Ken Burns Is Off To A Hard-Left Start With His PBS American Revolution Series: As Usual, Greedy White Men Steal Native American Land

American Thinker ^ | 11/25/2025 | S. David Sultzer

[SeekAndFind]

Ken Burns and PBS want to teach us the history of the American Revolution. That’s objectively laudable, but from the opening seconds of his new six-part, 12-hour-long series on the Revolution, Burns is off to a truly ludicrous start. Why do I say that? Because instead of beginning with the events that led to the break with Britain in 1775, Burns (after an anodyne quote from Thomas Paine) opens with an Indian diatribe about land.

That is not surprising. Lest there be any question as to what Burns intends for us to learn about the American Revolution, Burns stated in an NPR interview on Oct. 20, 2025, that he believes the driving force of the American Revolution was not to secure for all Americans the ancient rights of Englishmen, but to steal land from the Indians. Really:

The central [motivating force], we’re not taught this in school. It’s taxes and representation, which is super important, but it’s Indian land.

This is obscene historical revisionism. While it’s true that many people wanted to negotiate with Indian tribes to purchase land in the west, that is where the evidence ends. Yet Burns flogs this canard repeatedly throughout the first half-hour of Episode 1.

To go beyond that and claim that desire to steal Indian land motivated the colonists generally—or the Founders particularly—to rebel against Britain lacks a single iota of fact in a massive historic record. Burns’s claim is based on nothing more than—to quote Professor Sean Wilentz’s masterful condemnation of the 1619 Project for similar unsubstantiated calumnies—“imputation and inventive mindreading.”

Moreover, Burns ignores entire political history of Britain—and that history shows that, for Englishmen, the single most abused power of government was taxation. More English blood had been spilled over that one issue than any other in the history of England.

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TOPICS: Education; History; Society
KEYWORDS: burns; kenburns; nativeamerican; pbs; revolution; woke

[Az Joe]

Stupid MFr