Ken Burns

And so you don't need to spend your time wasting your time as filmmakers going, oh, isn't this so much like today?

You can just let it go.

There's a failed invasion of Canada.

We wanted to make it the 14th state.

There's a continent-wide pandemic in which there are huge arguments about inoculations.

And Washington makes, as the historian, the distinguished historian Joe Ellis says,

The greatest military decision was to inoculate his troops.

There's a total eclipse.

There's lots of stuff that rhymes, but you don't have to say, hey, doesn't that seem so much like today?

Because you want to do something that lasts and you want to have something that, you know, our Civil War series, today is a school day in America, as you and I are talking, and my Civil War series, which is

More than 35 years old is being shown in hundreds of classrooms.

Not the whole thing, but a 20-minute or a 40-minute gulp about the Battle of Gettysburg or about black troops or about Lincoln in the White House and issuing demands.

Whatever it might be, it's in use.

And it wouldn't be in use if everybody's going, oh, isn't this so much like this?

Yeah, we started, Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency.

You know, and so the things that were rhyming then don't rhyme now, or some do, and stuff comes and goes.

We have the wife of a German general, Hessian general, who's traveling to the United States alone.

She'd waited for the birth of her third daughter and was now making the perilous thing.

She's anxious because she hears that Americans eat cats.

Now, if it had come out when we're in the middle of the presidential campaign and people are talking about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating cats, completely made up, completely not true.