By Brian Boyles
On March 25, I swam in the deep end of the Semiquincentennial.
Two events that day provided opportunities to hear from several of the country’s preeminent historians about the 250th and its relevance in our time. I came away from my morning at Harvard and my evening in Concord with a generous helping of intellectual nourishment as well as new questions about the forms and impacts of history in this compelling year.
Cambridge
A sign hangs in the studio where Ken Burns and his team craft the documentaries that shape public understanding of American history.
“It’s complicated,” the sign reads.
The statement, per Sarah Botstein, co-director for their newest series, “The American Revolution,” motivates the filmmakers’ approach to research, filmmaking, and history. They go the extra mile to find more texture, whether in the archives or interviews, in a quest to show the many perspectives and dynamics within the stories of Muhammad Ali or the Civil War or Jazz or, most recently, the founding of our nation.
Botstein mentioned this at the outset of a well-attended panel discussion at the Radcliffe Institute that featured Burns, Botstein and three Harvard scholars, Vincent Brown, Philip Deloria, and Annette Gordon-Reed, all of whom appear in the film.
“The American Revolution” debuted in November 2025 and effectively switched on the public spotlight for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. At 12 hours long, the film is quintessential Ken Burns and, if you have time, a riveting history to consume. At Radcliffe, the panel was preceded by a 45-minute condensed version that seemed to reflect the directors’ view of the film’s most important moments.
For part of the screening, Burns stood silently in the aisle, leaning against the wall of the theater to watch along with the audience. At the conclusion of a retelling of the total eclipse that occurred on November 30, 1776, he headed backstage. While not essential to the story of American independence, it was a beautiful sequence of filmmaking, a brief and strangely poignant moment within an epic, and about as imagist as Burns can get. Maybe, I thought, he stayed just long enough to revel in it.
On March 25, I swam in the deep end of the Semiquincentennial.
Two events that day provided opportunities to hear from several of the country’s preeminent historians about the 250th and its relevance in our time. I came away from my morning at Harvard and my evening in Concord with a generous helping of intellectual nourishment as well as new questions about the forms and impacts of history in this compelling year.
Cambridge
A sign hangs in the studio where Ken Burns and his team craft the documentaries that shape public understanding of American history.
“It’s complicated,” the sign reads.
The statement, per Sarah Botstein, co-director for their newest series, “The American Revolution,” motivates the filmmakers’ approach to research, filmmaking, and history. They go the extra mile to find more texture, whether in the archives or interviews, in a quest to show the many perspectives and dynamics within the stories of Muhammad Ali or the Civil War or Jazz or, most recently, the founding of our nation.
Botstein mentioned this at the outset of a well-attended panel discussion at the Radcliffe Institute that featured Burns, Botstein and three Harvard scholars, Vincent Brown, Philip Deloria, and Annette Gordon-Reed, all of whom appear in the film.
“The American Revolution” debuted in November 2025 and effectively switched on the public spotlight for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. At 12 hours long, the film is quintessential Ken Burns and, if you have time, a riveting history to consume. At Radcliffe, the panel was preceded by a 45-minute condensed version that seemed to reflect the directors’ view of the film’s most important moments.
For part of the screening, Burns stood silently in the aisle, leaning against the wall of the theater to watch along with the audience. At the conclusion of a retelling of the total eclipse that occurred on November 30, 1776, he headed backstage. While not essential to the story of American independence, it was a beautiful sequence of filmmaking, a brief and strangely poignant moment within an epic, and about as imagist as Burns can get. Maybe, I thought, he stayed just long enough to revel in it.
The inclusion of the eclipse was one of several times that day when I wondered about the demand to make things complicated vs. the impact that’s possible through the symbolic or the simple.
I could listen to Brown, Deloria and Gordon-Reed talk about their research all day, but I was especially struck by their responses to a question about their earliest awareness of the Revolution. What was the story when they first learned it?
All three recalled the simplistic versions handed down in grade school decades earlier.
“In some ways it’s easy because I’m part of the ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ generation,” said Brown. He recited lyrics from the “No More Kings” segment of the animated series, which began airing on ABC in 1973 in between episodes of cartoons on Saturday mornings.
“And so it was mostly lies,” he said. “It was not complicated at all.” The complications fell into the void of his early education. Growing up in San Diego, Brown remembered, there was no mention of the rebellion of local Native Americans against the Spanish mission during 1775-1776. The story he learned was mostly what happened in Massachusetts. He did remember the “uncomplicated idea” of no kings.
Gordon-Reed grew up in Texas, where the “much less complicated” story was “a story of when the country was white.” The diversity of people and religions found in the film was not present in the lessons of her youth, though the notion that all men are created equal was something that people around her stated, and that always stuck with her. “But the complexity of the American Revolution, that wasn’t part of my education.”
Deloria recalled his wife beginning to work as a 5th grade teacher, and their shared realization that the lessons on the Revolution were mostly reproducing a curriculum that dated to their own childhoods: “Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, battle, battle, battle, Valley Forge, battle, battle, battle, Yorktown, Declaration of Independence, Nathan Hale, Benedict Arnold.”
If you watched the film, you know that its greatest contribution lies in its dedication to breaking that mold once and for all. No one finishes the six, two-hour episodes without a deepened appreciation of the experiences, heroics, and choices facing Americans who lived very different lives than the signers of the Declaration. From the outset, viewers learn about the experiences of Native Americans and the ways that multiple tribes conflicted, allied, and coped with the aims of colonists and the Crown.
The inclusion of these stories never feels like an add-on. Rather they are woven throughout the series. We cannot understand the origins of this nation, Burns and Botstein tell us, without those stories, which are found through meticulous research and the perspectives of multiple scholars with different backgrounds and expertise. The past is complicated and deserves more voices, more competing ideas, more time. In this way, the film makes its own contribution to the Declaration’s elusive promise of equality.
Concord
The voice of Jill Lepore filled my car during my first year at Mass Humanities. Her giant history of the nation, These Truths, had just been published, and the audio book was my soundtrack while crisscrossing the commonwealth in 2019. Lepore’s wry sense of humor came through in her reading, especially in the pomposity she gave when voicing the quotes of certain individuals. Lepore grew up in West Boylston, and there was something in her voice and those send-ups of the phony that felt very Massachusetts.
Lepore framed the 960-page These Truths as a necessary overview of the national story, the type of big history that white men regularly produced, sometimes with significant impact, in the 19th and 20th centuries. She set limits, however, in service of a goal.
“I’ve confined myself to what, in my view, a people constituted as a nation in the early twenty first century need to know about their own past, mainly because this book is meant to double as an old-fashioned civics book, an explanation of the origins and ends of democratic institutions, from the town meeting to the party system, from the nominating convention to the secret ballot, from talk radio to Internet polls.”
That old-fashioned approach rests on the idea there are things that must be widely understood if we are to carry on as a nation. Her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, shares this intention.
At her Mass Humanities-supported conversation at the Concord Museum, Lepore confirmed that We the People was timed for publication during the Semiquincentennial. The Constitution, and not just the Revolution, she argued, should be included in “the contestation over the meaning of this anniversary.”
Lepore’s focus is the “philosophy of the amendment” which emerged in response to the colonists’ anxieties as they hastily drafted state constitutions in the first years of independence. Freed from England and its unwritten constitution, they longed for a government recorded on parchment. They feared disorder and dictators. The Massachusetts constitution was eventually approved in 1780 and remains the oldest written constitution in the world, but not before our predecessors demonstrated their “long history of popular resistance to established authority,” particularly in the western counties.
“You and whose king?” Lepore cracked to the audience at the museum, channeling people in Worcester and Hampshire counties (then and now, I’d add). “We didn’t elect you to go to Boston of all places. You have zero authority to do this.” In their rejection letters for the failed ratification effort of 1778, some 15 towns sent objections to the document’s disenfranchisement of “original Natives of the Land” and “the poor Innocent Affricans.” Dissatisfied with process and the document, towns including Pittsfield and Lexington demanded the inclusion of a right to amendment.
“Circumstances are going to change,” Lepore paraphrased the “ornery” residents of Lexington. “Our world is going to change, and we need a mechanism to provide for change over time.”
We the People is the story of the uses of this mechanism, both the successful and the many failed attempts at amendment. In the book and in Concord, Lepore dwelled on the relationship between the words amend and mend. Americans in the 18th and 19th century were accustomed to mending, whether stitching a torn garment or repairing a tractor. They also believed in “moral progress,” in “mending your ways” so that things could get better. They wanted a framework for government that allowed them to improve upon it.
Just hours earlier, I recalled, Philip Deloria spoke of the Declaration as the nation’s mission statement, and the Constitution as its operations manual. In Lepore’s telling, the manual and its edits were responses to the desires and fears of people living through conflicts provoked by that mission and its complicated legacy. Americans demanded the amendment mechanism so they could update the manual.
“To write something down, to commit yourself to this list of rights, and not expect that you would exercise your capacity and express your sovereignty as a people” to amend was anathema to the understanding of democracy in an earlier America.
In our own era, rich with fear and conflict, the mechanism of amendment has rusted, a condition that partially inspired Lepore to explore the Constitution’s history. A Supreme Court dominated by constitutional originalists is the catalyst for the most significant changes at the federal level, with the majority of its justices dedicated to interpreting the Constitution based on its meaning at the time of ratification.
“Dead, dead, dead,” is how the late Anton Scalia described the Constitution, providing a simple motto for the originalist interpretation that Lepore described as “not only ascendant but entirely dominant in American constitutional interpretation” today.
And while Lepore isn’t optimistic that another amendment is in the works, she believes that the mechanism should not be ignored in the fight to win back civil society and the art of persuasion.
“Gathering in the rooms, the coming out for an evening, going out for donuts afterward, that is the stuff of democratic life and abandoning amendment also involves abandoning that,” Lepore said in Concord, “so I think it’s worth fighting for for its own sake.”
Final thoughts
“Dead, dead, dead” is a simple statement, the opposite of “It’s complicated.” In a chaotic environment, the simplistic is intoxicating. The more complicated life has become, the more people gravitated to a simple, aggressive outlook on the past. New stories are neither welcome nor possible.
Driving home, I kept coming back to something Annette Gordon-Reed said during the panel. She agreed with her colleagues that America was an idea, a commitment we share to the Constitution that could be taken up by generations of new arrivals. But, she observed, not everyone sees it that way.
“The view of some people is that it is a country based upon ancestry, leaving aside what the complexity of what that ancestry is.”
It was a quiet but firm reference to the issue of birth-right citizenship, which the Supreme Court took up this month in the case of Trump vs. Barbara, where, interestingly, the Constitution appeared as a road block to the stripping of citizenship from people who were born here. Per ScotusBlog:
Chief Justice John Roberts asked Solicitor General D. John Sauer a two-part question about “birth tourism.” First: “Do you have any information about how common that is or how significant a problem it is?” When Sauer responded with a whopping estimate of how common this is, the chief justice moved in for the kill: “Having said all that, you do agree that that has no impact on the legal analysis before us?” When Sauer tried to push back, reminding the chief that “we’re in a new world now,” the chief administered the coup de grace: “Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”
At Harvard, the panel found gallows humor in the idea that, if birth-right activists were really serious, they’d give all the land back to Native people. Gordon-Reed is right: it could get complicated.
But the people behind the birth-right movement are both incredibly powerful and uninterested in such complications. They are unencumbered by all this research, these films and books. For them, the only America is the one birthed, fought for, and ruled by white men, and the only history worth celebrating is that which refuses to impugn those who look like them. This is why they issue executive orders about U.S. history—to cut off the amending, and to return to a fantastical, simplistic past that bears little resemblance to “The American Revolution” or We the People.
Burns and Lepore use context, facts, and narrative to refute the simplistic. Yet to consume their truths, one must have the luxury of time. Time to watch for twelve hours or to read 900+ pages. I am here for that, you are probably here for that, but I’m not sure about today’s version of the young Vincent Brown, who was just watching Saturday morning cartoons when Schoolhouse Rock popped up to miseducate him.
At the time that the cartoon debuted, there were three television networks. The simplistic could hit hard when there were fewer options. Today, there are countless options, but the lies hold power precisely because they show up simply, in a meme or a tweet or, most troubling, in officially-directed erasure. I have a sixth-grader who was obsessed with the Revolution two years ago, but only because he found the Nathan Hale graphic novels at our public library.
In a year when the federal government is openly defying the Constitution, we should wonder about the most impactful ways to package the past and to whom it is delivered. I’m looking forward to sharing the work of Mass Humanities’ “Promises of Revolution” grantees for precisely that reason. There are many avenues, many modes of learning about amendment and complication—but which stories from the 250th will stick with us?
In different formats, both Burns and Lepore are willing to rise to the challenge of documenting and explaining the complicated. Burns begins with the roots of the Revolution and Lepore follows its promises to the present. They believe the public needs to know these stories in order to participate in and, perhaps, to save our democracy. Each chose to produce bold histories in time for the 250th. Their work reaches us in the sleepless night of America 2026.
New questions kept me awake at the end of this remarkable day. How do we share complicated history in less complicated ways? Can the simple be our tool, too? What songs will we sing about the Revolution in another 50 years?