Ken Burns

a beautiful thing.

And what was so incredible is that it fostered one of the greatest public debates ever in human history because they had emerged from this bloody, bloody, costly civil war.

Civil war means lots of deaths of civilians.

That didn't happen in our civil war except in Missouri and a little bit of Kansas.

You know, six people died at the Siege of Vicksburg, less than 20 at Atlanta, two in Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America.

But the American Revolution, lots of – there are battles in the south in which you might have one British officer leading loyalist troops.

Every person on each side is an American and they're killing each other.

And they're doing it not just in set battles but in little guerrilla actions, almost like the Viet Cong attacking patrols in South Vietnam.

I mean it is really bad stuff.

And so they say –

We're going to ratify this, but we want a Bill of Rights too.

We want to enshrine these things that we fought for.

And so you have no establishment of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom to assemble and redress grievances, right to bear arms, free and fair trial, end of cruel and unusual punishment.

All these things become the set pieces of—

I made a film a couple of years ago on the U.S.

and the Holocaust, what we knew, when we knew it, what we did, what we didn't do, perhaps what we should have done.

And I was at some event and somebody raised their hand and said, is the Holocaust the most important event since the birth of Jesus Christ in world history?

And I just immediately said, no, it's the American Revolution.

It's the American Revolution.

I mean, this is a sea change in the course of