Filmmaker Ken Burns’ new documentary — a six-part series on the American Revolution — aired on PBS in November and is now streaming. The documentary describes the American Revolution as “a war for independence, a war of conquest, a civil war and a world war,” and it aims to provide “an expansive, evenhanded look at the virtues and the contradictions in the fight for independence and the birth of the United States.” University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign history lecturer Shannan Mason is a historian of early America who teaches courses on the American Revolution, the American Republic and U.S. History to 1877. She spoke to News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel.
What are some of the lessons about our country’s origins in the documentary?
One of the chief lessons of “The American Revolution” is understanding the nation’s origins as a complex intersection of local and imperial struggles rather than a singularly focused and unified ideological movement. Framing the conflict as a civil war of colonials against Britain, as much as neighbor against neighbor, conveys the tumult of the founding era more appropriately. Americans attempted to sustain a fragile sense of unity even as deep divisions persisted, simultaneously championing universal ideals of liberty and natural rights while preserving slavery and pressing Westward for future development.
This political language of rights developed within older, everyday social and economic systems and practices — systems that were often misaligned with, or directly contradicted, the language of rights and representation Americans claimed for themselves. In all, we learn that the national movement and its rhetoric took shape out of many converging local and regional crises alongside imperial rivalries.
What are the basic ideas that most Americans have about the American Revolution?
Most Americans know the revolution took place in the late 18th century and led to American independence, and they could likely name a few conflicts or founding documents like the Declaration of Independence. They have a sense that colonists fought Britain over a dispute over taxes and principles of ‘freedom,’ and could name a few iconic figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. However, Americans’ general triumphal Whig narrative is largely centered around its ideals, a fact that some of our nation’s earlier political leaders would be delighted at, as they long encouraged a singular unifying origin story or civic myth to promote nationalism, in what was a still uncertain republic.
The master narrative of consensus centers a few key ideal-driven tenets (and individuals) and understands the Revolution as a moral struggle for liberty — driven by an enlightenment-inspired assertion of rights and widespread demands for representation and the principles of liberty. Conflict here is viewed as a unified, external war for independence against a tyrannical British monarchy, as opposed to civil conflict. Such narratives are characterized by the centering of a select few founders, who are presented as a cohesive, virtuous political elite whose primary motivation was the establishment of a republican government based on universal ideals, thus presenting the founding as a singular and completed triumph.
What are some misconceptions of that narrative, and why is it important to examine this history today?
Several misconceptions flow from this inherited consensus narrative. Chief among them, as Burns’ documentary explores, is a belief in colonial unanimity despite deep fractures within communities and even families; and the reduction of the rebellion to the issue of taxation, rather than a combination of factors including taxes as much as imperial trade restrictions, military occupation, and land speculation, among other more ideological disputes. Most consequential is the widespread assumption that independence led to an immediate expansion of political equality, while overlooking the endurance of tax or property qualifications, gender exclusions, slavery, and the emboldened dispossession of Native land, even against allies.
School textbooks, memorials, road signs and, more recently, the resurgence in popularity of biographies and Hamilton-mania have often reinforced idealistic themes. The framing of unity over division presents the founding as a complete unifying achievement rather than a deeply contested and negotiated process. Deliberate efforts towards early 19th-century mythmaking crafted a common virtuous origin story as a means to stabilize a new nation in the face of longstanding periods of crisis and instability, from the War of 1812, growing sectional conflict, Civil War reconciliation and beyond.
Re-evaluation of history matters, as Americans have continued to view its revolution and founding principles as a vocabulary and justification for debating national direction as early as the 1780-90s. Rival political factions invoked the founding to justify their positions on federal authority, banking, immigration and Western expansion. Later generations continue to draw on the American Revolution as a mechanism to confront new crises, as religious leaders and abolitionists exposed the contradiction between natural-rights rhetoric and slavery: Proslavery theorists increasingly framed the revolution as a defense of property, while Reconstruction-era lawmakers used revolutionary precedents to debate citizenship.
What is your view of how Ken Burns examines the revolutionary period?
The docuseries exploration of the wider impact of localized on-the-ground activity is its greatest strength. Segments on the influence of Hoadneshonee geopolitics and confederacy, the Sons of Liberty’s coercive tactics, Dunmore’s Proclamation and its consequences for enslaved Virginians and contradiction of colonials rising to fight against it, and the existence of maroon settlements and camp-followers convey a catalogue of ways the war disrupted long-established hierarchies and forced everyday people to navigate a rapidly shifting society and politic. While largely centering the war itself, these vignettes and surrounding context demonstrate how opportunity, information and support for the conflict circulated unevenly across the colonies.
Equally important is the effort in presenting how frontiersmen, women, Indigenous leaders, and the enslaved, as much as political and military leaders, interpreted the war through their own vantage points, making visible overlapping military, diplomatic, and domestic systems that shaped the conflict. Ultimately, it offers a narrative that gives viewers a comprehensive enough understanding of the conflict to continue learning on their own.
