Ken Burns

That's the word that I think Jefferson would use.

That is to say, they are not bestowed by a monarch.

They're natural, that all men are created equal.

This is big stuff.

And this is distilling, in Jefferson's words in the Declaration, a century of Enlightenment thinking.

And the Enlightenment has been a kind of philosophical and human and kind of governmental dynamic that's coming out of the Renaissance, right?

We know what the Renaissance is in art.

Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, all of this stuff, some music.

But what it's doing on a social scene and a philosophical scene is it's doing that.

And they're reaching back to antiquity, as you say, and they're pulling back some of the best ideas of self-discipline, of temperance, of virtue, all of these sorts of things.

But then because they've experienced all these years of this –

Misuse and distrust from the mother country 3,000 miles away takes at least a month for information to get there.

The Britain wins with our help what we call the French and Indian War, which was a global war called the Seven Years' War.

And they've got now the biggest, most far-flung empire on earth.

But they can't protect its own colonists who are trying to pour over the Appalachians to take Native American land.

And it's causing trouble.

uprisings and so they say you can't go over 1763 you can't go over that and oh by the way we're broke so we need you to help us to pay for this stuff but we don't have any representation there so native lands taxation representation become this thing and it goes on for so long they've watched

the ineffectiveness of their government while they're prosecuting the revolution and the ineffectiveness of the Articles of Confederation that emerges from fighting the war and is trying to figure out how to make it work, that they go into that constitutional convention and they are determined...

to figure out every possible angle to forestall authoritarianism, to balance the relationships between the states, to have the checks and balances between the three forms of government, the judicial, the legislative, and the executive.

It is...