Ken Burns is a filmmaker, a writer, a historian, and a cartographer of time. He s covered some of the biggest events in U.S. history, and his new film, The American Revolution, premieres in November.
00:06:07.400That we gave away to nonprofits, except for one or two computers that stayed in the office because we didn't have a good Mac computer in the office.
00:06:14.640And then we became friends for the rest of his life.
00:06:17.720And so whenever I visited Silicon Valley, I'd stay with him.
00:06:20.480You know, his kids, his daughter became an intern for us for a couple of semesters.
00:06:30.000It's the technological tale that wags the dog of what I'm trying to do, which is take these old things where you don't have newsreels or you don't have living witnesses and try to wake up moments in the past and make them as dramatically compelling as you would if you could talk to some veteran, say, of the Iraq war who's still alive.
00:06:51.280You know, I mean, and the Ken Burns effect, it's like that was at the time where everybody was trying to be could suddenly everybody could suddenly be a filmmaker, right?
00:07:07.380And what you needed were the tools to be able to polish it.
00:07:10.000I mean, my kids now and my grandkids can do stuff with this that I wouldn't have any idea how to do it.
00:07:15.720And one of the cruder tools is the Ken Burns effect, which has saved lots of vacations, lots of birthdays, lots of memorial services, lots of bar mitzvahs, you know.
00:10:00.140And it's just, you know, what grief does and what the inability to express it.
00:10:04.660When you're 11 years old or when you're two years old and realize there's never a moment when there's not a sword of Damocles hanging over your head that's going to ruin everything.
00:10:53.960Well, just think about the energy, the propulsion of this loss, just for me, is, and also my father's sort of, he's the smartest guy I knew, but kind of a Maserati without a clutch, you know.
00:11:05.720Looked really good, sounded voom, voom, really good, but couldn't get into first gear.
00:11:10.340That made me, you know, such, you know, keep working.
00:11:39.280Lowercase, two-letter, plural, pronoun, all of the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the U.S.
00:11:50.120And it is a magnificent space to operate in.
00:11:53.300I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to be, have the responsibility.
00:11:58.040It's a huge responsibility to dive into something like the Vietnam War, right now the American Revolution, which we just finished.
00:12:03.540And, you know, or the Civil War or World War II or the biographies we did.
00:12:07.840Huey Long, you know, we were talking about from your state of Louisiana, which is just like one of the great unknown stories.
00:12:18.900Oh, he was like, he was definitely a big guy.
00:12:21.720He had amassed more personal power than anyone else in the history of the United States in a state context.
00:12:26.840He was both governor and United States senator, which is not legal.
00:12:31.180And he was already running for president against Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 when he was assassinated in September of 1935 in the statehouse in Baton Rouge, in the big, magnificent Art Deco statehouse he built as a kind of monument to himself when he was governor.
00:12:48.980Yeah, kind of wild to build a monument while you're alive.
00:12:51.260And then it also immediately kind of turns into a mausoleum.
00:13:43.000He did do all the things that he said he was going to do, but he did it in a corrupt fashion and basically leveled, as the journalist, Eye of Stone said in our film, all the liberties of the republic.
00:13:55.420You know, he was kind of like a Caesar who took charge and thought it was his right to destroy the democratic institutions.
00:14:31.940If you're not in that, if you're not part of that echelon, especially in a traditional area like New Orleans, like Louisiana, then you never really can get to those rungs of that ladder.
00:14:44.240Well, you know, it's really many different states, but certainly there's New Orleans, there's the Catholic South, there's the Protestant North.
00:14:52.180And he's from a wind parish in North Louisiana.
00:14:57.000And was able to articulate the aspirations of people who then surrendered to him and then also had to then pay the price for the kind of dictatorial stuff.
00:15:08.280I mean, he was surrounded by jackbooted state troopers.
00:15:13.780He's eventually killed by the son-in-law of a judge that he fired, got out of his job.
00:15:20.700And so – or so we think because with all, you know, things like that, there's an attached conspiracy theory that maybe he didn't even have a gun.
00:15:32.920Maybe he didn't do anything except confront Huey about this and that bodyguards shot him and the ricocheting bullet in the close quarters of the hallway of the statehouse ricocheted and killed him.
00:15:45.660But, you know, we just don't know 100% what happened.
00:15:50.160But it's one hell of an American story.
00:17:26.120When we say we hold these truths to be self-evident, there was nothing self-evident about what Jefferson was about to say, that all men are created equal.
00:17:34.140No one on earth had made that proposition.
00:18:38.040And happiness did not mean the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning so that you would be virtuous enough – they borrowed from the classical traditions – to earn the right of citizenship.
00:18:50.680And everybody talked to you here as we're working on that virtue, virtue, virtue.
00:18:56.320It's all about the idea that character is destiny.
00:18:59.480John Adams is petrified that there's too much ambition and avarice, too much lust for profit, that we won't be virtuous enough to sustain this republic.
00:19:10.100It's so interesting because they're all the ideas that we wrestle with today, you know?
00:19:14.960So the Declaration is kind of like a love letter to the future in a way.
00:19:23.340Tom Paine, Thomas Paine, an Englishman who came off the boat in Philadelphia, failure and everything, and he contracted dysentery or typhus on the way.
00:19:32.420And he writes this pamphlet that's published in January, early January of 1776.
00:19:38.340At that point, the war has already started at Lexington and Concord the previous April, but nobody's really sure what we're going to do with this rebellion.
00:19:46.820And certainly, independency, as they called it, is not on the mind of everybody.
00:19:51.320But he writes this thing called Common Sense.
00:19:53.340It's this pamphlet, the most important pamphlet in American history, and just comes out and says the king is an ass.
00:20:52.820Sometimes we even now you're challenging the way that I've thought about some of this because it's like and you're in your the documentary does this.
00:21:29.640I think a lot of people don't have a relationship with themselves anymore.
00:21:31.780And so I think when you're not sitting there and thinking and contemplating where you're at and how the world's affecting you and how you can affect the world,
00:21:38.820I think it starts to limit us to just looking at our at our Declaration of Independence almost just as like a receipt of times instead of as a living document, you know, or more like a living will and testament.
00:21:51.740I don't know how it could be said any better than that.
00:21:54.280I think we wear too many things instead of be too many things.
00:21:58.720We wear our faith and use it as a cudgel.
00:22:01.780You know, if there's one thing I learned about making films about the U.S. and us is that there's only us.
00:22:10.020I mean, and people are always creating a them to make an enemy in order to postpone the active work that I have to do, that self-investigation.
00:22:20.000And that's, interestingly enough, that self-reflective sense that I need to improve, you know.
00:22:26.820Mark Twain once said, nothing so needs improving as other people's habits.
00:22:32.580Like, we're always ready to say, man, you should do this differently.
00:22:38.020But we're not willing to, you know, my, I have an ancestor, the Scottish poet Robert Burns, who said,
00:22:44.100oh, would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us.
00:22:48.440And I think that this whole work of not just wearing your ideas like a piece of clothing, a fashion, but absorbing them and living it is the big dynamic.
00:22:59.300So everybody, it is in the interest of an authoritarian to have everybody be a kind of superstitious peasant, right?
00:23:07.320Uneducated, not improving, not in pursuit of happiness and lifelong learning, which is what that, what they all meant.
00:23:16.380That's where the rulers want you there.
00:23:19.420They want you in a place where you're passive, where you're distracted by your things and your whatever and this scandal and stuff like that.
00:23:26.960Eleanor Roosevelt once said that great people discuss ideas, average people discuss events, and small minds discuss other people, you know?
00:23:40.320And you realize the extent to which our old culture is based on kind of judgment, not of ourselves, not with the self-reflective scrutiny that all of our religious teachings,
00:23:52.520all of our philosophy, and all of the common sense of negotiating this complicated thing that we call our lives suggest,
00:23:59.840but abandoning that in favor of, I can tell you what you're doing and I can tell you what he's doing wrong,
00:24:06.560but, oh no, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm fine here, you know, I believe this.
00:24:10.660Well, it's nice, it's nice to reflect, because it's fucking painful to look at yourself.
00:27:28.380I just want to keep my head down and not be bothered by it.
00:27:30.760So there's a constant set of interesting struggles that we don't tend to do with.
00:27:36.940I think we don't want to accept the violence of the revolution because we think it might diminish those big ideas we've been talking about.
00:30:28.140So they had their individual interests, we call that states' rights, but they had the federal connection that protected them in their general rights.
00:30:35.900So the great irony is the American Revolution destroys their Confederacy.
00:30:42.360But what's going on here is people are wanting to move west.
00:30:45.820The British win the French and Indian War.
00:32:46.460But then, as these taxes happened, as the decision to not allow colonists to go into Indian land was enforced, they just suddenly started coming together.
00:32:59.520And there's committees of correspondence, the Sons of Liberty, there's resistance.
00:33:15.620And so, what happens is, eventually, as always happens, and this happens in history so much, is that I tell you, you know, you're acting radical.
00:33:25.860You may not be acting radical, but then you start acting more radical.
00:34:22.600They've got their most powerful navy on earth.
00:34:24.880But they can't, they can't move out because there's just thousands of patriots who've rushed from Rhode Island and Connecticut and New Hampshire.
00:34:33.080As well as Massachusetts towns to the defense of Boston.
00:34:36.520And they ring them and they've got them in.
00:34:39.060And then it begins a war that is going to take six and a half years until Yorktown.
00:34:46.660And any time you're in telling a story, you have to remember that everyone who's in it doesn't know how it's going to turn out.
00:34:55.760And that if you're a good storyteller, you have people tune in, pay attention to the story, because you think it may not turn out the way you know it did.
00:36:22.260And what could be more important, and particularly today when we feel like we're divided, so divided, well, you go, well, we're pretty divided back then.
00:36:29.920And we were pretty divided during the Vietnam.
00:36:31.640We were really divided during the Great Depression.
00:36:34.120And we were really, you know, in America first.
00:36:35.940And we were really divided during the Civil War.
00:38:39.660All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink in the Ohio River or make a track in the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.
00:38:49.900If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.
00:38:55.300We are a nation of free men who will live forever or die by suicide.
00:39:07.700Then you are headed towards that self-destruction that Lincoln's talking about.
00:39:12.820You want to figure out what we share in common, this corny sort of civic virtue, civic energy that comes from the Declaration of Independence, like how you can work together to do it.
00:39:25.080And, you know, a lot of people who are unbelievable citizens, it's like they go to the school board meeting.
00:39:31.340They participate in, you know, I live in New England and we have a town meeting.
00:39:36.180And, you know, sometimes the biggest decision is whether to buy a new pumper for the fire department.
00:39:51.960Then, you know, if you like the abstraction of disagreement and violence and all that sort of stuff where suddenly just because your feed tells you one thing that somebody's an enemy, then you're lost.
00:40:05.300But if you look across the room and you say, you know, I don't share in common that much with somebody who comes from Louisiana and lives in Tennessee.
00:40:13.360I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Delaware and Michigan and now I've lived in New England for the last, you know, 54 years.
00:40:26.720We share a love of that process, the pursuit of happiness.
00:40:30.780God, yeah, it comes so much back to like your own integrity with yourself, you know, and I think it's interesting whenever like as I'm watching your documentary, it's like you learn that like even as you were saying earlier that this is like the first time that people thought of themselves as not under rule.
00:40:51.080But like it's almost like we were away at summer camp or something and you kind of your imagination started to bloom.
00:42:49.820It's going to take that self-examination.
00:42:51.700It's going to take that self-criticism, which we're so unwilling to do.
00:42:55.180It's rather criticize the other than ourselves rather than to assume the discipline necessary to have the virtue, getting better as a human being, to be a citizen.
00:43:09.800You will devolve back to that state where when somebody comes in who is acting as an authoritarian, you'll go, fine, take it over for me, Mussolini.
00:43:38.580You know, you don't—it's like two frogs sitting in the boiling pot of water, and somebody says—they're still saying to each other,
00:43:46.460I really like a hot bath, you know, until they're cooked, right?
00:43:50.460And so at some point, what Jefferson is saying is, do not be so disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable,
00:43:59.800meaning do not put up with the yoke of authoritarianism.
00:44:05.240You know, be more active as a citizen and understand that that person that you disagree with, we want them to disagree.
00:44:12.940Remember, we're the first country on earth that didn't establish a religion.
00:44:16.720Like, almost all of the wars that are fought are over some interpretations of religion or some other such thing that devolves from that.
00:44:26.020And we were saying, make no notice of it.
00:44:28.320Thomas Jefferson himself said, if my neighbor believes in 20 gods or no god at all, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
00:44:36.800And like, New York and Pennsylvania have got—worked into their state constitutions, just not paying attention to a particular religion means you are free from all the tyrannical thou shall rather than this is.
00:44:53.260Like, the thing that you're talking about, that individual responsibility—
00:45:33.660You want to have a lot—you want to tolerate lots of different points of view.
00:45:37.700And right now, we've gotten to the place where we don't even want to listen to another point of view.
00:45:42.040We only want to hear the information that, you know, sat us.
00:45:45.540Oh, yeah, that's what I agree with, you know?
00:45:47.200And not sort of expand ourselves and say, I can listen to someone that I totally disagree with, and I don't have to then make that person the enemy.
00:45:57.780That's the key to the American experiment.
00:46:06.100It takes me out of this, like—I don't get too caught up in the, like, us and them thing, but it puts me back in a place of, like, oh, yeah, well, I'm here with a purpose, right?
00:46:16.360Like, it gives you a purpose of, like, being a citizen, of being a human, right?
00:46:20.560Of, like, a Rubik's Cube that will never be solved, right?
00:46:25.140It's like, I don't need to win, right?
00:46:27.480Like, but I do need to keep playing and also be a good competitor and an earnest competitor.
00:46:35.720And, yeah, it just—it puts it more back on you, right?
00:46:39.440It makes the mirror a little bit stronger.
00:47:01.780Adams survived him by a couple of hours.
00:47:03.740But just before he died, he said, you know, I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
00:47:09.920And so we shall go on—so we will go on and shall go on—puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of mankind.
00:47:20.420And I love that idea that's puzzled and prospering.
00:47:22.720I gave a commencement address last year at Brandeis University, and I was talking about how we're so preoccupied with these binaries, you know, red state, blue state, Democrat, Republican, young, old, black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, east, west, north, south.
00:48:24.940I mean, there are a group of Native Americans, and I'm very pleased to report that there are more Native Americans now in the United States, not in the best of circumstances in many cases, but more than there were when the American Revolution took place.
00:48:39.460However, they do have a legitimate claim to saying, you know, we're the real Americans.
00:48:45.480And so all of this stuff in the revolution then has to parse that.
00:49:13.640And then we have all this pressure from all these big superpowers like Britain that owns us and France that is sorry that they lost us and Spain that wants that gots the bottom and they wants more.
00:49:26.280And the Dutch who used to be in there, you know, New York was this was a Dutch city.
00:49:37.240I mean, so you've got this overlay of all of these cultures competing here.
00:49:42.160And so the revolution is the place where we coalesce.
00:49:45.380We bring together the best ideas that had ever been thought in humankind about human organization amongst a huge variety of people.
00:49:56.280And we've made it work for at least 249 years.
00:49:59.660And I'm super proud to be an American.
00:50:02.220I mean, with the exception of one film, all of the things I've done have been about American history because I'm trying to ask this deceptively simple question.
00:50:13.120Who are these strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans?
00:50:16.880And what does an investigation of the past, that particular moment, that particular person, that particular war, tell us about not only where we were back then, but where we are now and where we may be going?
00:50:26.960This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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00:51:40.300Let's look at a little bit of the minutia.
00:51:42.180So just to make, just to like add, just to get into a little bit of the storytelling, to add some like blush to the cheeks of this conversation, what about Paul Revere's ride?
00:52:13.920He didn't say the Redcoats are coming or the Redcoats are coming.
00:52:16.900What he yelled was the regulars are coming out.
00:52:20.820The regulars are coming out, meaning the regular British army that has been stationed in Boston for whatever it is, almost two years, are coming out.
00:53:04.980So the British army is in there, in the colonies.
00:53:06.920They're in Boston because there's so much particularly.
00:53:08.620Only in Boston or in all the colonies?
00:53:10.260They've got a presence to protect the stuff, but they are in Boston particularly to try to put down the resistance to their taxes, the resistance to that.
00:53:22.000So the people realize that the military is there kind of against them.
00:53:42.760And when they got to the point when General Gage imported these number of ships from Halifax, Nova Scotia to go to occupy Boston, not to protect it, but to police it.
00:53:52.420And then you hear the voices from the past saying, a standing army in peacetime, this is horrible, you know, like that.
00:53:58.420And the audience in Telluride erupted because they're going, wait, that's happening now.
00:54:03.860So that's where history can be your best teacher to go, wait a second, did we just get, did they just raise the temperature on that pot I'm sitting in?
00:54:23.720They just had a thing in Britain the other day where people showed up and I don't know if it was half a million, a million people showed up to support like the British, just what it, what being British.
00:55:22.980You get involved in a war and then after the war, you get involved in negotiations and you just wonder.
00:55:28.400We were, we were making our film on Vietnam and we were introducing a Marine who just did some amazing thing, got a chest full of medals, just, you know, almost the Congressional Medal of Honor, just amazing stuff for his action.
00:55:40.540And we kept pressing him, wanting to hear the stuff.
00:55:42.940And he finally looked up and he said, it's the history of the world, meaning warfare.
00:55:49.340And you would think that at some point we get to a place, all of our religious teachings, all of them are just big tributaries flowing into the same sea, do unto others as you would have others do unto you, that we would just jump from the argument to the negotiation and the solution rather than what we seem to have.
00:56:13.020And I'm guilty of focusing as, you know, I tell other things, but, you know, history of country music, history of jazz music, baseball, all of that stuff, but I focus on Civil War and World War II and Vietnam and the American Revolution now because they're so instructive about human behavior, bad, of course, but also really good, these ennobling ideas that we've been talking about, first ever, which is why I feel comfortable saying it's the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ.
00:56:42.000And yet the violence is unnecessary and certainly political violence is unnecessary and certainly reactive violence.
00:56:53.260Well, that because they did that, then we have to do that.
00:56:56.140And it's, you realize that it's like the Old Testament, an eye for an eye, you know, and you realize you keep going with that and everybody's blind.
00:57:28.200And that's what, in a democratic society, which Britain is, you get a chance to, you know, as our First Amendment says, it's, it's, the government will establish no religion.
00:57:40.500You have freedom of the press and freedom of assembly.
00:57:43.380You have the ability to, these are the hallmarks, the number one thing.
00:57:47.800After the constitution was done, everybody said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, time out.
00:57:53.040We've got an operating manual, but we're not going to go forward in this unless we get a bill of rights that tells us what, you know, that, that enshrines the things we just fought for.
00:58:34.680So you realize that's the sacrifice that people have made in order for us to be able to hold a demonstration, express our point of view nonviolently, and to be able to tolerate lots of ideas.
00:58:51.100I mean, you can't say we're only going to tolerate our ideas and everybody else who doesn't agree with us are therefore bad, you know.
00:59:00.620I mean, across the street from us, on 23rd Street in New York City, where we are right now, is the headquarters of the Communist Party of the United States that has as much right to its office space as the Republican National Committee or the Democratic National Committee.
00:59:24.000The American Communist Party has its headquarters across the street.
00:59:29.960And they have had their headquarters there for decades and decades and decades.
00:59:34.740Well, you know, what's funny to me, Ken, is that it feels like just being a regular American that's hopeful, you're almost a communist these days in our own country.
00:59:43.540Well, that's, you know what I'm saying, that that idea, that's what I think is interesting about these, let me just start here.
00:59:50.840The Unite the Kingdom rally was a massive, and this says, far-right demonstration held in London on September 13, 2025, organized by anti-immigrant activist Tommy Robinson.
01:00:00.200The event attracted between 110,000 and 100,000 people, making one of the largest protests in British history.
01:00:04.900The rally was built as a free speech festival, and the demonstration featured chants like, we want our country back.
01:00:13.320What I think is interesting about this, it's people who have a set of beliefs and ideals of what British life is, right?
01:00:21.760And history is to them, and that they want to speak out for it, right?
01:00:26.060That's one thing that I thought was pretty cool, you know?
01:00:31.400I mean, I remember when I was growing up.
01:00:33.140Well, it's people tweeting with their feet, right?
01:00:34.720I said this the other day in a conversation, but it's like, it's not people sitting in the fucking background yelling stuff or screaming or, you know, but it's people who are actually out, right?
01:00:45.400And this, this to me is always inspiring because it's, you're putting your face out there with your voice, right?
01:00:52.360And you're putting your feet out there with your voice, and that to me feels like a real tweet.
01:00:58.560Any, any, they could be left-wing, they could be right-wing.
01:01:14.940And especially, I mean, Britain was predominantly white, probably, I would guess, until they took in slaves and Native Americans, I'm not sure.
01:01:23.600Or Caucasian, I guess they would have called it at the time, or European?
01:01:25.800They were European, but they're also a mixture of lots of European cultures, and they, their whole worldwide economy was dependent on slavery, mostly in the Caribbean, as the Spanish had it, mostly in South and Central America.
01:01:41.320And then we had it in the southern states.
01:01:44.820It was, slavery was legal in the colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia.
01:01:50.540And then, one by one, the northern states sort of realized it.
01:01:54.160And George Washington freed his slaves.
01:02:05.080And yet it was an impossible, what's the right word?
01:02:09.660It was a, they're making too much money not to give it up.
01:02:12.040And it's only later in the 19th century, when the abolitionist movement comes, we should abolish slavery, that then you find slaveholders now making really big arguments about how, oh, they're inferior, they're children, they can't handle freedom, and all of this stuff.
01:02:28.660All of which they, they didn't really express.
01:02:31.640Thomas Jefferson did a little bit in his notes on the state of Virginia.
01:02:34.400It's very, very complicated, but we're always looking for a way to say that some people are more equal than others.
01:02:43.700And if you believe in equality, that's not the case.
01:02:48.200That if you believe in the second line of the declaration, which is our catechism, then it's everybody.
01:02:56.240And that people have the ability to rise according to their abilities and opportunities.
01:03:03.440And you try to provide as many opportunities for as many people.
01:03:07.580But the minute you transform this civic, you know, just explosion, this beautiful civic compact that we have and racialize it, it can only be white, it can only be black, and it can only be this, it can only be that, it's already lost.
01:03:24.080It is not one thing or one type of people.
01:03:29.240But history does that, like, it's kind of interesting because it's like, even whenever they were declaring America, right, and deciding what it meant to be American, and they were, in this period that you investigated in the American Revolution documentary, it's like they were saying this is who we are, right?
01:03:52.540At the same time, they're also colonizing.
01:03:56.000It's just, it's interesting when colonization and human and being human started to sort of, I don't know, do you know what I'm kind of saying?
01:04:10.780It's the difference between the ideal and the human possibility at any given moment.
01:04:15.580And what the founders were saying is that in order to have a government that operates, not only do all people have to be created equal, but you have to be pursuing this self-examination.
01:04:27.260We should be interested in improving ourselves.
01:04:30.520So when Thomas Jefferson wrote All Men Are Created Equal, he meant all white men of property free of debt.
01:04:36.220He did not mean a majority of the white population of the colonies, women.
01:04:40.120He did not mean the 500,000 free and enslaved African-Americans.
01:04:44.180He did not mean the native peoples both intermixed with people and part of the rest of the continent.
01:04:50.480And remember, we didn't say when we started our Congress and when we started our army, we didn't say the Eastern Seaboard Congress.
01:04:56.960We didn't say the Eastern Seaboard Army.
01:04:59.100We said the Continental Congress, the Continental Army.
01:05:02.000We knew where we were going, and we knew who we were going to run over to get it.
01:05:06.160And even when the Constitution was started, women were let out.
01:05:09.140One of the leading women of Philadelphia, Elizabeth William Powell, met Benjamin Franklin as he came out in mid-September in 1787 from Independence Hall,
01:05:19.180where they had been figuring out the Constitution and getting it down, and said,
01:05:23.620what have you created, Dr. Franklin, a monarchy or a republic?
01:05:26.560And he said, a republic if you can keep it, meaning we're going to do this.
01:05:31.120Now, when they went into it in 1776, they were not after a democracy.
01:05:36.040Democracy meant mob rule to a lot of people.
01:05:38.780They were interested in an aristocracy of the elites, right?
01:05:42.760But in order to win the war, they had to enlist not the sturdy militiamen who often left to go plant a crop or often left to go harvest that crop,
01:05:58.080The Continentals, the regular army of the United States of America, the Continental Army, were teenagers,
01:06:06.260second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance, felons, ne'er-do-wells, recent immigrants from Germany and England, and they won the war.
01:06:15.040And so as they're beginning, the dogs won the war, and as they're beginning, and we follow them, as you'll see, you know, in this story,
01:06:23.80014-year-old kid from Boston named John Greenhorn, 15-year-old kid Joseph Plum Martin from Connecticut,
01:06:28.540you know, a 10-year-old girl from Yorktown who's a refugee all of the war.