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Posted on 11/25/2025 10:27:40 AM PST by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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Even among people who had always been part of slave cultures, like Africans or Indians, where slavery was completely normal and always had been and always would be, and had a normal place within society?
The documentary or the sport in general? 😀
When I watched the documentary it was like watching history, then my Dad's stories of his childhood and then my own childhood and young adulthood. Then 1994 came up and it was like watching a show about a foreign country I knew little about. That's how complete my post-strike divorce with baseball was.
“Actually his baseball series was very good- and i detest the guy...”
Though much of it was entertaining, it was clear that Burns was happy to accept any bull-pucky he came across if it reinforced his leftist virtue-signalling, as evidenced by his eager and uncritical use of the cartoonish version of Ty Cobb generated historically by a succession of total hacks.
For a view of Cobb that’s both balanced and actually researched, see the article below in Hillsdale’s “Imprimis” series:
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/who-was-ty-cobb-the-history-we-know-thats-wrong/
It is an object example of why Leftists cannot be trusted to tell history. And Ken Burns is a Leftist.
They must always force the means to support the ends. Always. Everything is “The Party”. And if that means financing a movie like GI Jane because it shows what a badass a woman can be, even though the movie will lose money, it is money well spent.
After all, they take our money in taxes and disburse it to support things like this.
I watched a PBS production “Weapons of The Revolutionary War” recently, and part way through it, pivoted to the discussions of slavery and racism. What a load of horse crap.
Like his other major series, he’ll end up wasting a quarter of the programming telling us how bad black people had it.
The irony about the Baseball series was that, while it aired, Keith Olbermann, then an anchor on ESPN, provided segments shredding the accuracy of his statements.
White Viking ancestors perhaps?
I’m really sick of hearing about the poor Indians and the poor blacks.
Well, women have it tough you know.
There were some good parts, especially on the strictly military side of the Revolution, but veered off to talk about slavery too often, or about whites stealing “Indian land.” He did admit that the British leaders who were encouraging the slaves to run away from their masters were slaveowners themselves, and mentioned the rapes committed by the British regulars in New Jersey.
He may be a great filmaker, but you build what the buyer pays for. Anytime I see PBS or NEH I know to keep moving, nothing to see here.
It is obvious that Burns and PBS wanted to get out in front of the Revolutionary War narrative as we head into 2026 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Now that the leftists have rewritten history to their liking, it is incumbent on us to support the real historians as they write the real history in the next 8 months.
Land was not “stolen.” It was conquered. In some cases, purchased. Which is the opposite of stolen.
Everyone would be wiser to watch, instead, The White Queen and The White Princess (both available on Amazon Prime), to witness yet again how power corrupts and the corruptible are drawn like a magnet to power.
If you think Caligula, Nero, the Tudors, Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Idi Amin, and Jean-Bédel Bokassa had irresistible inducements, imagine what kind of people would be attracted to the magnitude of power concentrated in Washingon.
The nice thing about PBS and Burns is that you don’t have to watch them ... there are alternatives in this country ... we’re not locked into a state broadcast network.
We stole democracy from the too, apparently.
*sigh*
Why mention it at all asshole? What relevance does it have to the Revolution? And it was mentioned numerous times throughout the presentation. Burns obviously had his Leftist axe to grind
What kind of freeper are you? You don’t belong here. You are being reported and watched
This is the perfect parody of Ken Burns
The Old Negro Space Program
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6xJzAYYrX8
Hilarious - thanks!
“Got laid that very night” - blackstronaut enough for me.
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