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Nonfiction
Ken Burns Brings the War of Independence to the Unruly Present
In “The American Revolution,” an illustrated companion to a new documentary series, the conflict is global, gruesome and tearing us apart.
An 1850s depiction of the removal of a statue of King George III from Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan.Credit...Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, via Alamy
Ted Widmer
Ted Widmer is the author of “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington.” A book he edited, “The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text,” will be published by the Library of America next year.
Nov. 10, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
**THE A…
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Nonfiction
Ken Burns Brings the War of Independence to the Unruly Present
In “The American Revolution,” an illustrated companion to a new documentary series, the conflict is global, gruesome and tearing us apart.
An 1850s depiction of the removal of a statue of King George III from Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan.Credit...Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, via Alamy
Ted Widmer
Ted Widmer is the author of “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington.” A book he edited, “The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text,” will be published by the Library of America next year.
Nov. 10, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: An Intimate History, by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns
An important historical anniversary is coming in 2026, and that can mean only one thing. Ken Burns will be ready with a PBS documentary (airing this month). As Ryan Gosling sang in “Barbie,” “Can you feel the Kenergy?”
Burns is also ready with a book, and it is a doorstop. “The American Revolution: An Intimate History” clocks in at 581 pages, with more than 500 illustrations. That’s a lot of Kenergy.
Brought forth with his frequent collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward, the book covers a vast terrain, chronologically and geographically. It is a sprawling canvas in every sense, including its generous use of paintings and maps.
There are six chapters written by Ward, corresponding to the six two-hour episodes that will be aired in the documentary. The first begins in May 1754 — 21 years before the Battles of Lexington and Concord — and the last chapter goes from “May 1780-Onward.” In other words, to now.
The authors are not wrong to suggest that all of American history goes back to these seminal events, including the French and Indian War that preceded and led to the Revolution. The founders, too, were conscious that something profoundly important had happened, even before the first shots were fired in Lexington. John Adams used the word “revolution” to describe a determination, forged “in the minds of the people,” to try a new form of government, rooted in the people themselves.
It required courage and eloquence and valor to win the battles that followed, and that, naturally, is the stuff of compelling television. But it can be daunting, in these toxic times, to approach any historical topic — let alone one as ripe for misinterpretation as the American Revolution — without setting off a trip wire. Was the Revolution the birth of the greatest nation ever known? Or a deeply racist enterprise, fought by slave owners to protect their property?
Ward and Burns are right to believe that the moment is favorable for a reappraisal. Scholars have been doing remarkable research on the Revolution in recent decades, correcting older histories that presented the founders as cerebral men of towering brilliance who simply willed the country into existence, like an Enlightenment parlor game.
We now know more about the Revolution’s violence, and the equally lethal effects of disease, especially smallpox. As Ward writes, the virus that had “scarred, blinded or killed hundreds of thousands of Native Americans” now ravaged both the British and the American armies.
Americans were fiercely divided as they fought the British (who were also divided). A substantial number of Americans — perhaps a fifth — did not want the Revolution to succeed at all. They included African Americans who sought their freedom under the British flag; but many African Americans also fought for the American flag. Native Americans fought on both sides as well, as did many of those who numbered among the constant stream of immigrants. One of them, Thomas Paine, called America “a blank sheet to write upon.”
These internal fissures are a good foundation for a new look at the Revolution, especially today. The Americans of 1776 bickered and saw evil conspiracies everywhere. They argued over health policy, with some leaders, including George Washington, ordering inoculation against smallpox, while others were understandably terrified to risk exposure to the disease. In other words, they were much like us.
Ward and Burns have incorporated some of this recent research, to good effect. Their narrative is interrupted six times, by interventions from well-known historians. Vincent Brown reasserts how the Revolution’s promises of freedom were emphatically denied to most African Americans; Philip J. Deloria explores how militias that fought the British also massacred Native Americans, splitting the skulls of women and children with mallets and axes; Maya Jasanoff reminds us of the stubborn presence of Loyalists, wishing that “the most unnatural, unprovoked rebellion” had never happened. They nearly got their wish. Washington marveled at his own victory, and wrote that it was “little short of a standing miracle.”
These essays bring sharpness. They also create a mild tension, at odds with the more lyrical tone that Ward and Burns bring to their narrative. For them, the Revolution was ultimately a difficult struggle, to be sure, but also “our epic song, our epic verse.”
Image
At the same time, the story benefits from the ways in which it is not too academic. Ward and Burns offer a visual feast, conveying the full continental grandeur of North America. We see the familiar battlegrounds — Bunker Hill, Saratoga, Yorktown — but the story also ranges into the deep interior, and toward Canada and the Caribbean.
The wide angle helps to promote another recent strain of research, by showing the complexity of a broader “Atlantic World” in which ideas of political liberty, maritime commerce and the right to enslave others jostled against one another, uneasily.
The conflict was truly global. Ward and Burns highlight the role of the Hessian soldiers who fought for the British and describe the French warships that came to the aid of the rebels; Brown paints the predicament of African Americans into the wider context of slave revolts in the West Indies; and the scholar Stephen Conway notes in his essay that the Revolution was only one front in a constantly changing imperial calculus that included chess moves in Spanish Florida and even in South Asia, where the British were expanding their influence at the same moment. Cornwallis, the British general who lost at Yorktown, later became governor-general of India.
Despite the book’s girth, some topics are treated hastily. We learn why New Englanders were irritated by British taxes, but spend less time considering why they clung tenaciously to their liberties. The reasons related to their long memories of self-government in matters both political and ecclesiastical; Bostonians particularly hated the way that British authorities abused search warrants, a topic of growing relevance in today’s ICE age.
Still, such lapses are rare and do not detract from the fact that the book and, no doubt, its companion film will effectively ground the coming national conversation about our origins. We can’t avoid the American Revolution, so we might as well face it squarely. This hefty volume does just that, and reminds us how, against all odds, a fractious people came together in the first place. Let’s hold that thought, and see if we can get through 2026 in one piece.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: An Intimate History | By Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns | Knopf | 581 pp. | $80
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