Pod Insights On with Kara Swisher Ken Burns & Sarah Botstein on Finding Hope in America’s Brutal Beginnings About this episode In “The American Revolution,” a new six-part docuseries airing on PBS this week, filmmakers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein take a deep look at the American Revolutionary War and the years before and after. They debunk many of the idealized myths we tell ourselves about the country’s founding and the complex motivations of the men who championed independence. At once critical and patriotic, it examines America’s history in ways the Trump administration would rather paper over.
Kara, Ken and Sarah talk about the ways George Washington was both a deeply flawed man and integral to American victory in the war, how enslaved African Americans looked to the British for hope of freedom, and why it’s unfair to paint all Loyalists to the British Crown as traitors. They also talk about why there’s still a lot of reasons to find hope in America’s origin story today.
Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 11,344 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Democratic socialists don't kill Jews. National socialists kill Jews. I'm not worried about democratic socialists. I'm worried about dictators.
0:20 Kara Swisher? Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guests today are filmmakers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein. The first episode of their six-part documentary series, The American Revolution, premiered last night on PBS and continues running through Friday. It's a deep, nuanced look at the American Revolutionary War and the years before and after. Over the course of 12 hours, Burns and Botstein challenge many of the neat stories we tell ourselves about the country's founding and what motivated the men who fought for America's independence from British rule. It's the kind of nuanced and challenging look at history the Trump administration is actively fighting against. But Burns and Botstein also make it clear there's still plenty of reasons to celebrate
1:05 Kara Swisher? our country's origin story, even if it is way more messy and brutal than we'd like to acknowledge. I am a huge fan of him. He's just a really interesting and complex person himself and quite, I would say, patriotic, one of the more patriotic people I've ever met. I studied history in college, and I really enjoyed this series. I think the most surprising thing to me was the depiction of Washington. For as much as I do understand his complexity, he was even more complex than I thought. And I think it's one of the best depictions of one of America's most important citizens. All right, let's get to my conversation with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein. Our expert question comes from historian, journalist, and author Garrett Graff. This is a good one, so stick around.
2:04 Kara Swisher? Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And The Guardian's not owned by a billionaire, they fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.
2:48 Kara Swisher? Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them ever talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try it today for free at Odoo.com/ Kara. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Kara.
3:31 Speaker 03 Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot, designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And, no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.
4:03 Kara Swisher? Ken and Sarah, thanks for coming on, on.
4:06 Speaker 00 Thank you.
4:07 Speaker 04 Thank you.
4:08 Kara Swisher? So, I'm gonna start with you, Ken. We've talked many times before on a lot of, a range of topics. But in recent interviews, you said the American Revolution was the most important event in all of world history since the birth of Christ. And the revolution certainly was a huge event. But explain why it's more important than the fall of the Roman Empire, the arrival of the Europeans and Americans. You know, tell me what makes it stand apart from your perspective.
4:31 Speaker 00 I was out on the road, talking endlessly about this. And I wasn't trying to be provocative. I was trying to enjoy a conversation which has happened. You know, Ecclesiastes said, "There's nothing new under the sun." And all of a sudden, on July 4th, 1776, there's something new under the sun. People are no longer subjects under authoritarian rule. They have the possibility of being citizens. And this is a big deal. And these are the noblest aspirations of humankind that are expressed in the second sentence of the Declaration and certainly in other parts of this struggle, which is not only a revolution, but a civil war and a global war over the prize of North America. It's been interesting, because it has enjoyed a lot of conversations. I was with a scholar at Brown University. She said, "What about the French Revolution?"
5:16 Speaker 00 And I said, "How did that work out?"
5:18 Kara Swisher? Yeah, stack-rank them.
5:20 Speaker 00 Somebody else said, "The Renaissance." And I said, "Really good point." Right? So, I'm not trying to impose this. There's no test on Tuesday whether, if you check this as the most important event after the birth of Christ, you lose, or win, or whatever it is. I just wanted to have people think about the importance of it, because our revolution is so drowned in kind of Madison Avenue sanitized, fife and drum, treacle. The barnacles of sentimentality have encrusted themselves over every aspect, in large measure, because there's no photograph or newsreel to give a human dimension. We think they can't be like us. They're exactly like us. And I think what Sarah and I have tried for the last 10 years to do is to sort of
6:01 Speaker 00 remove the opacity a little bit and treat it as the fact that we're born in violence, but that these ideas are beyond phenomenal. And that maybe, in times of division, going back to your origin story, maybe helps understand...
6:16 Kara Swisher? Yes, well, perfect timing, by the way.
6:18 Speaker 00 Where we go. 10 years ago, Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. So, we, nobody was talking 250, nobody was talking semi-clincentennial. And so, we've just stumbled upon our good luck here.
6:31 Kara Swisher? Yeah, absolutely. Timing is everything. So Sarah, one of the through lines is, of course, what Ken was talking about was this was different, right? This was so different. And it's throughout the entire thing, and I think you stress it quite a bit. I love your perspective. What was the through line? And did it change over the process of you doing it? Did it start as something else?
6:53 Speaker 04 I mean, I think like any huge revolution, the seeds did change over time. They were figuring it out as they went. I think for me, anyway, some of the debates that the founders had themselves about what should happen next, what were they going to declare independence? Did they need a foreign ally first? What were the rights of the states versus the larger body? These are questions that our founders were debating as the war was brewing, as the war was happening, and when the war was ending. So for me, working on this series actually had the effect of making me feel really deeply patriotic and proud of a lot
7:38 Speaker 04 of our history and begin to understand for myself how young a country we are in some ways and how unlikely it was that we were going to win this war. And so I think the film is a very surprising underdog story that the founders were figuring out as they went too. And some of the great, most important, exciting ideals bubbled to the surface and those inspire us 250 years later in some very important ways.
8:10 Kara Swisher? Sure, but also the situation in the United States is changed while you're doing it. What kind of effect did that have?
8:16 Speaker 04 So I love the fact that these films take a long time to make. The film that I worked on with Ken before this was On the U.S. and the Holocaust. And that film also took a lot of years to make. And the world changed enormously while we were making that film. And the world changed enormously, particularly here at home, while we were making the film. So what kept me up at night was not what was happening around us, but To to actually shut that noise out and get the history right and tell the story so that the film would transcend the moment and tell good history. That doesn't mean there aren't lessons and parallels and echoes.
8:57 Kara Swisher? Well, there's a lot.
8:58 Speaker 04 A lot, right? But that that made the history for me feel more important to get right so that we weren't blowing with the winds of what was happening.
9:07 Kara Swisher? Ken, you've talked about your past opposition to working with war reenactors to make a series. Talk about how your team had to adapt the filming, try to capture the details of the war and make it compelling. People's tastes have changed. You and I have talked about this a lot of how they watch things. And, you know, from the Civil War, that was groundbreaking, the way you did it. But not not the same in this in this watching environment with the impact of the Internet, etc.
9:33 Speaker 00 Right. Yeah, those are a couple of different questions. And and let me just talk about reenactments. I haven't really done. We had made a film in the late 90s on Lewis and Clark. It's two, two hours. There's maybe four minutes of watching people in keel boats or portaging the news or sewing leather buckskin by a campfire, close ups, no faces, or are far away, no faces. And and it worked. It helped us understand what the expedition looked at, an objective view, so that we could then subjectively see what they saw in terms of the natural scenery. But here, I realized with no photographs, we've got no chance in particularly over 12 hours of of understanding it unless I got over myself and, you know, said, we're going to do reenactments, but we're going
10:18 Speaker 00 to do it in a different way. We're not going to have reenactors reenact an event for us. We're going to film them for five or six years in every time of day and night, in every season, in every weather, and to do it impressionistically and to do it so we're not looking at faces, collecting a whole critical mass of hours and hours and hours of this stuff so that we can then use it as we would photographs or paintings in our work to complement the paintings that we do have, the documents that we do have, the drawings that we do have. And that, it works. It actually does something I was So surprised and anxious about it. I decided to do this when I was looking at a map that we'd made for the Vietnam War of the Yedrang Valley and the Central Highlands.
11:03 Speaker 00 I thought, maps will be really important. Maybe you can cover a lot of territory with maps. And this could be the British moving west in Long Island towards Brooklyn. And so, yes, we got all of that stuff, lots of maps, more maps than in all of our other films combined. Some of them are beautiful artistic ones we haven't touched. Some we've just added an arrow, some we've done CGI. You know, sometimes you've got witnesses in Vietnam and you have no first-person voices. Here, you have no witnesses. We had no scholars in Vietnam unless you happened to have been there. And here, we've just got scholars, but 400 voices, read by the finest actors in the world, that bring to life not just the top-down, bold-faced names, which it's important to know who they were and to remove that opacity, but also scores of other people that I had
11:48 Speaker 00 never heard of, and I presume you had never heard of, that make up in totality, the complex, incredible variety of human beings that occupied what we call the 13 British colonies in North America. And that's the exciting thing to have.
12:02 Kara Swisher? Is bringing to four people you don't know. Chisserie is littered with those people, of course, who are critical. So Sarah, one of the things your film makes clear, though, is that the Revolutionary War was a civil war. It was probably our first civil war. The historian Alan Taylor says in your series, quote, "The greatest misconception about the American Revolution is that it was something that unified Americans. The war pitted neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, father against son." Obviously, Ben Franklin is the most famous example of that. And also Native American tribes, and both free and enslaved African-Americans. So, talk about the dividing lines at the time in terms of who supported the separatists versus who sided with the loyalists to the crown, because it wasn't so easy, especially the common people. They were sort of happy to be British citizens in many ways.
12:46 Speaker 04 I mean, one of the really surprising things when you dive into the history is to begin to have empathy and understanding for why you would have been a loyalist. I think Ken talks about this a lot. Loyalists kind of come down to us in history books as cartoonish and silly and traitors, when in fact, you know, probably close to a third of the population potentially, at some point felt like they would be loyalists. The historians in the film sort of say... What does politics have to do with me? This is a violent, scary time. The British are not so terrible to us. It doesn't affect me so personally. Please, I don't want the war in my backyard. I'm afraid. I am afraid for my family. I'm afraid for my community.
13:29 Speaker 04 And so just regular, ordinary people, I think it's very understandable why you would have been loyal to the Crown. And in fact, you know, when the Germans came here, they looked around and went, why are these people rebelling? It's pretty good here. They had it pretty good.
13:45 Kara Swisher? And also, it was the richer class was more into this and had to convince the lower class.
13:50 Speaker 00 It's complicated. There are people that are making money that feel that their wealth and their property has come from the British constitutional monarchy. And of course, the people who want to stay out of it for their families, they don't want a revolution there, is important. But there are also loyalists that are saying, wait a second. And they're forming loyalist regiments that are fighting patriots. They're going to Canada, forming regiments and coming down. We have one loyalist who kills his best friend at the Battle of Bennington, who's stabbing, his best friend is stabbing him, saying, you damn Tory. And he said, I'm obliged to destroy him. It's that kind of intimacy that goes on. And I think the question is really like, what would I have been? Would I have been a loyalist or would I have been a patriot? Would I have been willing to pick up a gun for a cause?
14:35 Kara Swisher? Are each of you, Sarah, what would you?
14:37 Speaker 04 Right, I mean, I think at different times in the war, I think I maybe would have chosen different positions, which is not a wishy-washy thing to say. It's more sort of when the war felt inspiring and worth fighting and when the war felt very scary and maybe not worth it. But I think also to your question, in terms of Native American communities and the Black Free and Enslaved communities, they were making very, very complicated decisions for, I think, very understandable reasons. And again, Putting into context why Native American tribes amongst themselves were split to fight for the patriots or to stay loyal to the Crown because they had been dealing with the British for a long, long time. And then both our side and the Brits were manipulating
15:21 Speaker 04 particularly enslaved African Americans and whoever was going to promise what they thought was the best chance of freedom, which is where you're going to go. And I think that's a very important part of the story.
15:31 Kara Swisher? Yeah. So I want to talk more about Native Americans and African Americans in a bit, but the American Revolution was also a world war, which people probably don't realize. And the British hired Hessian, that's the best known because we've all read that Hessian book as kids from Germany, to fight alongside them. Johnny Tremaine in the Hessian book, the Hessian, I think it's called, the Hessian, and same author. The French, the Dutch and the Spanish all get involved on the side of the Americans despite having their own colonial empires that looked a lot like the British Empire. And it took place, as you noted, all across the world. What drove these other nations into the American Revolution? Just they often get drawn into other things.
16:07 Speaker 00 So the American Revolution is the fourth global war over the prize of North America. So the previous one, the third one, which we call the French and Indian War, Britain is triumphant. The rest of the world calls it the Seven Years' War. Britain's triumphant, but their treasury is depleted. They don't have the resources to protect the colonists who now want to pour over the Appalachian and take Native American lands. They can't protect them. They think about taxation and whatever. And meanwhile, France particularly, but also Spain, they're smarting from the loss of territory to the British. British have Florida. Spain is worried about their holdings around Louisiana and Mississippi.
16:50 Speaker 00 So you have all these players interested in it. And it's an amazing con game that Benjamin Franklin and the other Americans play. They do a Declaration of Independence saying, we really do mean to come together. And then they win a big battle, Saratoga, and then all of a sudden the French are in, all in, $30 billion, Stacey Schiff imagines, in aid. And it's very interesting that a Protestant uprising against
17:16 Speaker 00 Monarchy is going to be joined by a Catholic monarchy. And, you know, that doesn't work out too well for the French after this all happens. They're, they're one of the, the losers, um, not, not big time losers, but losers in the American Revolutionary Battle. But let's go back to the word prize. That means the land. Right. That land has been occupied for 22,000 years by Native Peoples. Um, the 13 colonies are superimposed on land that is originally Native Peoples that for the previous 150 years has been acquired and fought for and ceded and bought in some cases. And there are Native Americans that are completely assimilated. There are Native Americans coexisting with the colonists.
18:01 Speaker 00 It's a very diverse group of people that are living there. You do have Africans, both free and enslaved, that are part of the dynamic of the economies of all the states. It's legal from New Hampshire to Georgia. And then on the western borders, you have Native nations that are anxious about their land, understandably anxious. And they think, as Sarah's suggesting, that the Brits might hold the key to it. They're all, it's all a disaster. Everybody wants to take the prize, whether it's Spain, whether it's Britain, whether it's the French, they want the land. So that land is going no matter what happens. But in the short term, it looks like the people who beat the French and are saying, "We don't want these rebellious colonists coming into your land," might be the people to go with.
18:45 Speaker 00 So on the eastern side of things, the Unites, for example, are, are connected to Americans more. They fight for the Americans. And on the western side, the Seneca and the Cayuga and Onondaga and Tuscarora are more sort of trying to protect pristine lands. So you've got great, huge forces. And what we say in the introduction is that it's a clash over Englishmen, becomes a global war that involves more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American. And you can hear, we are trying to center, we treat Native Americans as them. These, these tribes, the Shawnee and the Delaware are as different from one another as the French are from the Prussians. Why do we just say "them"?
19:27 Speaker 00 They've been on the world scene, both economically and diplomatically, for... Centuries, they know people in France, they know people in Spain, they know people in Great Britain, they've traded with them. And so what we've tried to do is say, this has got a gigantic international dynamic into which you insert this squabble between Englishmen. You won't let us take the land you promised us we'd be able to have. You want to now tax us, and we don't have any representation for those taxes, and we're the least taxed people anywhere, and you're the most taxed, and we're not going to do it. And so all of a sudden, this argument coincides with the Enlightenment, and it gets broken out into universal rights.
20:08 Speaker 00 And so this idea of liberty is now out there for Native Americans and women and enslaved and free blacks to hear and want as well. So you have a kind of rush for that door of the phrase, "All men are created equal." We know what Jefferson meant. But when you say "all," as the conservative scholar Yuval Levin told us, "All is it, all is all, it's over."
20:31 Kara Swisher? Except it's what? It's not. Now, what Ken's referring to, in reality, the elite colonial settlers like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, wanted this land from Native Americans, and they made a, to make a fortune off of it. But 1763, King George III had banned new settlements and speculation into the Appalachians, and they didn't like that. Sarah, in the grand scheme of causes, where did the land rank from your perspective? Was it the primaries? Because we always think it was taxes, of course, because, again, we have this mythology around Boston Tea Party, et cetera. Was that more important than taxation?
21:05 Speaker 04 I mean, as Ken was just saying, I think a big revelation to all of us when we really cracked the first book and started to talk to the first scholars about, okay, what is the story that we're telling? What do we have to make sure viewers walk away with? The land is at the center of that. So I think maybe an answer to your question is that sometimes land is more important, and then eventually taxes begin to be very important. And they're taking turns in terms of which cause in different times. The 20 years leading up to a shot being fired at Lexington and Concord, there's a lot going on to the lead-up of those first shots. So it is about 1763, that's a huge, amazing, important moment in the American Revolution.
21:48 Speaker 04 That they put that line there and that means, wait a minute, everybody realizes this is a big piece of land.
21:54 Speaker 00 And it's not just Washington and Franklin.
21:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
21:56 Speaker 00 The higher classes that are dealing in tens of thousands of acres and are very pissed off that they're not going to be able to exploit that. It's just regular folks too want to cross over and claim 100 acres. Their family's been dependent labor for 1,000 years in England. They're going to own their own land for the first time and you're saying no? And then you mentioned Tea Party as the other part of the taxation thing. How do the people who dumped the tea in Boston Harbor dress? Everybody, school kid knows this, they dressed as Native Americans. But then he asks the second question, why? Well, it's to offset the blame, to make them think that Native Americans, nobody was fooled. They knew exactly who had done it.
22:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, right.
22:34 Speaker 00 They did it by proclaiming as a scholar, Phil Deloria says in our film, we're Aboriginal now. We're not of you. We have separated in our essential sense. And it's so ironic, of course, that you're dressing like the people that you've spent the last 150 years dispossessing of the present land and you're going to spend the next 150 years taking the rest of the land all the way to San Francisco. But you're making a huge statement and so it's still about the prize of North America. And I'll do one other thing and let you go on, which is, they do not call it the Eastern Seaboard Congress. And the Eastern Seaboard Congress does not name George Washington the head of the Eastern Seaboard Army.
23:17 Speaker 00 They call it the Continental Congress and the Continental Army. They know where they're going. And whether you've got a tax on tea, or stamps, or panes of glass, or painter's lead, or whatever it is.
23:30 Speaker 04 For land.
23:31 Speaker 00 They're going to take this land.
23:32 Speaker 04 We're going to pay our soldiers in land scripts.
23:35 Speaker 00 And we're going to pay those who sign up for the duration in land.
23:42 Speaker 04 We'll be back in a minute.
23:51 Kara Swisher? Support for this show comes from The Guardian. Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack these days. Social media feeds, cable news, and subscription-based news outlets might be able to give you one version of the news, but not in the way that you need. You want news fast, but slow enough to actually absorb the information. Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman is here to do just that. The podcast tries to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions regarding the world at large at your own pace. Three times a week, hosts Kai Wright and Carter Sherman bring their expertise together to showcase different and engaging perspectives regarding the world today. They will use their collective knowledge to discuss the news, international affairs,
24:34 Kara Swisher? climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. Plus, The Guardian wants to emphasize they're not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube starting May 13. Support for this show comes from Delete Me. Have you ever Googled yourself and found your home address, phone number, or the name of a family member? It's unsettling. Here's what you do to clean up your online data footprint. Go to joindelete.me/kara and enter the code Kara. You get 20% off Delete Me. Delete Me removes your personal information that's being sold online.
25:17 Kara Swisher? Delete Me was named the top pick for data removal services by Wirecutter, so you know you're in good hands. I really like Delete Me. I use it all the time. It's always surprising how much data people have about me. I am very privacy forward, and I still find so much stuff in mine online, some of which is incorrect, some of which is compiled in a really disturbing way. And you have to sort of control it like weeds. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now, at a special discount for our listeners, get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindelete.me/kara and use the promo code Kara at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindelete.me/kara and enter the code Kara at checkout. That's joindelete.me/kara, code Kara.
26:08 Kara Swisher? Support for this show comes from Hers. Losing weight on your own can often feel like a fight you never win. Luckily, weight loss by Hers offers access to the FDA-approved Wegovy pill and the Wegovy pen. Wegovy is the first-ever GLP-1 weight loss medication available in a pill, but also comes as a pen, so you've got options. With Wegovy, you can lose up to 20% of your body weight. People lost an average of 14% body weight at 64 weeks in a clinical trial of Wegovy alongside diet and exercise. To get started with Wegovy, just go to forhers.com and complete an online consultation with a licensed provider who will determine if your prescription is appropriate. And Hers doesn't stop there. Nutrition and lifestyle guidance are part of the plan, along with access to 24/7 messaging
26:53 Kara Swisher? with your care team, so support is always in reach. Ready to reach your goals? Visit forhers.com/cara to access personalized, affordable care for weight loss, hair, menopause, and more. That's forhers.com/cara. Individual results may vary, and stopping treatment may result in weight regain.
27:15 Kara Swisher? Let's talk about some of the other myths we tell ourselves. The hypocrisy inherent in the Declaration of Independence is well-trod territory for colonialist equality for all men did not include Native Americans, as Ken just noted. It did not include women. It did not include enslaved African Americans. One of the points you make in the film is that for a lot of enslaved people, it was the British who represented freedom, not the patriots. Around 5,000 African Americans joined the patriot cause, but more than 15,000 fought on the side of the British, three times as many. Why were the British the lesser of two evils for people who were enslaved? And I just recently read the book about the guy who ran Virginia, who was very friendly.
27:51 Speaker 00 Dunmore. So the British Empire is dependent entirely on slave labor. There are 26 colonies that they have in North America, 13 in the Caribbean are hugely profitable, and they're all dependent on slave labor. We're the least profitable, only Virginia and the Carolinas are. And in Virginia, the royal governor, Dunmore, has been deposed. He's floating impotently out in the Chesapeake, and he gets this idea. I can offer freedom to only those slaves of rebels, not to slaves of loyalists who will have to remain slaves forever. And oh, by the way, I own slaves and I'm not going to free them. But there are circumstances, as Sarah was suggesting, and it's all local.
28:32 Speaker 00 The decision, the run for daylight is dependent exactly where you are. And so a lot of enslaved people rushed to Dunmore. It's a disaster. They're killed in these battles, foolish battles. They die of disease. They're not treated well. But there is a sense that the British are going to be the place. As Christopher Brown says, one side is unevenly attached to this institution. Britain, although in a global sense, they are totally attached to the institution, and that our side is 100% for it. And so you do have that. But at the same time, there are people who hear that liberty talk. Native Americans and women and blacks who hear that, and that's where they go.
29:16 Speaker 00 We followed James Forten, who's a kid who hears the Declaration read the first time it's read in public in Philadelphia. And he knows that it applies to him. He knows also, he's not an idiot. He knows that it means all white men of property free of debt. But for him, he wants it. He joins the patriot cause. He's captured. He refuses a kind of sweetheart deal to go to England. He ends up in the Jersey, which is a prison ship in the East River, which is, you know, a death trap. Very few people come out of it alive. He makes it home. He becomes wealthy in the merchant marines. And he starts funding the abolitionist movement. And when offered a pension, he said, no, I'm a volunteer. And I mean, it is so, it's a layup to go for the hypocrisy of it. It's totally hypocritical.
30:01 Speaker 00 But it is those people at the margins, as Maggie Blackhawk say, who give it meaning. And the real hypocrisy is that as this...
30:11 Speaker 00 Resistance is building up, the rhetoric increases. And so what happens, the rhetoric of of people are often that the British are enslaving us. And, you know, and even Washington says, you know, hold arbitrary sway over us as we do over the Negroes, you know, in our backyard. And and you go, OK, then. And they know slavery is wrong.
30:36 Speaker 04 I was sort of confused by that. I was like, wait a minute, what slavery are we talking about? That rhetoric was, in any way, yes.
30:42 Kara Swisher? So Sarah, the desire to uphold slavery also helped unify the colonies because it helped convince the southern states to support the war against the British, but it also made slavery an issue of national debate in the colonies in a way that it just wasn't before. Talk about how this issue of slavery both united and divided Americans around the time of war.
31:00 Speaker 04 When we started, my husband said to me, you know, in so many ways, the American Revolution was our civil war, and our civil war was our revolution. I think, as Bernard Balin says beautifully at the end of the film, before the American Revolution, slavery was not a constant conversation, and after the revolution it was. And I think that's for a number of different reasons. Most important is what we were just talking about, which is the Declaration of Independence, which is this document that everybody reads, inspires everybody, and its ironies and its complexities and its hypocrisies are not lost on anyone. So the colonies are not a monolith around slavery, people are not a monolith around
31:45 Speaker 04 slavery, and we're going to say all something, everyone's going to think about that in new and different ways. And the founders debated slavery themselves. And George Washington frees his slaves on his deathbed. Thomas Jefferson doesn't. Ben Franklin, they all have different records on slavery, different opinions on slavery. They are thinking about it all the time.
32:06 Kara Swisher? Ken, George Washington, as Sarah's just noting, is a mythic figure, of course, in this story, as both the commander of the Continental Army and the first US president. But your documentary paints a more complicated picture of him. He wasn't a particularly great general at times. He made a series of major tactical mistakes that almost lost the war for the Americans, especially in the Battle of Long Island and Brandywine. There was talk of mutiny among the ranks of the army at one point. And yet, a few of the historians in this series say the war couldn't have been won without him. Talk about his flaws as a general and why he was so integral to the victory.
32:38 Speaker 00 We wouldn't have a country without him. It's really unbelievable. He's a deeply flawed human being. He owns other people. He knows slavery is wrong, and only until his deathbed does he do something about it. He is opposed, when he gets to New England, that there are black troops and doesn't want any more hired. He changes his mind on that. He's persuaded, which makes him different, as Jane Kaminsky says, than any other Virginia planter of the time. So he's malleable in one respect. He's rash. He rides out on the battlefield, risking the whole cause, because if he's killed or captured, that's it. We're done. The revolution's over. He makes, as you suggest, some tactical mistakes at Long
33:19 Speaker 00 Island and at Brandywine, and some would argue, at Germantown, that cost the war. So that's if you're trying to decide which college to go to. Those are all the negatives, right? We're not going to George Washington University because of this. But we are going to George Washington University because of this, which is, he is able to inspire people, ordinary people, not at his station, he may be the richest man in America at one time, to fight in the dead of night, to when they're going to go home because they're cold and hungry, to stay longer. He picks subordinate talent, generals that are better than him, including Benedict Arnold and Nathaniel Greene, and does not feel the jealousy. He
34:00 Speaker 00 defers to Congress, even though he has the moral rectitude and the kind of presence that Benjamin Rush, the only physician who signed the Declaration, said would make every other ruler in Europe look like a valet de chambre next to him. And yet, he defers to Congress. More importantly, he's able to convince people from Georgia and New Hampshire that they are not from these separate countries that they believe they've always been from, but are this new thing called Americans. And more important than anything, he gave up his power twice and set in motion. So for all of these reasons, he didn't know he was George Washington. He didn't know there's a dollar bill, or a quarter, or a big spiky monument in the national capital named after him, or a state on the other
34:45 Speaker 00 side of that.
34:46 Kara Swisher? Yeah, that might be going soon, but go ahead.
34:47 Speaker 00 You know, the state on the other side of the country, and every state has a Washington county or a Washington town. He's central to this. Annette Gordon Reed, the historian, says, you know, he's the glue that held it together. And Christopher Brown, a younger historian, you know, breaks the fourth wall for the only time in our 12 hours and just sort of, I can't believe I'm saying this, because I don't believe in the great man theory of history or interpretation of history, that we don't have a country without his leadership.
35:17 Kara Swisher? One thing you do note is that first, he fired the first shot of the actual war, which was in the French and Indian War.
35:23 Speaker 00 Right. Well, we think he did. Native allies suggest that this 22-year-old militia commander from Virginia fired into a French encampment that began the Seven Years' War. He has a very mixed result there, but he distinguishes himself and asks for a commission in the British Army and doesn't get it. And they turn him down, and that begins a kind of, wait a second, you don't want me?
35:45 Kara Swisher? I didn't know that.
35:46 Speaker 00 You don't want me?
35:47 Kara Swisher? Yeah, I didn't know that.
35:48 Speaker 00 Yeah.
35:48 Kara Swisher? So, we have an idealized notion of all these men, though, who fought in the war as these noble patriots, fully committed to the cause of American freedom and liberty. But as the war drags on, the ranks of the Continental Army are eventually made up of the poorest of the poor, jobless laborers, second and third sons who weren't going to inherit anything, British deserters, felons hoping to win pardons, immigrants from Ireland and Germany. There's no nationwide draft to force men to enlist, and some states did implement drafts. But why did they stay along, Sarah, from your perspective, to win the war? No other choices?
36:19 Speaker 04 I mean, I don't want to... Speak for them, but I think this is, you know, part of the history of our country and of wars and who fights them versus who leads them. You know, I think they fought the war for all the reasons that are inherent in your question. It was their chance at something. It was for financial reasons, for family reasons. They didn't have any other choice for the hope of a better life. They were promised things that were better than the station that they started in. And I think class is at the center of our history as much as race. We don't talk about it as much. And this happens in war, and it happened during the American Revolution.
36:59 Speaker 00 And it's so great because they're also, everybody's drawn to these ideas. The animating spirit of it, and plus, many of them are in the revenge business. They are after the fact that the British came through and occupied your New Jersey town and stole your crops and raped your daughter and, you know, stole all of your possessions. And so cause animated by fury is a great motivator. So what we can say is that democracy is not the intention of the American Revolution by no stretch of the imagination. The ruling elites, we'd call them today, believed in forming some non-monarchical republican small or form of government.
37:43 Speaker 00 But in order to win the war, you got to begin to promise things to the people who are fighting the war for you. And it is fought not just by this dirty land-owning militiamen. They're often unreliable, leaving to plant crops or to harvest crops or because they're scared. And it ends up being won by these teenagers and these new immigrants that don't own property. And it is, as Washington said, it's just nothing short of a standing miracle that they were able, against all this odds, over six and a half years, to pull it off. It's just, it's incredible.
38:17 Kara Swisher? So I'm going to jump for a second to present day and the ways we talk about history now. This is airing in a particularly fraught time to be telling these kinds of nuanced stories. It's become a political act, whether you want it to be or not. The Trump administration is demanding a return to telling more patriotic version of the country's history. Trump wanted to purge the Smithsonian, what he called divisive, race-based ideology. He's ordered any material that disparages Americans to be stripped from the national parks. You've got a lot of that in there. Like, you're telling the story, right? Which is the factual story. So how has that been in working on it over these 10 years? Because you started in a different time.
38:52 Speaker 04 Look, I have two children. I see history as our great teacher. History as a warning. History as inspiration. History as essential to understanding where we are and where we might go. And I think to teach complicated, good history is at the heart of this country. Our founders wanted us to be educated. Curiosity, education, Ken talks a lot about this. Virtue are all about trying to understand the good and the bad. It's like making a hero perfect. No hero is perfect. No person is perfect. You need, to make somebody truly heroic, you need to understand the things they're not good at.
39:36 Speaker 04 At least for me. Because then you can tell your son or your daughter, "Look at that incredible person who wasn't perfect and look what they achieved." Right? Whatever it is. Like, you want to give people complication and nuance. And we have a really complicated, I don't really love the word nuance, but it's appropriate, nuanced history where, you know, Ken says this a lot. "As soon as you're sure you're really right, you better peel back and let somebody tell you why you might not be right." That is at the heart of, I think, what makes a human experience worth living through. So I think the film in the end, for me, is a deeply patriotic film. I feel very proud to be an American at the end of this film.
40:20 Speaker 04 Not because we did everything right or we've done everything right in the last 250 years, but because this is such an unlikely and surprising story. Citizenship is the highest form of office. Citizenship, to me, is at the heart of any film we make, actually. And I want to inspire young people to care about their local school board and their local election. And you can only do that if you understand who your neighbor is and that their beliefs might be different than yours.
40:48 Kara Swisher? So Ken, do you think, you know, you talked about getting history right and you've definitely gotten more nuanced over the years, right, in terms of who you pick and choose and the perspectives?
40:58 Speaker 00 I don't think so. I was looking at the Civil War and I thought it had, you know, it's pretty nuanced in terms of the voices that you hear from and all the various people who contribute to it.
41:10 Kara Swisher? Do you feel pressured to include even more voices that you may not agree with?
41:13 Speaker 00 No, not at all. In fact-
41:15 Kara Swisher? Tell me about that.
41:15 Speaker 00 You know what's so nice, they take a long time. So people don't have the attention spans to like sort of oversee us. But let me just say something. This nuance is not the province of progressives. This nuance is the province of human beings and storytelling. So let's just take what is considered a kind of bellwether of the conservatives, supposedly, which is the series I love called Yellowstone, right? It's patriarch, it's George Washington, is a very wise person who happens to murder people and dump their bodies in a ravine, right? His strong daughter, right, is-
41:56 Kara Swisher? She's a hot mess.
41:57 Speaker 00 She's a hot mess and is incredibly wise and smart and also kills people and dumps their bodies in ravines. They're two sons, one of whom is married to a Native American and conflicted throughout the whole film. The other is Benedict Arnold. The daughter is in love with the foreman who has a crew of young and old, white and black people, right, and surrounding them is a Native American sense that this is their land and overlaid on that is the American story of taking over land and greed. So this is the, this is a complicated thing. I could be describing a Shakespeare play for all you know. This is what people want. They are hungry. And Sarah and I were on Washington
42:40 Speaker 00 Journal and C-SPAN, you know, where they call in in the morning over the headlines and they got a Democratic line and a Republican line and a Independent line. And I'm used to being on it and you're dodging arrows and bullets and spears that are coming at you from every one of them. Each caller said, "Oh, we really love your stuff."
42:58 Speaker 00 What it means is that we're hungry for good stories and good stories are always complicated, no matter what the state might want to impose, it doesn't work for anybody. It doesn't work for a conservative, it doesn't work for a progressive. I mean, look what the left has done in sort of editing out people off the Politburo or this thing or whatever it is. It's all in the interests of authoritarians to make this a single-note story because that keeps you a subject dedicated to conspiracies and mythology, not what's really going on.
43:37 Kara Swisher? Let me push back. You say nuance is not progressive, but let's on both sides that Trump and MAGA are interested in not in complicated nuanced portrayals of American history, correct?
43:46 Speaker 00 No, totally, but what I'm saying is that they don't necessarily represent even conservatives in the United States. What we have is, a good story is a good story. The novelist Richard Powers said, you know, "The best arguments in the world," and that's all we do is argue, "won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that," he said, "is a good story."
44:05 Kara Swisher? That's true.
44:06 Speaker 00 So, good stories remind us that it isn't a binary.
44:09 Kara Swisher? Right, right, but Sarah, I'm just curious, your thought, can stories of history ever be neutral and is it wrong to present them as such if they're, they still hold a point of view, right?
44:19 Speaker 04 Look, I think the way I think about this is facts as close to a fact as you can get, and then how you interpret those facts is where I think the heart of your question is. So, what we tried to do, both in Vietnam and this, and I think we've talked a lot about the scholarship in both, in both series, they may seem so different, they took place a long time apart, but they're, they're like upside-down versions of each other. In Vietnam, we're looking at the war from four different perspectives and the scholars are behind the camera. In this film, the scholars are on camera, helping the American people understand the facts on the ground as we're putting them forward. And the historians have different
45:02 Speaker 04 expertise and different points of view and think different things are important, and we want to put them in conversation with each other. To give our audiences the tools to think for themselves and have questions and get to the heart of some of what you're saying, which is what we've done well, what we haven't done well, and how to think about our origin story.
45:22 Kara Swisher? Truthful, but not neutral necessarily.
45:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, no, we say, we say calling balls and strikes. That's the crazy right to use.
45:29 Kara Swisher? You do know that Chief Justice John Roberts also talks about calling balls and strikes.
45:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, but that he's a different balls and strikes that he's misusing it in a different way.
45:38 Kara Swisher? Let me ask, let me ask you the last sort of Trump question. In addition to this documentary, you've made films on Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and Congress itself. Based on your decades of research about this era, what does Trump's rapid consolidation of power tell us about the gap between the founders' visions of checks and balances and the reality of what we're seeing today? And what would they make of Congress's abdication of its own constitutional powers as a check on the executive? Because it's sort of the opposite of what this, your story is telling.
46:05 Speaker 00 Yeah, so, so we were with Yuval Levin a few weeks ago in Philadelphia, taping something that'll air after the broadcast of our film with Jeffrey Rosen at the National Constitution Center and Melody Barnes, Sarah and me. And we was, it was a wonderful conversation and Yuval was saying, you know, the founders aren't going to be, they wouldn't be surprised if somebody was seeking, you know, monarchical power. They'd be surprised that Article One is not the executive. Article One is the legislative and that they had abdicated. That would be the huge stunning shock to them, that there had been any kind of abdication of powers. He said it in a wonderful way, having to do with tense. He said that the legislative was in the future tense.
46:50 Speaker 00 You'll do this. The executive was in the present tense. I am doing what you told me to do. And the Supreme Court is in the past tense, judging that. And so they saw this almost in that temporal way. The founders I'm talking about, and this is through Yuval Levin, who knows a lot more about it than I do, even though we, I'm sure find ourselves on opposite sides about any, any number of things. But it was an interesting way to understand that. And, and I went, it took me back, you know, to what I carry around, which is the Constitution and the Declaration and the Bill of Rights. And to read, you know, just how extensive Article One is and, and how much less extensive Two and Three are, and the other sort of parts of it before we get to the Bill of Rights.
47:35 Speaker 00 It's, it's. It's unprecedented times and yet, you know, I made a film on Huey Long, which, you know, every sentence is rhyming with today. Every sentence of that film is rhyming with today.
47:47 Speaker 05 He had a different outcome.
47:48 Speaker 00 Different outcome.
47:50 Speaker 05 Who knows?
47:52 Speaker 05 We'll be back in a minute.
48:01 Speaker 05 Support for this show comes from Indeed. When the pressure's on and you need to hire the right person for the job, Indeed Sponsored Jobs has got your back. Instead of forcing you to spend tons of time searching, Indeed Sponsored Jobs matches you with quality candidates fast. According to their data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. And listeners to the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit
48:46 Speaker 05 to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.
49:11 Speaker 03 Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot, designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.
49:42 Kara Swisher? I'm Kara Swisher, and I like people who say the quiet part out loud. In fact, I love it. That's Tiger Sisters, a new podcast that recently joined the Vox Media Podcast Network. Cherie Brooke Lu and Jean Lu are real sisters who built their careers at LinkedIn and Goldman Sachs. On their weekly podcast, they're giving the next generation practical tips on how to get ahead, how to write emails people actually answer, how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out, and how to keep learning as an adult. It's straight talk about money, career, and relationships every Monday. Follow Tiger Sisters wherever you get your podcasts.
50:18 Kara Swisher? All right. Every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours.
50:22 Speaker 06 Hi, I'm Garrett Graff, a journalist and historian. And my big question for Ken Burns is about his documentary, Civil War. Ever since that documentary came out in 1990 and helped re-inspire and re-interest America in that seminal conflict, we've also seen the Civil War become a flashpoint in our politics again. We've seen the Confederate flag removed from the State House lawn in South Carolina after that infamous church shooting in Charleston. We've seen Confederate statues removed across the country in the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020. And now we're living in another moment where
51:03 Speaker 06 Confederate statues are going back up in Washington, DC. I wonder, Ken, how your view of that war's legacy has changed since 1990 and what you have learned about how we remember that war as a nation?
51:21 Speaker 00 Well, the Civil War, that's a really great question. The Civil War, once we started our country, is the most important event. And let's remember that Confederate flag was not the Confederate flag. The flag of the Confederacy is a different flag altogether. That was one battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia that was just adopted by the Ku Klux Klan. So that use of the flag is in itself even more specious than being-
51:43 Kara Swisher? So they're just stupid.
51:45 Speaker 00 Yeah. And so it's constantly doing that. I've got photographs in many other films of Klansmen- Marching by the tens of thousands in Washington DC unfurling gigantic American flags on the steps of the Capitol, we've had periods in which we have romanticized this and part of the attempt to simplify our history, to go back to something that's more manageable and simple, whether it's moving women back into the position where they should be, making it a lily-white story, is of course to elevate the aspirations of the Confederacy, which itself was not only bankrupt, but varied in and of itself. There are nine million people in the South, four million of whom are owned by the other people
52:28 Speaker 00 in the South. So you have forty-five percent of the population that doesn't give a damn about slavery. They want it to end as fast as possible. And so, we've got a really complex that the Civil War will always resonate. There's no different way that I treat it. Our film, after a prologue and an introduction, begins with a quote that says, "When thinking about America, I admire her bright blue stars," this is an approximation of it, "her beautiful mounds her star-crossed fields, blah, blah, blah. But then my rapture is soon checked when I realize it is filled with slave-holding and wrong. The tears of my brethren flow to the sea, that the soil drinks daily of the blood of my outraged sisters. I am filled
53:11 Speaker 00 with unutterable loathing." Frederick Douglass. That's how our series begins. I don't have, after the prologue and introduction, I don't have any problem with that. Today, yesterday, thirty-five years ago when it came out, or thirty-five years from now, which, God willing, we've still got a republic thinking about the centrality of the Civil War and the excellent question that was just posed.
53:34 Kara Swisher? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're not going to be able to run the Smithsonian, Ken, but that's okay. Not this week. The Civil War is actually a good segue to finishing up and talking about the legacy of the Revolutionary War and what came after. Sarah, Ken has said that democracy was not the intention of the American Revolution, but a consequence of it. You see the tension with the founding fathers themselves, as you both noted. 250 years later, we're still trying to live up to the values they champion, even if they didn't live up to them in personhood. So if the challenge for every generation is to try to live up to those ideals and create a more perfect union, as the preamble of the Constitution says, how do you think that legacy is going? And what are the unique challenges? Are they the same challenges, from your perspective?
54:16 Speaker 04 I don't think they're the same challenges, although there's probably some similarities just to the human experience. I do think citizenship and your responsibility in a democracy are just essential elements to try to inspire in our young people to actually be civically minded, civically engaged. I think there are a lot of deeply important principles at our founding, the freedom of speech, the freedom to practice your own religion, the separation of church and state, and a balance of power, free and fair elections.
54:57 Speaker 04 I think some of our founding principles are deeply inspirational and really, really important. And when we lose our way, we need to go back to those principles, kind of strip back and reassess and sort of, I hope, actually come together around this pretty surprising, it's a great underdog story, it's very unlikely that we were going to win, we didn't win alone. So it's, I mean, at the heart of your question, I think, are some of the things the founders were debating themselves and fighting for and declared and then tried to figure out, right, there's 10 years between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, it takes a while to form a government, George Washington steps away from power because he
55:42 Speaker 04 wants to show an example of a peaceful transfer of power. There's a lot to our beginnings that might help us right now.
55:49 Kara Swisher? So Ken, what do you hope particularly young people will take away from the docu-series? According to the recent PBS News/Marist Poll, nearly a third of Americans right now say people may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back. So what do you hope people will take away?
56:06 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, the study of war is always fraught because you are essentially
56:13 Speaker 00 Reexamining and re-presenting violence. That is part of the human story. In fact, one of our episodes of the Vietnam War was called "The History of the World", meaning that's what human beings do, is they kill each other. And regardless of what a poll says on Thursday or whatever, it doesn't matter. You don't want in any way glorify war. It is really horrible. There's a woman, there's a line in a document we have, Rebecca Tanner, lost five sons, fighting for the patriot cause. Rebecca Tanner was a Mohegan Indian from, we presume, Connecticut ultimately. We have an ability to tell the story because it's so dramatic and so part of the human condition.
56:56 Speaker 00 But the idea that what emerges are these free electrons, the free electrons that Sarah's been talking about, and citizenship and education, that pursuit of happiness doesn't mean stuff, it means knowledge. And that the word that is most commonly used throughout our film is virtue, which is an old fashioned word. And this period has as much venality as it has virtue, maybe more venality, just as our period does. And to your earlier question to Sarah, you're gonna always take steps forwards and steps backwards. And I think the Chicken Little in us at any moment says, "Our moment's the most important", and of course, as the worst has ever been. And so, you can either Chicken Little it, you know, sit in the room with your, you
57:39 Speaker 00 know, sucking your thumb in a fetal position and go, "The sky is falling", or you go out and vote.
57:45 Kara Swisher? But I want you to address young people specifically.
57:47 Speaker 00 So I think they're the ones that are most sophisticated about stories. They're the ones who are getting our stuff now in school and come up where nobody knew me from Adam when the Civil War came out. Now, all of them have seen it and they come up and they want to talk about it. We were yesterday at the Trinity Church in Manhattan doing stuff on the revolution with Lin-Manuel Miranda, and there were all school kids, 400 school kids from all over New York. And there was this one kid who like, he knew everything about me, every film I'd made, every, you know, stuff. And I just kinda went... Holy Toledo, and then he gets up and he's one of the performers of a scene from Hamilton, this rap, which he does perfectly with Lin-Manuel going, "Oh my God."
58:30 Speaker 00 Because we've got, it's, to me, it's the easiest group to do. It's the people who have permitted their beliefs to become so encrusted and they're so certain. Learned Hand, there cannot be a better name for a judge than Learned.
58:46 Kara Swisher? So they're not more doubtful?
58:47 Speaker 00 No, no, no, no. They're more open, they're persuadable. They went with the democratic socialist, you know? Democratic socialists don't kill Jews, national socialists kill Jews. Many of our allies are, have been, or are democratic socialists. I'm not worried about democratic socialists, I'm worried about dictators. That's what I'm worried about, and so are they. Because they told us which way they wanted to go. So you've got, this is complicated, it's that Learned Hand said, liberty is never being too sure you're right. And that you have to understand there is a fluidity, and that this question that has animated my work, who are we, is in fact a mirror that has to hold up to itself and
59:32 Speaker 00 say, "Who am I?" And I think good stories do that. And so if people give us our attention, I don't care if you voted for Trump, I don't care if you voted for Kamala Harris, I literally want you to do it. And we've been out in the country, Sarah and I have been traveling all across the country, and we've said the same thing to Joe Rogan as to kids everywhere, and inner-city kids in Charleston, and Detroit, and Chicago, and suburban kids, and general audiences in every part of the country. Same story, same fastball down the center of the pipe there, I could give you another baseball story.
1:00:03 Kara Swisher? Thank you for that.
1:00:04 Speaker 00 And what you find is a curiosity and a hunger, and the best thing we ever hear, which is... I didn't know that.
1:00:13 Kara Swisher? So this is my last question. Despite all of the hypocrisies inherent in the origin story and the country's founding documents, it's hard not to come away from your series feeling patriotic, as Sarah noted. So even though the story of America's founding was brutal and messy and ugly, right now, each of you, why don't you start, Sarah? What things are worth celebrating and taking pride in, and then can you finish up?
1:00:35 Speaker 04 Hmm. I mean, you know, I think the Fourth of July is worth celebrating because we did turn the world upside down. We changed the way governments function. We changed the way people could participate and have a voice, even if that voice was for a very small segment. In 250 years, we've pressed the levers of power, right? It took 144 years for you and me to have the right to vote, but we did it. And those women fought hard for us, so I want to stand on their shoulders and fight hard for the next generation. I think optimism gets lost, and I want to be optimistic. You know, I don't think I have a deeply sophisticated answer for that, other than
1:01:19 Speaker 04 going back to some of the debates that they had themselves. I find very helpful to understand where we are now and where I think it would be helpful to go.
1:01:30 Speaker 00 I think we frame this always in binaries. No matter what question we're asking of ourselves, we have to say, despite the hypocrisy or despite that, the actual human experience is much less defined. It's more shades of gray than the black and white that our computer systems of ones and zeros and our media system of my way or the highway, red state or blue state, would suggest. And I think that if we can, and this is where good stories come in, then we have the idea to go, and I could amplify, Sarah, that optimism is not a naive and pejorative condition. Cynicism is a luxury for jaded journalists and jet setters, not for the rest of us.
1:02:13 Speaker 00 We all have to say, yep, there's a lot of bad stuff behind us and there's a lot of good stuff behind us, but in fact, none of that matters. Just matters what I do. So what I do is I vote. I go to my school board meeting. I go to my city council. I run for dog catcher. I clean up my dog's poop. I find out what my neighbor needs. I shovel their walk if they're infirmed. I do the things that the civic engagement that the revolution suggested was possible, that for the first time in human history, and I'll repeat myself, human beings are no longer subjects, willfully dedicated to being ignorant, susceptible to superstitions,
1:02:52 Speaker 00 but educated and now citizens, exercising as Washington felt when he resigned the presidency, the highest office in the land.
1:03:02 Kara Swisher? Great. Perfect. Thank you so much. Sarah Botstein and Ken Burns. It's a wonderful documentary.
1:03:08 Speaker 00 Thank you.
1:03:09 Kara Swisher? Thank you.
1:03:09 Speaker 00 Great to be with you.
1:03:16 Kara Swisher? Today's show was produced by Christian Castor-Rosell, Kateri Yocum, Michelle Leloy, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nasheet Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Catherine Barner and Eamon Whalen. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trakademics. If you're already following the show, you're a patriot, but not the Mel Gibson kind. If not, go read some history books. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podia Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.
Previous 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton Rings the Warning Bells Next Gloves Off with Scott Jennings, CNN’s Conservative Pundit Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated