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

And he gives up his power twice, which is just the stunning thing.

He's able to inspire people in the dead of night to fight.

He's able to pick

subordinate talent, unwilling, unjealous of whether they're better generals, and many of them were than him.

But nobody had the rectitude, nobody had the command, nobody had the dignity.

Somebody says, Benjamin Rush, the only physician who signed the thing, he said all other monarchs in Europe would look like Valet de Chambre next to him, right?

You know what a Valet de Chambre is?

The guy who's

pouring out the piss pot next to George Washington.

So you have to wrestle with the complications.

You've got this guy who owns other human beings, this guy who rides out and risks the whole cause in the battlefield, and a guy who makes some tactical mistakes.

Particularly, I'm in New York, in Long Island,

um, his, his failure to protect his left flank causes the biggest battle of the revolution to be lost and be a humiliating patriotic defeat that will just in a few days, lose him, not just Brooklyn, but all of Manhattan as well.

And New York becomes for seven years and two months, a loyalist and British headquarters.

And it's not until two years after Yorktown that he gets to ride back in and kind of reclaim the city that his own mistake had lost.

But

Without him, we don't have a country.

More trying than this.

There are some aspects that are unprecedented.

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