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[on-hold music] If the American Revolution was, as Ken Burns put it, the biggest event since the birth of Christ, then there's probably never been a better time to explore and drastically expand on, not refute, but expand on why it happened, who was involved, and what it set us up for than right now. There's probably never been a better time to understand the people affected on the front lines and far from them, the promises made, the expectations set, the precedents set.
And of course, there's also no one better to tie it all together than Ken Burns himself, and this time with his co-directors, Sarah Botstein and my guest today, my good childhood friend and my very first podcast guest, way back to episode one, than David Schmidt. Every week, thousands of people ask us the most important question in the world: what can I do?
So every week, I turn around and ask someone like David, who actually knows what the hell they're talking about, the very same question, someone who has already had to answer it for themselves, someone who's working on the front lines of the future, even indirectly, by working through the past.
The decisions we made then, because we are who we are, have ramifications today and for the future, for global health, for climate change, democracy, poverty, AI, food and water, Alzheimer's research, all of the above. My job is to find out why these folks are doing the work they're doing and what we, you and I, can do to support it, to not only join their work or fund their work, but to find our own way to the front lines of the future, and again, sometimes that's through the past.
I'm your host, Quinn Emmett, and my guest today, again, is David Schmidt. David is the producer and co-director, along with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, of The American Revolution, a six-part, twelve-hour series premiering on PBS this November, and I have already seen parts of this twice, and I have to tell you, it is incredible. I can't wait for you to see the rest. Let me explain why David's here.
David is a childhood friend, but two decades after he and I played Nintendo in his basement, he began working with Florentine Films as a researcher and apprentice editor, beginning with The Roosevelts in twenty-fourteen, where he also supervised the documentary's seven-episode script. David's research on The Vietnam War in twenty-seventeen won him the Jane Mercer Footage Researcher of the Year Award, and he also worked closely on that project with writer Jeffrey C.
Ward and helped coordinate post-production. If you've seen Vietnam War, which you should and not shy away from, you will understand what an undertaking that was. And of course, with Burns, Schmidt also produced the two-part biography Benjamin Franklin in twenty-twenty-two for, of course, PBS. I can't wait for you to hear this discussion.
I think it pairs really nicely with our conversation with Clint Smith and can't wait for you to see this piece. For questions or feedback, of course, email us at questions@importantnotimportant.com. [on-hold music] David Schmidt, welcome back to the show. It's good to be here again. Very different circumstances. You are constantly standing on the cusp of history- [chuckles]... and giving us all a lot of perspective. I'm gonna have to figure out how to run our first episode again. I don't know.
I was trying to explain to someone this morning the circumstances of my very first podcast conversation and you and having you back, and they were like- I don't wanna relive it right now, but I'll just say, yeah, it was the day of the fake nuclear scare in Hawaii with the alerts that told us we were all going to be hit by an inbound nuclear missile.
And I'm really grateful to you, actually, that I was able to kinda download my thoughts in the moment 'cause I wouldn't have that clear of a picture of what it was like living through that. I was just on a pre-honeymoon with my wife, who handled it gracefully, and I did not, and I like that I have that memory recorded, so thank you for that.
It's good to be back to talk about something that I actually did rather than just something that scared me. [chuckles] Yeah. No, absolutely. Well, I'm sure this was scary at times as well in a very different way. But that's, you know, there's this great quote. Is this David McCullough? I don't know. Somebody said about, you know, history could have always gone the other way, basically. Mm.
And obviously, there's always pieces of that, and obviously, you and your co-conspirators know that better than anybody else, but you didn't have to, like, live through it for seventeen minutes or whatever it was. Yeah. So- It was cool because i-i-in a weird way it was like a shared human experienceThat nobody had really suffered So everybody in Hawaii who was there at the time got scared, but also had something fun to talk about in a strange way.
Not fun to talk about, but something to talk about. Yeah, sure. All right. Since that very first episode, this is 207, something like that.
It, it turns out listeners, especially now, are really, you know, as we do the what can I do thing, a lot of the folks are really always interested in like who, as we call it, the front lines of the future, how people, scientists, senators, whoever it is, doctors, historians, find their ways to the work they're doing because it's inspirational to people who are accountants or artists or whoever it is to go, "Oh, I could make this lateral thing right."
You know, it's like how I wanted to grow up and maybe I get a business degree, but explicitly to work for a baseball team, you know? Yeah. What are the lateral moves you can do to help? And I realized as I looked at these questions in my basic outline that I've never actually gotten to the context of these with you offline, online, anything.
So I'm gonna ask them, and it sounds like it's the same question, but it's not. And the first part is- Sure... why do you have to do this job? So of everyone in the world, why you? And I instantly thought, "David's gonna hate answering that question." And the second one is, why do you have to do this work? So you graduate Dartmouth, and you've been working with Ken ever since.
Of all the things you could have done, why'd you have to do this work? Second one's easier than the first. Mm-hmm. So the first one you're saying, why does it have to be me that is doing this job? Yeah. Okay. Well, I don't know that it has to be, so I'll say that. But accepting the premise of the question, I'll say that one thing I'm good at is really obsessing over detail and solving puzzles, too.
So filmmaking is solving thousands, millions of puzzles again and again and again. It's not necessarily that I'm the best at solving the puzzles, but I will obsess over how to do it perfectly.
And so there's a perfectionist streak in me that would not work without having the people that I work with to say, to be very decisive. So the part that I bring to it is reading as much as I can of what George Washington had to say during the war and highlighting all the things that I thought were good, bringing them to my colleagues, and they say, "Yeah, but we don't need to say all of that. Let's just have him-" Right. "... you know, use this point."
And that obsession, sometimes it's sometimes hard to live with, but I do think that it polishes what all of my colleagues have been doing in a way that somebody else wouldn't bring to it. I also carry with me, you know, Quinn, you and I grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and I like to tell people that I grew up in 1774. So I carry with me lots of experiences of seeing, smelling, you know, you could walk out your door right now and smell Williamsburg in a way that I can only remember.
But I carry with me this kind of, I don't know, bedrock of understanding about colonial America that nobody else who didn't have the experiences that we did could have.
So I have the experience of working with Ken since 2009 on all, on other projects, "The Roosevelts," and "Vietnam," "Benjamin Franklin," and now the American Revolution, and then I can marry that with my memories and connections to Williamsburg and the time of the 18th century that, yeah, you just don't think anybody else quite has.
I'm sure there's somebody else who could do it perhaps better, definitely differently, or just as well differently, but that's the what I bring to it. And then why do I have to do this? Certainly, I would have found a different way to tell American history. But when I was in college, and I was majoring in history, it was, you know, these term papers I'm writing, even I'm not rereading them [chuckles]
after they're done, right? So I, I don't think I could have been successful in the world of academia quite the same way that I was being trained to do as an undergrad. And at the same time, I loved piecing things together in the way that you would when you're writing those history term papers, finding stuff in the archives, telling a compelling narrative.
And so I was looking for a way to tell American history, which has always been my passion, I don't know, more dimensions than just words on page. Mm-hmm. And so I thought to myself, "Well, maybe I could go work for Ken Burns." And then the opportunity kind of fell in my lap. I graduated in 2009. The financial crisis meant that none of my friends had jobs coming out of college.
And so I went to career services for the only time in my life because I saw that they were offering a job shadow at Florentine Films, and I knew what that was, and I immediately called down there. They had me come in for a day just to see what it was like, and I just, you know, just really loved it, and I knew that I had to do it, signed up to be an intern, and at the end of that internship, got my full-time job.
I think one of the first times I was working closely with Ken, he said to me, "Wow, you're like a pig in shit." And I didn't know what he meant by that. I was, like, briefly offended, but he's, he was absolutely right. Like, not everybody would enjoy the slop that- Yep... goes into the sausage-making of these things, but it is so exactly what, what energizes me. I'm really grateful that I've had the opportunity to do it and that I've, I've done well at it.
I love that, and I've been thinking ever since at the Yorktown thing when you and Dana sat down and immediately just started digging into production and research and all that kind of things, and then she said the incredible line of like, "Is there a movie about witches coming out this year?" I-- Nobody's talking about this, at least not enough, but there is all sorts of media this year that is related to revolutionaries. Yeah. There's Andor. Yeah. One battle after another. Yeah.
There's Wicked and Wicked For Good. We're a couple years after it, I guess, but Dune certainly has that aspect, and the American Revolution is a totally different way of approaching it, but I just think there's something there. I think we should probably have a conversation that you and Dana talking about.This sort of thing. That'd be fun.
I think it could be kind of awesome but I thought about your perfection or you were saying the perfectionist part, and I thought about what she's always told me about taking on this. So when she got the job on "Wicked," they were on, like, their third director or whatever, John, and the story was basically... Obviously, "Wicked" the book was "Wizard of Oz" didn't happen the way you thought it would.
Came out in the late '90s. Okay. Something like that. Universal got the rights to make a movie and Stephen Schwartz said, "Hold on. Can I try to make a musical first?" Basically. So it was actually... That's the direction it went. That's wow. Okay. And Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman made the musical and as they said, they were inspired by the book and took pieces of it. The book is very different in parts.
Um- Yeah, very different. Yeah, in a lot of ways, but it's been 20-something years, and Dana had just worked with John on her TV show, and I'm getting to a point, I promise, and she gets hired to do "Wicked." John says, "Can you come help me with this?" Right? This is the first time an outside writer had come along 'cause the same people who made the musical 23 years and were so close to it were the ones making the movie.
Same producer, everything. Mm-hmm. Except for John and then Dana, and she had never seen the musical, and it was COVID, so she couldn't go see the musical, so she had to fake her way through it for a little while, but she has this important point about, like you said, the perfection of him asking these questions about who actually was George Washington, what did he say, right?
Mm-hmm. And she has the same points about Elphaba, where she said, "No, but hold on a second. What are her powers?" And they were like, "Well, you know, she can fly." She's like, "See, I don't know." And- Right... as many diehards are gonna see this, just like as many, like, diehard Colin Williamsberg fans are gonna see "American Revolution," she was like, "Okay, does she have to have the book with her when she does it, and what does that mean?"
Oh, that's great. "And what's in the book?" And also, did she know she could be melted by water? Like, all these different things. Right. That she's like, "We're gonna have to explain this to millions if we do this right, millions of people who have no idea, and all they know is 'The Wizard of Oz.'" Right? So I, I brought some of that to the film. Yeah.
Because I come at it from the... I would've been the viewer who would've written the letters about, "Well, you know, da, da, da." You know? Yeah. And I know how annoying it was for them to hear me say that from time to time. Yeah. But I also know that the film is better from that, and also from me saying that at the start rather than last minute when it's too late to fix some things.
Yeah, 100%, because it informs- It's really great that Dana brings that to "Wicked"... the story. So- Yeah... we'll get to... What is your term for it that you've been trying to get? Wicken Forvolusion. So, so, okay, we know that Barbenheimer, everybody knows Barbenheimer. Last year, they tried to make, what was it, Clicket? Yeah. I don't know why they went for Clicket for "Gladiator" and "Wicked," but they could've...
Wikiator was right there. Wikiator- Much better... was right there the whole time. And so for the "American Revolution" and "Wicked" for good, I think it should be Wicken Forvolusion. I think that's- Yeah. I think it's great. There's, like, work to be done to get it, but I think once you get it and the themes- It'll make people say, "What?" And then they'll- Uh-huh... have to learn more.
So the idea of "Wicked" was, like, this actually happened differently than you thought, and here's different people's perspectives. Yeah. And a lot of the work you guys have always done is, like, bringing a ton of different characters into these. Right. I mean, Vietnam, right? These different ways, jazz and baseball and all this stuff. I know you weren't there for those. [upbeat music] Hey, I have three kids. They eat so much. We try to eat real food. We try to cook when we can.
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It's right there for you. Check it out. Huge thanks to Mill for sponsoring our work and doing the right thing, and thanks to all of you listeners for supporting our partners. [upbeat music] I was there for Vietnam, so I know exactly what you mean. Right. It, it's like, it's not just about these main guys, but also these main guys aren't who you thought.
I just had Clint Smith on the show, New York Times best-selling author. His prose book, his nonfiction book, of which there's now two editions, "How the Word Was Passed" and the young reader's edition. He has this quote in one of them where he said, "I think that history is the story of the past using all of the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts." Sure.
And Ken had this quote recently where he said, "The American Revolution is encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia." Is that reason enough to make this, to go there's so much more to this, and I have a perfectionist like David up to bat who can tear this thing down to its basics? Or- It may be. It's not the reason, it's not the reason that I approached it. It's related to the reason I w- I mean, Ken asked you to do something, you say yes, right?
When it's something th-this great an opportunity, so it's not like there was any thought about whether I wanted to do this or not. But what really energized me about taking this project onWas not to change anybody's preconceptions necessarily about the American Revolution, 'cause actually a lot of those remain true, but was to myself, first and foremost, to take some time to understand this, you know, foundational, obviously, literally moment in our history,
and to then take that process of discovery with all my colleagues and make it something that anybody, everybody has access to because this story does belong to everybody. So what I think you would find when you watch the whole thing is that there's a lot that you'll come in with that you already knew, and we're not really throwing any of that out. Mm-hmm. There might be a couple things that we just don't go to.
Like y- this, this moment is so important in American history, and every generation of Americans has dealt with it, and some things have come from it, have been emphasized in a way that maybe they weren't quite the way that they were, that we've come to understand. So for instance, really small things like Paul Revere wouldn't have said, "The British are coming."
Nathaniel Hale may have said, "I only have o- but one life to give for my country," but if he did, he's quoting a well-known play. Mm-hmm. "Don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes," probably not said exactly that way. If it is, there's four or five people who've been credited with saying it. Mm. John Paul Jones is said to have said when asked to surrender in the Battle of Flamborough Head, "I have not yet begun to fight."
Well, maybe he said that, but it doesn't appear in the history until after the fact, and we know that he remembered responding to that, this is in John Paul Jones' own words, "in the most assured negative," or something very similar to that. I might have it slightly off. And then Betsy Ross probably didn't make the first flag.
So rather than say, you know, "You guys think Betsy Ross did this, she didn't," we'll say, "No one knows who made the first flag," rather than, you know, we go with John Paul Jones' actual thing. So there are those things that are like kind of part of our mythology, but they don't really, you know, affect any true understanding of this war. So what happens is, yeah, Washington sacrificed his life.
He put on the line his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor. Even if he didn't sign the Declaration, he's doing that. He's one of the wealthiest men in the country, and he's sleeping in a tent during much of the war, and he certainly is not back at Mount Vernon for more than four days or something like that during the entire war. Hmm. It's true that he's putting his money where his mouth is. That said, so did tens of thousands of other people, and the war affected millions.
This is a war that unlike the 20th, 21st century wars in our history and similar only to the Civil War I would suppose, is in American towns and cities. And in all of the colonies there's something military going on. New York's occupied, Boston's occupied, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah. This is a war that is obviously going to affect civilians, and we happen to know what they thought because they wrote it down. Mm-hmm. They knew they were living through history.
This is a much more literate society than at least I was aware going in, and they either at the moment or in their memoirs wrote down what they saw and what they did and what they felt, and so we have access to this.
We are really standing on the shoulders of people of the period, of the every generation since that's dealt with this period, and also, you know, one of the things that separates this film from what we could have made maybe 50 years ago is the work that is done since then to kind of proliferate, scan, digitize- Mm...
a lot of that first-person material, so we're able to shape our narrative through the experiences of the people who actually lived it, which is, you know, allows you to feel the truth of this, that these are people just like us, and to share a kinship with those who came before. Imagine what you might do under similar circumstances or realize that some of these circumstances are actually unimaginable, what they had to deal with. Sure. Yeah.
I'm glad you, you pointed to all these firsthand things, and again, you and I grew up in this. I'm sitting outside of it, like the odds of a cannon going off while we're talking, like 80%. But unlike, again, you know, s- a lot of the, your team's prior work, unlike Vietnam, I guess Benjamin Franklin was similar, there were no real, like- Yeah... photographs or videos or, or newsreels.
You had all these firsthand accounts, but at the same time it sounds like you guys really brought in, from everything you've said, like a real murderer's row of American historians to go- Mm-hmm... over this thing piece by piece, knowing that nothing will ever be perfect and satisfy everyone. But where do you start with that research process, knowing the constraints, which are sometimes really helpful, right?
You're like- Mm-hmm... we just don't have this- Mm-hmm... this media. And- Yeah... what other self-imposed constraints are there? 'Cause again, I always try to help people understand. It, it's easy for people to look and go, "Oh, this is great, six episodes," and that's what it is. It's like I can't imagine what this was cut down from.
You guys have had the same scriptwriter for almost all of Ken's work? He's had a few scriptwriters, n- notably Dayton Duncan and- Yeah... uh, Sarah Burns and David McMahon. Right. But Jeffrey Ward's written The Big Wars and Jazz and Baseball- Right... and worked with Ken for 40 or more years. [upbeat music] It's Quinn. Maybe you're like me and sometimes you just spiral out, not just because everything is a lot all of the time, but because some part of you actually wants to do something about it.
But, I mean, holy shit, where to start, right? Great news. We built an app for that. It's called What Can I Do? Even better news, it's free and it's fast. It takes just three clicks to start unfucking the world. Visit whatcanido.earth to get started for free. [upbeat music]Tell me about that process, knowing, as Ken has always said, "Yes, Netflix would give me a lot of money, but they would never give me 10 years." Right.
Knowing, okay, we're finishing up Vietnam, it's '20 whatever, '15, '16, we've got a lot of work ahead of us. Like, how do you build that process? Yeah. What does it really look like? Well, Franklin and Revolution are the first time that I've been in the role where a lot of it comes down to me, and again, with the other producers, Ken, Sarah, and Salima on this one, and on Franklin with Dayton Duncan, and on this with Jeffrey Ward, the script writers.
But I will say that, you know, I am lucky enough to have come into a company that has had a lot of success before I ever had anything to do with it, and so I can trust the process in a way that might be... Maybe they can too, just because they've done it so many times, but... Or because they have a, a higher p- opinion of themselves than I do.
[chuckles] But I know that it's going to be good, it's going to get done if we do the work, and that Ken has created the space for us through both all of his hard work and also his good name, that people are going to generally say yes to us, generally gonna open their doors, their grounds to us if we're gonna film. If they're historians or, or writers of the period, they're gonna wanna talk to us.
And I think that this film, in some ways, there will be other contributions to us, b- but this is, in some ways, you know, our living generation's... One of our opportunities for so many people's input to be put into a single thing. Every generation gets its chance to look at the founding of this country on the 50th anniversary, 250 now. You know, 100 years was back in 1876, and you know, the bicentennial. So those moments are what we can really focus in on.
And I think that because Ken has the credibility that he does, we were able to get the best of the best in terms of historians. We worked with all the great archives, museums, et cetera, to make this work. So the first thing you do is you read, and you read, and you read, uh, and certainly Jeff does that.
And in the meantime, while Sarah and I are reading, we're also going out and talking to people like Alan Taylor and Jane Kamensky, others, and just, you know... I- in the case of the oldest generation that appears in this film is, you know, the late Bernard Bailyn, who passed away I think in '22, maybe '21. But we interviewed him first, and we interviewed him for the Franklin film, but we knew that we were making this American Revolution film, so we asked him questions about that as well.
And you just know that, like I said, you can trust the process, that if you do the work, it's like a field of dreams kinda thing. It will get done. And Sarah is really the master of knowing how long things take and how- Mm... to build out the schedule and making sure we hit our marks. And I will say that, you know, we weren't really aware of the 250th when we initially started saying we wanna do this. It wasn't what drew us to it. Mm-hmm.
But there was a, a moment relatively early in production where we're like, "Oh, okay, we would like to get this out before- Mm-hmm... January 1st, 2026." Not knowing what the country would be like by any means, but knowing that people would like to talk about the 250th in that year, and that there will be other people putting their own product out, and that we wanted to get a little bit ahead of that.
But also, in part, not just to get ahead of it, but to be a resource for whichever institutions would like to draw on our film when they're talking about the 250th. And I, I know that's already happening, which is really- Yeah... exciting. Yeah. So a- as you're going about it, and it sounds like you said Sarah's the mastermind of the process, I'm imagining you guys having a 76ers trust-the-process sign, which- Yeah... has worked out better.
Because of '76, right? So... 100%, there you go. Yeah. There you go. American Revolution franchising. You can do this all day. Do you come at it through characters? Do you come at it through... Y- obviously you're just reading a lot and going through all these incredible historians, but are you coming at it, like, year by year? Sort of what is, like, the organizational principle for something so unwieldy? I don't know. It's not necessarily an order to it. Yeah.
You know, Jeff's writing the script at the same time that we're out filming, and at the same time that we're not just filming interviews, but filming, you know, landscapes or historic museums or whatever. At the same time, I'm grabbing a lot of the archival voices, and at the same time, our colleagues are gra- gathering a lot of the archival stills and documents, et cetera.
But I think that, you know, the first thing to make sure you've got is the chronology. Mm-hmm. Some other filmmakers would make their episodes thematic. You know, this is the episode on X and this is the one on Y. But ours is this is the episode on, you know, the first half of 1776 kinda thing. I guess there isn't one that's the first half of 1776. There's one that's the second half of 1776.
But my point is we are diligent about sticking to the chronology, and one thing follows the other, and that actually helps us ground it, I think, and then find the human stories that fit within those moments and those scenes. And then, okay, you know, there's a character that I'm particularly fond of that actually came a little bit late to the process, a, a girl from Yorktown, Virginia, named Betsy Ambler, who was 10 when the war began and 18 when the peace was concluded.
So she came of age with her country. And her inclusion in the story came about because we had already, you know, had a rough cut of the six episodes or maybe only f- the first five episodes.
And Sarah Botstein turned to me and said, "I feel like we're missing a child's perspective." And I was like, "Yeah, well, wouldn't that be nice?" And then I remembered that there was this girl who had some pretty interesting things to say about the war, both, both during it and a little bit more after, but I didn't know everything that she'd written at that point, and I was like, "Let me just explore this." She ended up being in five of the six shows.
She allows us, because she's from Yorktown, Virginia, to seed the idea of that place which will be forever changed by the war in the first episode, but also lets us come to Virginia, which was so important- Mm... to the Revolution at a time when most people, when they're talking about the early years of the Revolution, areThinking much more about Massachusetts for good reason. Yeah. It allows us to, you know, set some of the board correctly for what's gonna come.
And she's also somebody who never saw a battle, and she lived about half the war as a refugee, so you get to see what war does to people, to civilians as well. Yeah. And then my favorite thing about her is, yes, there's a couple letters that she wrote during the scariest of times in 1780, 1781, when she's writing back to a friend in Yorktown.
But most of what we have of her, she wrote in the early 1800s to her little sister, who also experienced much of what Betsy Ambler experienced during the war but was too young to remember it. Hmm. So none of it's ever been published. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has all of her writing in the Rockefeller Library there. Her intention wasn't to publish these letters, it was just to tell the truth of them.
And so there's something that just feels more true about that- Sure... because it, the, the audience is just her sister and- Yeah... not us. Yeah. No, I love that.
And I know the production stuff, you know, and the research process isn't, like, the sexiest part, but again, like talking to Clint, like, how we approach history and how we approach grounding ourselves in facts first, which means like- Mm-hmm... literally starting with the years first instead of a theme, which can start to change things- Yeah... a little bit, you know?
That's really important, and it's instructive again, I think, to other people who are trying to get into the work, or teachers who are, again, are looking at this and going, like, "If I've got kids who might be interested in history and I'm showing them," like you're saying, if this is being used as an educational instrument for 250, that's important to know. One thing I just want...
Like, you're just making me think of is, is I was talking a little bit about the work that people have done in the last 50 years to surface more testimonies about the Revolution, and this is not a knock on previous generations at all. They didn't have the easy access to what we had. But, you know, if Benjamin Franklin wrote something to somebody, they kept that letter, and so it's just always been easier to access the people in power's memories of what happened.
And also, it was a more literate society than anywhere else on earth except for maybe Scandinavia, but literacy was still kept from a large percentage of the population. Sure. And-or a lot of North America doesn't speak and write in English, if we're talking Indigenous people.
That said, there's an awful lot out there that we know that people did say or wrote or remembered, and I would just say I'm grateful that we have much more easy access to that now than we did before, and, you know, hopefully people will continue to churn up more and more.
When Clint is talking about what he's talking about, how the word is passed, an incredible book, and it's often dealing with how slavery is talked about in certain parts of the country at different living history museums or other historical sites. And the fact is, slavery is one of the most documented things in early American history because- Oh, yeah... it's pretty transactions.
But we don't usually know what people thought, the people themselves, the enslaved people themselves, because literacy was actively kept from most of them. We are super grateful that there are a few standout characters that give us representation from those populations in the time of the American Revolution.
Somebody like Phillis Wheatley, who was an incredible writer herself. Her name, Phillis Wheatley, she was brought over on a slave ship from Africa called the Phillis, and she was enslaved by the Wheatleys. So that's not her birth name. That is as slave name as it gets, and yet she made a name for herself and became an incredibly successful poet, not just in North America, but in Europe as well.
And what's interesting, you know, we don't really get into this in the film, but there's an argument to be made that her career as this kind of transatlantic poet was cut short by the war because England and the colonies were separated, and you couldn't have that, you know, exchange of ideas in the same way.
So she's a great example, and then Boston King is another great example who stands in for the thousands of Black men, women, and children that used the opportunity of the American Revolution to win their own freedom by going to the British side during the war. Right. And he has some really great thoughts that Samuel Jackson read for us for this film and, you know, I think Samuel L. Jackson did him well.
So you have told me offline and online, again, we've been to two of the events here at the Colonial Williamsburg, one was amazing in Yorktown on the battlefield, pretty incredible. Such a great turnout for those among- That was-... history nerds. Those were so cool. Ken is famous for, at Florentine, having a sign in the editing room that says, "It's complicated," and that's- Yeah...
one of the beautiful things about history. So one of the things that I think maybe if you're coming at this, I don't wanna say in a reductive way, but if you're coming at this from a typical US public school education, you might be surprised at how central, for example, Native Americans are in- Mm-hmm... the film. Talk to me a little bit about that to sort of- Sure... set it up before people watch.
So I went to Dartmouth, as you mentioned earlier, and one of my professors there is a man named Colin Calloway. He speaks with a northern English accent, and I first met him on a history open house during pre-orientation at my freshman year of Dartmouth 20-plus years ago. And so I'm talking to him, you know, and say, "Oh, what do you teach?" And he says, "Native American history" in his, you know, Yorkshire accent, and just kind of floored me.
And he said, "You know, sometimes it takes an outsider to really see it clearly," which stuck with me. So I took his class. I took three of his classes. He always said American history doesn't make any sense without American Indian history, which, you know, self-evidently true, I have to imagine, but never more true than with this war.
The American Revolution is about all sorts of things, the things that you know it's about, as well as many-Other things that you might not be aware of, and it also meant something different to every individual who got involved in it. So for somebody like Boston King, it's about getting himself and his successors out of slavery for somebody like Dragging Canoe, who's a Cherokee warrior
the American Revolution is about fighting for his people's sovereignty and independence and of all the things the American Revolution is about, one of those things undeniably is about the future of the continent of North America and you know, somebody like Washington knew that and he sends an army into upstate New York that with, you know, his orders to General Sullivan when they go up there is burn their towns, make it so they can't live there.
That is not an attractive part of the story of the patriot side of the American Revolution but it is true and it's something that Washington wrote about and thought about and to tell this story without getting into that detail is to be doing a disservice to history.
There are also Native American people who are fighting alongside the American rebels who considered themselves of course patriots among them the Stockbridge militia from Western Massachusetts and George Washington said of them that they are our friends and brothers. So it is complicated, but I don't think that those complications are perplexing. I think they actually just make sense. Life's complicated. Sure.
So the more you understand it, it actually I believe makes your country make more sense. You know, it's funny, one of the things I told Clint when I was talking to him was I was so excited about the young reader version of his book because you and I grew up here surrounded by all these different things. Mm-hmm.
And at some point, and again, I worked with your brother out at Jamestown and- Yeah... things like that, and even since I was there and you were there, they've discovered so much. Oh, yeah. And then there was the sixteen nineteen project and everything, but the point is it was easy growing up here. I think if you were curious enough to look around and go, "There's probably more to this story." Mm-hmm.
That again, a lot of this is probably truthful, but there's probably more characters to this story. There's probably more people who spoke up from these stories. So we hear about the American Revolution and like you said, you've got all these complicated, very individualized reasons, but it really c- so much of it comes down to we're in the Enlightenment.
We are in looking at what are natural rights, and you've got all these, like you said, very literary and well off Northeasterners writing about this stuff, but you've also got felons involved and- Mm-hmm... as your brother always pointed out to me about Jamestown, second and third sons, right, who weren't due to inherit anything, and you've got slave owners and all this stuff, and you used the word a few minutes ago, self-evident, right?
Which is the second line, right? They are like, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Right. As horrific as, let me phrase this the right way, the North American slave trade was horrific, thirty-five thousand ships over or passages over, over three hundred years. We were doing slavery for a long time as a race of people. There's not a lot of these truths that would imply that they are self-evident from- Right... sort of who we are. We are a complicated creature. Right.
And would say there's nothing self-evident about that. Yeah. E-exactly. Now- But it's a declaration. Let's make it, Seth. It's a declaration. It is a promise, right? It is a declaration. Right. Then you're like, "Well, now we gotta back it up." Yeah.
We've had a lot of trouble backing it up because of who we are as creatures, and now you're putting out this six-episode incredible series in a moment where people's attention spans are very short, and we're really struggling over complicated stories. How do you most earnestly and truthfully keep people's attention for them to absorb these complicated characters and complicated stories?
I mean, I think I've never been inside of anybody else's head, but I think that people are very thirsty for this information, and I don't think it's specific to anybody who votes a certain way. I think Americans want to know this stuff. Hmm. I think they recognize that they don't know it the way that they'd like to. I think that all of us have some understanding of the American Revolution before we have our first conscious memories, basically. You know, the Fourth of July is the Fourth of July.
Washington's on our currency, et cetera, the flag, and then we learn about it in school. We learn about it in elementary school, learn about it in middle school. We usually learn about it in eleventh grade in high school, but in, especially by eleventh grade, you know, that's usually a US survey class, and they are worried they're not gonna get to September eleventh if they spend the time that they ought to on the American Revolution.
So I just think, again, I don't think that we're out to dispel anybody's understanding of the American Revolution necessarily, but we're just here to tell you what we found out, and I think that people are really thirsty for this. Honestly, look, Thanksgiving's coming up. There's not that many things that everybody can talk about at Thanksgiving. There's sports. There's the weather. Those matter, but what matters more than the American Revolution?
And again, I don't think we're trying to tell anybody, "Hey, your understanding is wrong." I think that this could give people, curious people, an opportunity to break bread over stuff that really matters, stuff that they share, and that it really has informed our country where it is today, but certainly where it's come from the last two hundred and fifty years.
And thankfully, Thanksgiving gives you a little time off of work to maybe watch the whole thing too or at least talk about it. There you go. But it's an important lesson unto itself, right? Especially now. So the entire country had thousands of state and local elections last night, right? Mm-hmm. And in Virginia, every district, every single district in Virginia was bluer than it was one year ago,
and there's probably a thousand reasons for that among a very... You know, Virginia's a complicated place. You've got basically- Mm-hmm... a bunch of people who at least used to work in Washington, D.C. until a few months ago. You've got unbelievable amount of the variety of armed forces and other government institutions and retired folks, all these different things, so much history, all this stuff,
Native American folks, colleges, you know. There's one right down the street here. But it seems like a lot of people who were saying then-I don't feel like I'm being heard, much less being represented, right? What's the line from Hamilton? "Why should a tiny island across the sea relegate the price of tea?" Or whatever it is.
They're feeling more disconnected in a moment where we're all more connected, but at the same time just not heard. And- Right... they were told, "If you show up this way, it is your version of being heard." And then part of, again, without getting into too much of now the pros and cons of what's going on right now are that we're kind of back to fighting for basics in a lot of ways.
Obviously, many more people have it much worse off than others, but things that were fought for- Mm-hmm... and achieved for in the past 150, 250 years, 50 years, we're fighting over again. And that's clarifying in a lot of ways, 'cause it's pretty easy to draw the line between do you think people should have representation or not, which is an argument we're having again.
But it really is those interesting parallels, right? Where everybody is coming at it for different reasons, but at the same time, you know, it's all grounded in these same basic rights that again, don't appear to be self-evident. I think that there's 100,000 different lessons you might learn from the American Revolution, and I don't just mean our film, The American Revolution, though- Mm-hmm... many of those lessons are in that.
People will have different interpretations depending on who they are, just as people had different interpretations back then about what they were fighting for. Mm-hmm. But I do... I mean, look, I'm selfish. I want everybody to watch this, but among those people I would like to watch this are the people in government because th- there's, again, some of the lessons you might draw from this are, frankly, inhuman. This is a war.
People died, people suffered, but one of the inspiring messages that you might gain from this film, and again, I don't wanna prescribe anybody's interpretations on them, but one of the reasons the Patriot Coalition was successful is that they gave people something to fight for, something to work for.
Mm-hmm. They promised a better future. Alan Taylor says in our film around the time that we're talking about common sense, that for a lot of the thousands of people that it took to win this rebellion, they wanted to know what was in it for them, and common sense is a really great piece of art that'll tell you a lot of what's in it for them.
And then on top of that, there's everything that turned into the Bill of Rights. There's the freedoms of religion and speech and assembly. There's the, of course, the right to bear arms. There's the not having to quarter people in your towns, and ban on cruel and unusual punishment. All of that stuff is, you know, it's in people's minds before the Revolution, of course- Sure...
but it's what they fought for, and it's what they enshrined in law afterwards. So we have fought, worked for making all that stuff real for generation after generation. John and Abigail Adams are in an argument about what these truths are in 1776. I think today's America is a lot closer to Abigail's vision than John's, who was worried about the slippery slope of an expanded electorate.
I personally think people, the more people that can vote is probably the better for decision-making, but it's also worth noting that a lot of the famous founders were terrified about that, and that they didn't get into the Revolution to expand the electorate.
This is one thing that I think is actually imperative to understanding the American Revolution that you might kind of know but probably haven't considered, maybe you have, but most people probably haven't, which is that, yes, the American Revolution won American independence, it brought together the union of the states, and it created the republic we continue to operate under. None of those were on the table on April 19th, 1775 when the war began.
You might expect that if you really think about the fact that the Declaration of Independence is more than a year after the war starts, but it's not really what we think about when we think about the American Revolution. It started as a war to liberate Boston, to redress grievances, to get things back to the way that they had been under the British Empire when we used to get along. Mm-hmm.
But the crisis of war and the uncertainty of that decade gave way to a lot of possibility, and what it took to win the war was a c- building a coalition wherein you're promising certain things to certain states and then later to certain individuals, and when you put the words "All men are created equal" into your founding document, which by the way is not a law, still to this day, it's just an ideal- Right...
that document. And there's some stuff in that document that did not age as well as, "All men are created equal." But when you put that in the first couple sentences of your Declaration of Independence, it becomes the reason for your existence, and that has mattered, and it very much still matters throughout our history, even if Thomas Jefferson enslaved people when he wrote, "All men are created equal."
And it matters in our history and in world history. You know, when Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence, he had two American OSS officers standing next to him, and he quoted Thomas Jefferson. It's interesting.
It's so easy and correct to say that promise has not been 100% fulfilled, and we've had two steps forward, 12 steps back, and vice versa, but we also wouldn't be a republic that has been fighting over it and fighting for it if that hadn't been written down in the first place, right? Yeah. The bar was set so high that again, like n- no one else has ever done. Are there better versions of actual functional administrative democracy out there? Sure.
Ireland's making it work, you know, ranked choice voting, whatever you wanna get into the technicals. I don't wanna tell anybody how to think about the past.
One way that I find myself being better at my job is to look at these people with less judgment, to understand that they didn't understand what was going to come out of this, that George Washington didn't know he was George Washington, that Thomas Jefferson knew slavery was wrong but didn't see a way out of it, that they didn't have the model that we do of centuries of history and more recently to show that people can be free and, you know, the debts that he was involved in don't matter next to theLiberty of the individual
So you can judge them. I mean, go for it. And I do obviously believe that slavery is an evil, but I also have some patience with them is not even the right word. What it allows me to do is to look at myself and say there are some things that I'm doing that I know aren't good, whether it's just driving or whatever that are not- Oh, we always say it about, like, at some point we're gonna look back at, like, factory farming and be like, "We were all criminals."
Right. Right? So there's all of that sort of stuff, and what you can maybe find inspiration is the people who took that chance and freed their slaves, which actually became illegal in Virginia, by the way, around the time of the revolution.
Just nuts, a little bit after, I think. But... Or, you know, somebody like John Laurens, who is a character in the Hamilton play and advocated for freeing slaves, like, he, he also couldn't quite imagine just flipping the switch and saying, "These hundreds of people that my dad owns are now free."
He said, "Hey, Dad, give me my inheritance early, and we'll enlist them, and then this will be a passage to becoming a free man." And, like, is it humanitarian? I don't know. You're giving them a gun. It's like- Right... sending them off to war, and yet somehow it is more evolved and enlightened than the system that they were living under. I mean, it's just, it's, it is, it's complicated.
And so I, for me, I like just knowing what was and not really revering or shaming the past, but just kind of trying to understand it. Yeah. No, I appreciate that perspective of it. No one has marinaded more in the past than you all and all these incredible historians and researchers and folks that you work with.
One thing that I was thinking about when you were talking about Colonial Williamsburg earlier, sorry to interrupt, is- No... you know, Williamsburg was either majority Black or close to majority Black at the time of the revolution, and when you think about what that actually would have looked like,
you can't exactly faithfully represent that in Colonial Williamsburg because most of those Black people, of course, were enslaved. You're not gonna interpret that faithfully, or it's awful, right? Yeah. It's like Stanford Prison Experiment almost. So I don't wanna, you know... Clint Smith I think got it really right with his article about Colonial Williamsburg. They are doing a good job, I believe, telling people these stories, and they've been doing a good job for a while.
Let me put it this way, at least they, and I think this is important, they aspire to do a good job about it. And I think that there is just something in the messaging of, and completely switching subjects, of hope that I think is appealing and people should not forget that. So it is necessary to have, you know, liberty or death as a slogan.
It is necessary to have a model like George Washington to win this. You gotta have something to fight for, not just against. Sure, and I think that's more, more true now than ever. You know, you can only use the bad guys so much before you go, "Is this an opportunity to actually do that?" And we should say that and then try- Right... to stand behind it and fight for it, even if we know even in our time it's gonna be imperfect and having no idea of the future.
Like, maybe Elphaba would've been more successful if her platform were less anti-wizard and more pro-something else. Yeah. Instead of writing, like, "Our wizard lies in the clouds," you know- Yeah... she could've written, like, animal rights. We'll never know. That's counterfactual if we get into her history. Okay. I don't know if this fits anymore, but I'll just read it real quick. Is this Madison? Which one is it?
Hamilton or Madison, number 51. I think one of the more- Who wrote Federalist 51? Uh, they wrote, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this.
You must first enable the government to control the governed and in the next oblige it to control itself." And, you know, that's only part of it, but it's interesting. You know, just- It is... again, just a little hint of self-awareness there.
There's a lot of writing about government during the revolutionary period, surprise, surprise, because they are creating one that's from scratch and creating an army from scratch and winning a war from sc- I mean, that's, there's all this incredible stuff that they did.
But when they talk about government, one of the things that they go back to, I think both Adams and Paine would say this, and they did not agree with each other, that the end of government, meaning not, like, the finality of government, but the, like, means to an ends, so, like, the, the purpose of government is the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
They're saying that in 1776. Why can't we try to achieve that? Yeah. Yeah. Again, a promise yet completely unkept, but at the same time also a low bar in a lot of ways, you know? For sure, and then it depends who you're counting as among the denominator in that- Sure... equation too, which thankfully we're counting a lot more people than we used to. 100%. 100%, no doubt.
And this, you know, I wrote a little bit about it a couple years ago, but it was Tolkien's idea of what he called the long defeat. You know, he always told people The Lord of the Rings was not based on his World War I experience. But if you really look at it and when it was published and the story of it, it's about the time between World War I and World War II. You know, when everyone said, "This is a war that will never happen again," the Great War this and this. Mm-hmm.
And he just watched it happen again and watched his son serve and all these things, and you go, it's very difficult not to take away this is gonna keep happening again and again. Yeah. And so how do you just keep fighting the long defeat, which sounds like a pessimistic way to do it. Yeah, and yet has it? Right. Has there been another World War since? No, there hasn't. And will it again, who knows? Yeah. Yeah. So far.
And that's an important thing to also maybe just check in with that you might, again, no- not telling you what to think about this war, but you might remember that they didn't know how it was gonna turn out. We do. And we don't know how-Our own history's gonna turn out either, and that is terrifying. Yeah. But it's also exhilarating. There's a lot of possibility in the uncertainty that we are living in. Don't forget that. Yeah.
What is Gandalf? "All we get to do is the time given to us," right? Yeah. Something like that. And you're just killing me with the Tolkien right now. I know, man. I don't have much left. Last two questions, one I've been asking for a long time and a new one. One is, what's any book you'd recommend to everybody? Um- From the period of the American Revolution? Can be anything. Here's the thing.
We've gotten the Constitution. All right. Books you're reading to your kid right now, anything. Fiction at night that you turn your brain off with, anything. This is what I wanna recommend to you. Mm-hmm. But whatever, it's the last book I read. It's called This Here is Love. You heard of this? Okay. This Here is Love? This Here is Love. Not the... Well, whatever. It's a good title. Not the most memorable title necessarily, but it works in the context of the book. Awesome.
And it is, it is a book about a number of characters, but three primary characters who are born or come to late 17th century Virginia. A few of them are enslaved, one of them's indentured, and then it just follows them through the next 30 or so years. And I think it deals with the moral complexities of slavery in a lot of different ways that I had never really considered. It is very dark, necessarily so, but if you make it through, you will be glad you did. Okay. I'm down. I'm in. Mm-hmm.
Let's do it. If you want a funny one, I'd say The Sellout. I don't know if you've read that one, but that book's incredible. Haven't read that either. By Paul Beatty. Oh, it's very funny and great. Great. And also deals with the moral complexities of slavery. That's amazing. Last one, people love the music. Any playlists you're sharing with your kid or yourself or you can't get enough of?
Is there, like, an American Revolution playlist? There is gonna be an American Revolution playlist, and it will include songs that were originally written for the film as well as some needle drops. I'm hopeful that at least one Colonial Williamsburg Fife and Drum song will appear on it. Nice. Probably do your Greenwood medley. Music that I listen to, I don't know. There's lots of stuff. Let's go with...
Just because I wouldn't have come to this naturally, but I'm really glad that I was introduced to, my mother-in-law introduced me to the great song, "Hammond Song" by The Roaches, and a little bit more of their work. They're three sisters from New Jersey from probably the 1970s. Different, but I love that song. Give it a listen. Okay. Intricate harmonies.
You know, living with a screenwriter and being among them for so long in LA, a lot of people have, like, really specific things they listen to while they're working. Mm. Sometimes it's, like, thematic. Do you have anything like that that you're listening to, like, when you're doing all your research and everything? Um, so often when I'm working, I need my ears for whatever I'm working on, but if I'm writing,
one thing that I've turned to a few times is The Shape of Water soundtrack. Ooh. I really like its music too, particularly. I should also say that my son, who's three, has now seen Wicked up until "Popular." I'm not sure we'll let him see the monkeys get their wings, but he's been singing all of- I mean, it's a great place to end. It's just a great story. Everybody wins. It's a great story. He's been singing all the songs.
We're gonna see Lin-Manuel Miranda next week for an event he's doing with Ken at Trinity Church. Very excited about. Awesome. All right. This comes out November 16th? The film does, yeah. Yeah. November 16th. So November 16th, the first episode will air on PBS. Check your local listings, but it's probably around 8:00 PM Eastern.
At the same time, at 8:00 PM Eastern, you will be able to stream all 12 hours, all six episodes on the PBS app for free for a bit, a few weeks at least. I think it's four weeks at least in UHD. It'll be the first 4K feature on the PBS app. So if you wanna see it gorgeously, you could buy the Blu-ray of course, or you could check it out that way. Rock and roll. And the book comes out November 11th.
It's also gorgeous. Nice. There you go. Very excited about that. [outro music] That's it for this week's conversation. For more conversations, scroll back in the feed or visit podcast.importantnotimportant.com to search by name, topic, whatever. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for leaving a review, and thanks for giving a shit. [outro music]