Two quotes from the historian Jane Kamensky — one appearing in the first episode of “The American Revolution” and one in the last — exemplify so much of what’s driving Ken Burns’ new king-sized and king-skewering documentary. The first frames the final two hours of the 12-hour series, which encompass events from May 1780 through what the title simply refers to as “Onward.”
“I think to believe in America, rooted in the American Revolution, is to believe in possibility,” Kamensky says. “That to me is the extraordinary thing about the patriots’ side of the fight. I think everybody on every side — including people who were denied even the ownership of themselves — had the sense of possibility worth fighting for.”
Burns’ documentary venerates that possibility, not as an outdated idea but as a dream that took great effort to distinguish and that’s prematurely fading from our cultural consciousness. The series recognizes the…
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