Ken Burns

It's bankrupt.

So we're going to replace it with a Freudian interpretation, a psychosexual interpretation.

And it's going to be Marxist economic determinism.

Somewhere along the line, it's symbolism.

It's semiotics.

It's deconstruction.

It's queer studies.

It's Afrocentrism.

It's whatever it is.

None of those give you what –

All of those give you, which is a multitude of modes of inquiry, multitude of perspectives, like the spokes on a wheel that make the wheel work.

engineered to great strength, able to bear a great load.

So we draw in scholars on Vietnam or the revolution that represent all sorts of different areas of scholarship.

And we take in what their knowledge is, but not necessarily their total interpretation.

So scholars of Native Americans, one of the scholars, Christopher Brown, is a student of

18th and 19th century British economy.

He's a black man.

You go, no, no, no.

He must want to talk about slavery and does, but only in the context of economic stuff.

So you get a wonderful dynamic without having to subscribe to anybody's theory of how you should understand American history.