On a brisk Thursday night in New York City, the red carpet outside Town Hall buzzed with anticipation for the premiere of Ken Burns’s latest PBS docuseries, The American Revolution. Inside, the air was thick with both admiration and unease as the audience prepared to witness a retelling of America’s founding—a story that, as recent events have shown, is far from settled.
The 12-episode series, set to debut on November 16, 2025, dives deep into the complexities of America’s birth, boldly examining the roles of slavery, Native American influence, and the contradictions woven into the nation’s earliest ideals. According to Deadline, the panel discussion following the screening—moderated by The Atlantic’s Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg—didn’t shy away from the current political climate. While the name of the sitting president was never spoken aloud, the shadow of Donald Trump’s recent directives to the Smithsonian and National Park Service loomed large. Trump’s orders, which called for the removal of what he labeled “woke” and “out-of-control” content, specifically criticized the Smithsonian for focusing “too much on how bad slavery was.”
Ken Burns, never one to mince words, addressed the tension head-on. “There is this tendency to make it so Weekly Reader. It’s superficial,” he told the crowd, referencing how history is often sanitized for public consumption. He praised PBS for allowing the creative team to “dive deep, unafraid of conflict,” and assured the audience, to resounding applause, that “PBS is not going anywhere” despite Congress stripping the network of a key part of its funding.
Tom Hanks, who lends his voice to several historical figures in the series, echoed Burns’s sentiments. Without naming names, Hanks reflected on the dangers of a single, sanitized narrative: “That agreed-upon story is made by the people in power who want to guarantee themselves to be in power. … We know better. And you do not get that unless you understand the conversation that we’ve had about slavery.” Hanks argued that the nation’s greatness stems from its capacity for growth—even if, as he put it, “51% of the time we steered toward the right way of making a more perfect union.”
The series doesn’t flinch from controversial truths. It covers the fact that many founding fathers owned slaves and explores the influence of Native American tribes on the very idea of forming a United States. Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed, who appears in the docuseries, explained, “It’s not about criticizing America. … It’s about having a sense of progress.” She noted that questions about the inclusion of people of color in the American story have always been present, a point that resonates powerfully in today’s divided climate.
The urgency of these conversations is not lost on those outside the world of documentary filmmaking. In a recent opinion piece published on September 18, 2025, Melaine Mahaffey, a semi-retired antique dealer from Clintonville, recounted her shock at President Trump’s comments to the Smithsonian. “Few set me aghast more than his comment … that they were focusing too much on ‘how bad slavery was,’” she wrote. Mahaffey, whose lifelong interest in history led her to publish a book of Civil War letters, reflected on the whitewashing of slavery in both public memory and education. She recalled that, as a student in the 1960s, the causes of the Civil War were often framed as “state’s rights,” with little mention of the institution of human bondage.
Mahaffey’s research into the era led her to Solomon Northup’s harrowing 1853 autobiography, Twelve Years a Slave. Northup, a free Black man kidnapped and sold into slavery, chronicled the brutality of the system—families torn apart, relentless physical abuse, meager diets, and the total absence of legal protection. Mahaffey quoted Northup’s powerful observation: “The existence of slavery in its most cruel form among them has a tendency to brutalize the humane and finer feelings of their nature. … It is not the fault of the slaveholder that he is cruel, so much as it is the fault of the system under which he lives.”
This erasure of history is not merely academic. Suzanne Van Atten, in a piece for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published on September 19, 2025, described her own Southern education as largely devoid of any real engagement with slavery. “Most of what I knew about slavery in my youth came from ‘Gone With the Wind,’” she wrote, recalling field trips to plantations and the eerie presence of slave quarters. It wasn’t until the 1977 TV miniseries Roots aired that Van Atten began to understand the reality of America’s “long tragic chapter.”
Van Atten’s experience is hardly unique. She found that friends and family educated in the South also had little memory of learning about slavery in school. This collective amnesia, she argued, is being reinforced by recent efforts to remove or alter historical exhibits at national parks and museums. The Trump administration, as of March 2025, evaluated and directed the removal of materials deemed controversial or critical of American history, particularly those related to slavery and race. Public monuments and educational displays have come under renewed scrutiny, with some elements ordered removed or revised to present a less critical narrative.
Yet, as Van Atten and Mahaffey both contend, books and honest educational resources remain vital counterweights to these attempts at historical whitewashing. Mahaffey stressed, “The truth telling of our history is more important than ever,” especially as systemic racism continues to shape American society and politics. Van Atten echoed this, underscoring the role of literature, memoir, and documentary in providing the context and empathy that textbooks and public monuments often lack.
Back at the Town Hall in New York, the panel reflected on the stakes of this moment. Goldberg observed that the environment has shifted dramatically since the end of Barack Obama’s second term, when production on The American Revolution began. “The filmmaking team probably had a different view [then], that the American story was settled. We were on a course, and it was a steady course.” Now, with the nation approaching its 250th anniversary, the battle over how history is told—and who gets to tell it—feels more urgent than ever.
John Lithgow’s reading of Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” set a tone of reflection and resolve—a reminder that America’s story is, at its best, one of reckoning, growth, and the sometimes painful pursuit of a more perfect union. As Burns, Hanks, Gordon-Reed, and others insist, nothing is lost by showing the violence and contradictions of the past. In fact, it’s only by facing them squarely that the nation can continue to move forward, learning from its darkest chapters rather than erasing them.
With The American Revolution poised to enter living rooms across the country, the conversation about whose history is told—and why—shows no sign of fading away. If anything, it’s just getting started.
