Ken Burns

speaker

195 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 14 Nov

Ken Burns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

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The MeidasTouch Podcast · Ken Burns Discusses his New Series "The American Revolution" · 14 Nov 2025 podcast

It's I mean, you can get an A on your test in eighth grade if you say taxes and representation.

But we put Indian land first.

That's what we wanted.

more than anything else.

This is the fourth global war over the prize for North America, and that prize is the land.

And that land is occupied for 22,000 or 12,000 or whatever number you're going to say by people who don't have the same sense of property and deeds and things that they inherited from Europe, but they nonetheless have that land.

And Benjamin Franklin himself, impressed by the Haudenosaunee

the Iroquois Confederacy, this sort of six nations that had figured out a way to have their own trade and foreign policy, but protect the state's rights.

You're talking about California or Illinois or whatever it might be.

And at the same time, protect the interests of their independent nations, sometimes with different linguistic roots, certainly with different kinds of people.

And he says, why can't we do that?

20 years before the revolution.

It doesn't work.

Nobody wants to give up their autonomy.

But 20 years later, the war cry that he had put at the beginning, join or die, the picture of the snake cut up into pieces, the snake representing the various colonies, becomes the war cry in the most consequential revolution in history.

So it's a good story.

And it will, I think...

I don't want to say arm.

I think it will provide enough information to understand the complexity of then, to understand how they're way more divided then than now.

And that that might provide a new way or a new approach, a new tack to how you don't, as the novelist Richard Powers says, don't make arguments, but tell stories that have the way of reconciling and sort of

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