the hundreds of subsidiary characters that make up this story,” he said. “From young kids volunteering to fight, to Loyalists, to German Hessian soldiers, to Native Americans, to enslaved and free Africans, to poor working men, to women. They’re central to this.”
Burns and his filmmaking partners Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt have spent the last 10 years crafting a 12-hour documentary series, “The American Revolution,” premiering on WHYY-TV and other PBS television outlets beginning Nov. 16.
Burns will give a sneak peak of the film on Oct. 9, showing excerpts from all six episodes at the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Camden, New Jersey, where he will be interviewed live on stage by Terry Gross of WHYY’s “Fresh Air.”
The free event with prior registration is part of a weekend of activities marking the 250th anniversary of the United States Navy and Marine Corps. The Continental Navy, which ultimately became the naval branches of the American armed forces, was established in Philadelphia in 1775.
The Navy 250 Homecoming celebration is seen as a precursor to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next summer.
Burns said the fact that his documentary film is rolling out on the eve of the semiquincentennial is a coincidence he did not plan when he started in 2015.
“The urgency comes from our own curiosity, not from any external political exigencies that may be going on,” he said. “The semiquincentennial was on no one’s mind. Not mine, not anyone else’s. We got in several years working on the project and thought, ‘You know? We’re going to finish sometime in ’25.’”
The crew of “The American Revolution” shooting a scene of patriot camp followers re-enactors in New Jersey. (Courtesy of PBS)
The details of the American Revolution have been picked over by historians for 250 years. Every generation of writers brings more insight into the war fueled by new approaches and historic discoveries. Botstein said her work with Burns takes viewers through a complex story to evoke a feeling that we might not know its outcome.
“There’s so much popular mythology about the topic and actually very little real understanding of what happened,” she said. “It was a world war as much as a bloody civil war. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are two documents very far apart in time. A lot of people died and a lot of violence happened between those two things.”