{"id":177794,"date":"2025-09-29T15:05:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T15:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/177794\/"},"modified":"2025-09-29T15:05:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T15:05:07","slug":"whyy-to-preview-ken-burns-american-revolution-doc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/177794\/","title":{"rendered":"WHYY to preview Ken Burns\u2019 \u2018American Revolution\u2019 doc"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Camden and Cherry Hill to Trenton and the Jersey Shore, what about life in New Jersey do you want WHYY News to cover? Let us know.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

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.\n<\/p>\n

But documentary filmmaker Ken Burns says you don\u2019t know the half of it.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cOur Revolution is smothered in gallant, bloodless myth,\u201d Burns said.\n <\/p>\n

\u201cThe main figures are just marble statues. We don\u2019t know all of the hundreds of subsidiary characters that make up this story,\u201d he said. \u201cFrom 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\u2019re central to this.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Burns and his filmmaking partners Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt have spent the last 10 years crafting a 12-hour documentary series, \u201cThe American Revolution,\u201d premiering on WHYY-TV and other PBS television outlets beginning Nov. 16.\n<\/p>\n

Burns will give a sneak peak of the film on Oct. 9<\/a>, 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\u2019s \u201cFresh Air<\/a>.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

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.\n<\/p>\n

The Navy 250 Homecoming celebration is seen as a precursor to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence<\/a> next summer.\n<\/p>\n

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.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThe urgency comes from our own curiosity, not from any external political exigencies that may be going on,\u201d he said. \u201cThe semiquincentennial was on no one\u2019s mind. Not mine, not anyone else\u2019s. We got in several years working on the project and thought, \u2018You know? We\u2019re going to finish sometime in \u201925.\u2019\u201d
\n\"TheThe crew of \u201cThe American Revolution\u201d shooting a scene of patriot camp followers re-enactors in New Jersey. (Courtesy of PBS)\n<\/p>\n

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.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s so much popular mythology about the topic and actually very little real understanding of what happened,\u201d she said. \u201cIt 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.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From Camden and Cherry Hill to Trenton and the Jersey Shore, what about life in New Jersey do…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":177795,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,92482,115022,1691,134,344,115023,115024],"class_list":{"0":"post-177794","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-camden","11":"tag-camden-new-jersey","12":"tag-documentary","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-philadelphia-250","16":"tag-whyy"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}