Ken Burns

But it's also a revolution.

It's also a civil war.

And as we've been discussing, it's also a global war.

So it's got wonderful, complicated dynamics.

And we haven't even brought up

The fact that of the three, two and a half to three million inhabitants of those 13 colonies at the beginning of the revolution, 500,000 are free and enslaved Africans who are part of the dynamic.

Women who play essential role in keeping the resistance alive, who are...

writing as philosophers and historians and satirists and poets movingly about it.

They are participating in the revolution when it happens on the battlefield in support of armies or women attending these armies.

They're washing the dead.

They are burying the dead.

They're washing the bloody clothings.

They're around.

They're also back home

running farms and businesses.

Thank you very much.

And so there's a whole cast of people who have not really had access

their stories acknowledged in large measure because we're pre-photographic.

There's not, you know, 99% of people don't have their portraits painted, but it doesn't mean those 99 don't exist.

So we've spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out how to make them exist.