Ken Burns’ latest documentary “The American Revolution,” launches this Sunday on PBS, ten years after he began work on it, which was just about the time that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical “Hamilton” riffing and rapping on the same history began its run.
“There’s been a lot of water under the American Bridge since then; a sense that our divisions will somehow destroy us,” Burns said yesterday, when he and Miranda met with four hundred public school students in Trinity Church, where Alexander Hamilton was a member of the congregation and is buried in its churchyard. Burns showed the students a brief clip from his six-part, 12-hour series. Miranda watched students perform original history raps. The two storytellers answered students’ questions, complimented and complemented one another, talked Revolution and immigrants..
“The story of the American Revolution is that we were as divided then as ever. It isn’t just a revolution of ideas. It isn’t just guys in Philadelphia, ” Burns said. “It’s a civil war. It’s a global war over the prize of North America, which means there are native peoples who end up losing everything, regardless of which side they chose. There are half a million enslaved and free black Americans that are in this town whose story is rarely told. The majority of the population are women. They are not just quietly at home. They are leaders of the resistance….”
“I want to let you know that I learned exactly none of that in school,” Miranda said, “which is why I’m so proud of one of the — I think the most consequential legacy of the show Hamilton, which takes a lot of liberties with history, is our EduHam program”
In the Q & A session after the clip, one student asked what they would want to ask Alexander Hamilton
Miranda: “I think, first of all, I’d probably ask a little forgiveness, because, I didn’t make a documentary. I wrote a piece of historical fiction. Essentially, I had two and a half hours to get the audience’s attention. So I think I’d say sorry for omitting your other six kids…..I think I’d really ask questions about the moments that that he didn’t write about. I’d be very curious about his childhood. I’d be very curious about his relationship to Christianity, which he really turned to towards the end of his life.”
Burns: “,,,I’d want to be with him when he’s in the Constitutional Convention, and they’re trying to reverse engineer against a tyrant. And he says, you know, but what if someone should mount the hobby horse of popularity and and wreak chaos? Everybody’s trying to figure out how to keep this experiment a Republican, Democratic one, and not one that succumbs to authority…”
Another student said: “Both Hamilton and the American Revolution have an incredible emotional depth that help viewers really understand the past as someone learning to tell stories and express themselves. What advice would you give to young creators who want to make people not just learn history but feel it?”
Miranda: “I love stories and I really love music that tells stories, which is why my life’s work has been taking musical theater and hip hop and putting it together. They’re two of my favorite genres because they both tell stories so beautifully and richly.
“With me, it begins with identification. I’ve told this story many times, so I’ll try to tell it a little differently today. But I wasn’t looking to write a musical when I picked up that Ron Chernow biography of Alexander Hamilton. I was going on vacation, and I just wanted one book to pack instead of six. So I picked a really big book.
“I had written a paper on Hamilton in high school. I knew his son died in a duel. I knew he died in a duel. I knew he was on the $10 bill. End of list of things I knew about Alexander Hamilton. But I started reading the book. I didn’t know he had been born in the Caribbean, where my parents were born in Puerto Rico. He was born in Nevis, and he has a Dickensian childhood. I mean, he basically loses everyone who is important to him at a startlingly young age. So just really tragic early life. And yet his response to that is, I’m going to get out of here. I’m going to do a lot of stuff, which is the stuff of great characters.
“A hurricane strikes the island, destroys St Croix, where he’s working. He writes at testament. He just describes the hurricane and describes it so vividly that it’s published in the Danish American Gazette for relief efforts. …people take up a collection to get him an education on the mainland, and send him to New York to become a doctor. And he never goes back. He comes to New York and gets swept up in the revolution.
“Now you should know my father got a scholarship to New York at 18 years of age. My father sleeps four hours a night. He will never do one job when he could be doing 10 jobs. So more than anything, I was just like: I know this guy.
“And I grew up in Washington Heights, Inwood, New York uptown,, in an immigrant neighborhood where I knew so many people who came here from somewhere else and did amazing work in this country so that their kids could have a better life.
“And so to me, it was like, as I’m reading the book, it’s this proto version of what I think is our greatest American promise, which is that we export this promise that if you come here and you work hard, you can make a life for yourself and for your family. And what is also true, as we are seeing in 2025, is you can be demonized for not being from here, which Hamilton also was. He was not trusted by the folks who had ties going all the way back to the Mayflower. And so it just was such a mirror of the immigrant story that I just felt like I saw it with new eyes…You have to really understand your characters and see what you have in common to begin to tell the truth.”
Burns responded to the point about immigrants: “What I’ve learned with regard to the immigrant story, is that there is only us and no them. Only autocrats created them. The United States, we’re all us. So I would hope in these complicated times, that our series might help put the us back in the U.S. “
