If you live in the U.S., you likely know that this July is the 250th anniversary of the country. There’s been a lot of news about it, but don’t worry! I’m not going to get into all that.

What I am going to talk about to commemorate the occasion, however, is the interview I did with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein about their documentary, The American Revolution. Until July 12, 2026, you can watch all six episodes for free on the PBS website and app, and when the series first premiered last November, I interviewed them both for Smithsonian magazine.

It was a great conversation, and we discussed many things about the creation of our country. One of those things was lice, which you’ll see below. (I also used the topic to create my first real TikTok back in November. Is it a good TikTok? No! But I’m trying!)

Read on for a condensed and lightly edited version of our conversation.

Vanessa Armstrong: Everyone has an understanding of the American Revolution. But it might be mythologized, or perhaps they haven’t thought about it in depth since high school. Watching The American Revolution will be eye-opening for a lot of people. What do you hope are viewers’ biggest takeaways from the series?

Sarah Botstein: The Revolution was a terribly tragic civil war: neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, families and communities broken apart. Neighbors made different choices, and we tried to provide some context and understanding for those choices. It was a civil war. Americans were breaking themselves into pieces.

The other thing is that it was a world war for — as one of our scholars says — the prize of North America. That dovetails into how much the American Revolution was also about Westward expansion, land and empire itself.

It’s a very surprising underdog story. We didn’t do it alone, and we needed allies, particularly the French, to actually win the war. It’s a violent and bloody war. Many, many, many people died and lost their lives, and we stand on their shoulders. That’s an important piece to remember when we think about the Revolution, so it’s not just, as Ken always says, “smart guys in Philadelphia thinking really good thoughts.”

Ken Burns: The grittiness is what I think is going to be surprising. A lot of that has to do with this superficiality that attends the Revolution — because maybe it’s not even in high school, but in eighth grade, that [people studied] it last with any significance. It’s just an incredibly difficult war, and the [lack of] photographs makes it seem cartoonish. The sacrifices are different than watching somebody fall as they’re climbing up the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. But it is, of course, all of that and much more.

As Sarah is suggesting, it was a big land thing. Somewhere along the line, [American colonists] woke up and said, “Actually, we want this. Not the French. Not the Spanish. We want this.” And that means tragedy for Native people.

Armstrong: What was your process for finding first-person accounts of the Revolution?

Botstein: David Schmidt, the third filmmaker here, deserves a lot of credit for digging up and finding those characters. He grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and is a great student of the 18th century. He’s a little obsessed with finding unusual characters — not just finding them, but finding things people haven’t seen, quotes that are less familiar. That actually goes for the big, fancy names, too. He loves to find the things in the archives that people rarely get to see or hear.

We’re all really interested in the lesser-known characters and how they influence history, how they experience history and how they can help us understand what was happening. There was a little girl, Betsy Ambler, who was a character that we added in as we were making the film, because we thought, “Oh, we need a child’s voice.” We had one quote from her, and then we were like, “Oh, she’s terrific. Can we really pepper her in through the whole show?”

Some of the soldiers who were fighting were so surprisingly young. James Forten [a Black patriot who served on an American privateer as a teenager] at the end of the documentary is one of the most moving stories in the whole show and just a great American story. There are also interesting family dynamics, like Lucy Knox [wife of American General Henry Knox]. I care more about Henry Knox because I know about Lucy Knox and what happens to her family. Any time you can make the story you’re telling feel more relatable because it’s a family, a town, a community, a place, a child or a mother, it just helps bring the history to life.

Burns: A lot of the people that we think we know, we don’t know. And by getting their collective writings together, you can infer some things about them and who they are.

There’s John Greenwood, who’s 14 years old when he joins the patriot cause, and Joseph Plumb Martin, who’s more well known within Revolutionary War scholarship [due to his late-in-life, matter-of-fact memoir] but is nevertheless an amazing character. He’s the grunt, and he’s 15 years old when he signs up, and he gets into the biggest battle of the Revolution right away. And it’s not pretty, and it’s not fun. He’s like every complaining soldier of every war, either Vietnam or World War II. You just go, “Oh, the soldiers must have said that back in ancient Greece.”

Armstrong: I remember learning that Greenwood had a lice infestation when he went back home. That stuck with me, like “Oh you are living a life.”

Burns: And just remember, he survived Trenton. And if you think about it, he's been in the boats across into Delaware — nobody is standing up like the painting. It's ice-filled. It's night. There's a storm. He gets there, it is so cold that he's wants to quit, and he’s just rotating his body. We all know what he's doing, and two of his comrades who did lie down are the only two American deaths in it. And you just think, we could have ended the story right there with John Greenwood. It's amazing. But then he goes home and you see the scene, and his father baking the clothes in the oven to get to kill the lice, and covering him with sulfur — you can't make this up. And that's the beauty of a deep dive.

Even with regards to George Washington, just as in his encounter with Darby Vassall in his headquarters in Cambridge, who is this free Black kid who wants to be paid for doing chores, and Washington, the Virginia planter, just goes, “What?” And it sticks with Darby for his entire life. And just the dynamics — you don't have to make anything up in order for history to be rich and dynamic and complicated.

Armstrong: Historically, Indigenous people and enslaved people haven’t been highlighted or even considered in accounts of the Revolution. How did you find primary sources about these individuals?

Botstein: We stand on the shoulders of this new generation of scholars. Since the bicentennial in 1976, there’s been a huge amount of scholarship finding those voices and doing that research and going into different historical records to bring those characters to life.

Burns: 99.9 percent of people didn’t have their portraits made, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. The question is, how do you resurrect them? Maybe they’ve left a written record. Maybe they’re just a name signing up some place. Maybe it’s a gravestone. But you can figure out how that resurrection could take place and show they did live full lives. Sarah and I are so thrilled that the thing you remembered was John Greenwood going home to be deloused, because this is the stuff that is true, and you can’t make it up.

Armstrong: Did your preconceived notions about any specific events or historical figures shift over the course of the research?

Burns: Every single one, from who George Washington was to what happened at Lexington and Concord or Bunker Hill or Trenton or Yorktown. Everything got dimensionally more complicated and more interesting. And that’s the whole point of this. We’re not here to tell you what we know, but what we learned, and not to share or just pass along the familiar tropes, but rather a much more complex one that makes those big ideas in Philadelphia that much more inspiring.

This is one of the most important events in all of world history. And it’s a sea change in the course of human events. Jefferson got it, understood it as he was writing [the Declaration of Independence]. That’s why it’s framed the way it is. All we want to do is add dimension to it.

And we need to say it: None of this happens anywhere else but PBS. Nobody else is going to give us 10 years to build a history of the Revolution. No one. The willingness to dive deep into this, to be able to excavate stories, to depend and rely on scholarship… the Corporation for Public Broadcasting helped us really pursue this.

Armstrong: I’d guess that most Americans today assume they would have been a patriot rather than a loyalist. But then I remember the first episode of the documentary, which shows people hanging tax collectors in effigy and robbing and setting houses on fire in response to the Stamp Act and wonder, “What if I had lived in Boston and saw those mobs in the street?”

Burns: That’s it! Who would I be? And if you call balls and strikes, if you don't make a loyalist wrong, then who would you be? And more importantly, would you be willing to fight for a cause, sacrifice your life, your fortune, as they said in the Declaration, I mean Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson didn't fire a shot in anger. John Adams didn't fire a shot in anger during the whole Revolution, but George Washington did. And so did Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington may have been the richest person in the country, and he lived in a tent for most of six and a half years, and definitely risked his life and his fortune and his sacred honor for this thing. It’s a big, big deal.

And then whether you would die for a cause, or kill someone else in the cause, it's abstract. The difference between British constitutional monarchy and this fledgling republic idea that nobody's ever done before — that's worth dying for? Well, then it's complicated. It's about land and it's about your money, and it's about your honor, and it's about lots of really interesting things. And then finally, it has that element, as Sarah was saying, of the civil war, where these old scores — the war provides, you hate to say it, opportunity to settle old scores, and people are doing it. South Carolina is a horrible place to be in during this war — so many of the battlefield deaths take place there, but there's lots of civilian-on-civilian violence that takes place. It's in New Jersey. It's in Pennsylvania, to some extent, but really in South Carolina. And it's not fun. It's not a fun thing to watch.

And in a way, our Civil War isn't a civil war, it's a sectional war. There's very few civilian deaths outside of Missouri and eastern Kansas in our Civil War. Two people died at Gettysburg, which is the biggest battle ever fought in North America. But it's happening all over in our Revolution and the lead up to it. Not just deaths, but harassment, and kicking people out of town who are loyalists, opening their mail. It's really tough stuff. And Benjamin Franklin's own son was the deposed royal governor of New Jersey, and was imprisoned and was released presuming that he would go to England. And he stayed and started a terrorist organization that killed patriots. And there were lots of patriot organizations killing loyalists. It's just, you can't believe it. And so the fact that what emerges — us and the U.S. — is pretty amazing, just an amazing thing to contemplate.

Armstrong: It's truly miraculous. There were so many opportunities for it not to happen that way.

Burns: Look at the French Revolution. I mean, ours wasn't fun, but that's really not fun.

Armstrong: Any parting thoughts on what you hope viewers take away from watching the documentary?

Burns: I think the biggest thing for me is that we're in a moment that people have described as existential, certainly a moment of division. Maybe there could be some understanding that during this revolutionary period, we were more divided than we are now.

We’re speaking all around the country to every type of audience. We have never varied what we've said to any group, from Joe Rogan to the editorial board of the New York Times. We are saying the exact same thing. The reception has been remarkable and exciting when people find out what we were about, what we really believed in, and consider the dimensionality of real people who have flaws, who are also great.

George Washington, without whom we don't have a country — doesn't mean he didn't make two huge blunders on the battlefield, or that he was rash in riding out, or that he owned other human beings. You don't have to have that unforgiving revisionism to replace the old top-down narrative. As I said earlier, we just call balls and strikes. We just say, “This is what happened. This is who this person is.” It's a really interesting thing.

And then John Greenwood [the boy with the lice], who — well, don’t won’t give it away, but you cannot make his story up!

Parts of this post originally appeared in my article for smithsonianmag.com, published on November 13, 2025.