Ken Burns

I mean, sometimes ironically, it's the gravestone that proves that they were alive.

Sometimes it's an enlistment role.

Sometimes it's a letter.

Sometimes it's a memoir.

Sometimes it's just going to the places where you knew they were.

and invoking them.

So in addition to

having a third person narrator reading Jeff Ward's extraordinary script that is distilling 10 years of our working with scholars of every stripe about every aspect of the revolution and read by Peter Coyote.

We also have 400 first person voices read by the finest actors in the world, probably the best cast that's ever been assembled off camera of any television or movie, bringing to live scores of people that you don't know.

We've tried to make those boldface names

less opaque, the Washingtons, the Adamses, the Jeffersons, the Sam Adamses, all of those folks, Abigail.

But more importantly, to introduce our audience and us initially to a cast of characters I'd never heard of,

who I think give dimension and then I think more meaning.

I think maybe we tell a superficial version of the revolution because we're afraid that if we show how violent it was, for example, that it diminishes somehow those big ideas in Philadelphia.

It doesn't.

It makes them all the more impressive.

And so we tell stories about these people

So let's take, go back to the revolution and take the most important person in the history of the United States, which is George Washington.

Without him, we do not have a country.

We just don't.