[.article__paragraph--leading]Ken Burns is an American filmmaker who has produced close to forty major documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle US history and culture. His most recent project, The American Revolution, co­directed with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, premiered on PBS in November 2025. Plough’s Joy Marie Clarkson sat down with Burns to talk about the questions that guide his work.[.article__paragraph--leading]

Plough: Tell me about the American flag on the couch behind you.

Ken Burns: What you see is not a flag, it’s a blanket. It’s a Navajo blanket. It has for me extraordinarily deep and complicated meanings because I like to think the histories that I’ve pursued in my own filmmaking have a depth and texture and richness beyond the superficial – like this blanket. To have a Navajo blanket in the shape of the flag of the people who spend a good deal of their time dispossessing not only the Navajo but other Native tribes is an interesting thing. Native Americans fight disproportionately for this country, more than any other group, and that comes out in our recent documentary.

One story that stands out to me is something that we found in a list of things in an old archive. In the record, it says, “Rebecca Tanner: lost five sons fighting for the Patriot cause.” She was a Mohican woman, which would put her probably in North Central Connecticut. Many Native Americans had fought with the British during what we call the French and Indian War, hoping to forestall what they thought was an inevitable move west. And many Native peoples were already coexisting or had even assimilated with the European colonists in what is the original footprint of the thirteen colonies. And I think that’s the case with Mrs. Tanner’s sons, who were fighting in large measure because they hoped that by participating in that revolution they might gain the kind of freedoms that were implied and promised, and might also be able to reclaim some of their land.

It is complicated and bittersweet in the way that most of life is, and we tend to fail ourselves and our posterity by giving a sort of superficial, Madison Avenue version of our past when the real thing is much more interesting, more compelling, and at the end of the day, much more inspiring than the regulated history some would like to promote.

Much of your work focuses on these little snippets or portraits of ordinary lives, lives that are otherwise invisible to history. Why is this important to you?

Most of the history we’re taught is top down. It is the story of Great Men, capital G, capital M. And in our films, we try to tell the story of those familiar faces, the boldface names, if you will, but to give them dimension, not perfection. Nobody’s perfect. George Washington never told a lie? Please! We want to make him dimensional and relatable.

But we complement that with a bottom-up style. And I think that’s really important. We fill the story with scores of other, more unfamiliar faces. In the case of the American Revolution, that means women, teenagers, the poor, the free and enslaved African Americans, Native peoples, both those assimilated and coexisting and those resisting on the borders. I want people to understand who the “enemy” is, what it meant to be a loyalist, what it was like to be a soldier in the British Army, or a German soldier.

And together, the totality gives you a more nuanced and complicated portrait, but one that’s ultimately much more relatable. Viewers can say to themselves, “I recognize that person.” Or, “I find in this story something closer to me.”

And we want to make even a person like George Washington more understandable. Viewers can accept, with all the exhilaration that comes with it, the idea that without this person, we don’t have a country. It’s very rare that you can say that about anybody. And yes, he was flawed: he owned 577 human beings. You can’t excuse that away. He made some pretty bad battlefield decisions. But he’s also somebody who at the height of his military power gave it up, at the height of his political power gave it up, setting in motion the most extraordinary aspect of our democracy, which has been the peaceful transfer of power.

What is the question you are most exploring in your work and documentaries?

The question I’ve asked in my professional life is “Who are we? Who are these strange and complicated people who call themselves Americans? And what does an investigation of the past tell us about not only where we’ve been and where we are, but, importantly, where we may be going?” You may never answer the question, but you can deepen it. The American Revolution goes back to our origin story as a country and asks those essential questions. Where do you come from? Who are your parents? What was your early life like? I think it’s helpful to have a complex and realistic version of our past.

This word “liberty” had an incredible effect. Why would anybody want to give up the benefits of being a subject of the British constitutional monarchy? Most of everyone’s wealth, education, prosperity, and literacy came from that colonial relationship. Why would you give up those benefits for freedom and democracy, ideas never tried before in human history? At the heart of the American experiment is possibility. At the heart is risk. At the heart of it is this willingness to be this new thing, a citizen.

It’s not hard to be a subject. You’re under authoritarian rule and you just put up with stuff. But to be a citizen is to assume responsibility, to assume the pursuit of happiness, which the Founders understood not as the acquisition of things, but the pursuit of lifelong learning. Lifelong learning made you more virtuous, and the more virtuous you were, the more possibility that you could begin to bear the responsibilities of citizenship and to be able, if not to answer, then to ask more authentically those essential questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? What is my purpose? Where am I going?

One of the things you highlight in The American Revolution is the extent to which the Revolutionary War was a civil war. The United States of America has a great history of disunity. What brings us together? When do we see unity?

We come together usually after periods of great division. So, you must ask yourself: How central is division to the progress that we make? We were way more divided during our Revolution than we are now; way more divided during the Civil War; way more divided in Reconstruction, the mostly misunderstood period after the Civil War.

Periods of great disunity are often followed by incredible progress. The post-Civil War period brought amendments to the Constitution like the thirteenth, which outlawed slavery, and the fourteenth and fifteenth, which expanded the rights to include all citizens and all people who were born in the United States. But there is never any kind of permanence to these moments of progress. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, born out of the struggle of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, are now being dismantled. We rarely come together in uncomplicated ways for long. You’d like to look to a moment like 9/11, when we supposedly came together, but we almost immediately came apart.

I’m interested in these gigantic conflicts like the Revolution that produce something as spectacularly interesting as this idea that people, for the first time in human history, could govern themselves. It wasn’t just the aristocracy that pushed this forward, but ordinary people who debated over the ratification of the Constitution and the subsequent Bill of Rights. It is one of the most active moments in the history of humanity of people coming together in a civic way to create something. But did they agree? No, not at all.

In the compromises of the Constitution, there was the perpetuation of slavery, even though it had just been proclaimed eleven years earlier that “all men are created equal.” And yet saying these things began to open the door to permit even the people who knew that it wasn’t about them to see a path forward. Women, Native peoples, free and enslaved black people, and the poor understood that this was the opening salvo in battles that they could fight to make the words truer and less hypocritical. So, for me, in American history, the best sometimes comes out of the worst and sometimes the worst comes out of the best.

Is America the greatest nation in the world?

While I was promoting the film – not in the film – I said that the American Revolution was the most important event since the birth of Christ. I said that to provoke people to think, to offer other alternatives, to argue in a civil way about it. But the superlative that is in the film is that the Revolution is the most consequential revolution in history, whether or not that makes us the greatest country. But I believe that we are, for all the flaws we may have.

But you cannot remain exceptional or be the best if you’re not constantly improving yourself. If you’re Tom Brady, you don’t win your first Super Bowl and go, “OK, I’m the greatest player that’s ever been. I don’t have to do anything.” It’s not like that. In fact, Brady works harder than ever for twenty years to maintain that. And I think Americans do really well when they are liberated from the oppression of this idea of our own exceptionalism. And when we become too certain of it, in that certainty, we make enemies.

I like to say that I’ve made films about the US for the last fifty years, but I’ve also made films about us – that lowercase, two-letter plural pronoun – and all of the majestic complexity of contradiction and controversy of the US. That’s been a magnificent space. We say we are entitled to the pursuit of happiness. I think that we’re saved by the fact that we have these words that remind us we’re in the process of becoming. We’re not already there. You can argue about happiness, but it’s actually pursuit, a lifelong search, that matters most. Eleven years later in the Constitution’s preamble, we say “a more perfect union” as if we are not there yet, and we have an obligation to strain toward that more perfect union.

I think it makes us an unusually restless and curious bunch. And that drivenness, that work ethic, can incubate less attractive habits: love of money, love of guns, making enemies. There’s room for improvement. But I could lay out, starting with the Declaration and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, 250 years of extraordinary contributions to world history that have benefited not just the United States but all of us. Everything from putting men on the moon, to the interstate highway system, the GI Bill, the Marshall Plan, and the rebuilding of Europe after the Second World War.

We can be the greatest and be problematic and difficult and have our things that we need to work on. I don’t think we would be the greatest without those things. I think the notion of heroes as being perfect is ridiculous. We inherit from the Greeks the concept of heroism, and their heroes aren’t perfect. Their heroes are having negotiations within themselves, sometimes wars within themselves over their strengths and their weaknesses. Achilles had his hubris and his heel to match his great strengths.

We look at these stories not as examples of perfection but of imperfections as well. And what makes the American system so interesting is in this idea of becoming.

One of your earliest documentaries was about baseball. Do you think baseball captures something about the American spirit?

Yeah, it does. It’s still the greatest game that’s ever been invented, even though it’s no longer the national pastime. It’s the only American sport in which the defense has the ball. It’s the only sport in which the person scores, not the ball, the puck, or whatever. It’s got incredible rules, but there is not one ballpark which is exactly the same as another, whereas every single basketball court, every hockey rink, every football field is the same dimensions and cannot be anything but that.

There’s a funny combination of things that reflect us. And for a time, baseball was this thing that united us, and I still think it does. You get together at a ballgame and you sing a couple of times together. Nobody asks you who you voted for. Nobody asks you why you’re rooting for that team or rooting for the other team. You have a sense of community that offers things. And I would also suggest, as a baseball chauvinist, that when you tell a story about basketball or football, it goes right to the action. On the football field, Joe Montana threw a pass to Jerry Rice and we won, or Michael Jordan hit a three-pointer at the buzzer and we won. But a baseball story starts with “my mom took me” or “my dad took me,” and then you describe the action. It’s about who you see it with. It reflects on a sense of your own experience in the continuity of your family, as well as your community, your team, your identity. And it is a hell of a good game!

I think it’s been a good thing to accompany us. I saw our baseball documentary series as a sequel to our Civil War series because the first real progress in civil rights after the Civil War and after the collapse of Reconstruction was when Jack Roosevelt Robinson, the grandson of an enslaved person, made his way to first base at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947. It’s a long time after the Civil War. But that’s the great moment in the history of baseball. And to this day, one of the most moving moments in all of baseball is that on every April 15 players and coaches and managers all wear the same number, 42. Mariano Rivera, the great relief pitcher for the New York Yankees, was the last person to wear that number, and he had chosen it because it was Jackie Robinson’s number. And when he retired, the number was retired except on April 15, when we all become number 42. It’s a very democratic, very American, way of saying, “I am Spartacus.” Are we willing to shoulder the kinds of things that move us forward as a nation? Burdens like the one that Jackie Robinson carried, having to be the first person of color in the modern age to be in Major League Baseball?