A Review of Ken Burns Reviews

What critics say reveals more about the critics than the work under review, or the events themselves.

Rob James

December 16, 2025

“A man hears what he wants to hear/And disregards the rest.”—Simon & Garfunkel

For someone of my vintage, it is hard to believe that thirty-five years, midway Dante’s journey, have passed since the release of the Ken Burns documentary series on The Civil War. Many of us first faced a history told not only from the standpoint of leaders and battles, but from the testimony of ordinary individuals whose lives were torn asunder. Talking-head pundits reassured or provoked us, in alternating professorial and folksy tones. The production was aided and abetted by achingly beautiful music and famously slow pans over photographs that became eerily contemporary. 1990 seems in my memory a time when people from across political divides could exchange views without denying the other’s essential humanity. There were some dissenting voices to be sure, especially whether the South was given too much or too little empathy, but the series weathered them and all in all remains a landmark in our cultural landscape.

Fast forward to 2025 and the release of his series The Revolutionary War. The changes in the popular attitude toward our past have been, well, historic. The documentary took eight years to produce, during which the public conversation has unmistakably shifted. It is therefore no surprise that attacks on the new film have come from both flanks, like a military pincer maneuver.

Everyone is a critic after his or her fashion, after all, and I do have a couple of personal reactions that I will share. Before I get to them, though, I wanted to review a variety of reviews of the series and see what the reviews themselves tell us about our present state.

Does it seem curious to review reviews? I take this approach from an article I read in law school of all places. A Yale professor named Grant Gilmore gave a series of lectures that became a provocative book, The Death of Contract. His sweeping generalization was that the consideration doctrine—the “quid pro quo” / “tit for tat” rule that a contract is enforceable if and only if it is accompanied by a bargained-for exchange of promises or performance—was dead! Indeed, that it had been murdered by a variety of tort law end-arounds by judges, legislators and professors.

The slim book precipitated reviews that in total far exceeded its length. Richard Danzig surveyed them in “The Death of Contract and the Life of the Profession: Observations on the Intellectual State of Legal Academia.” The reviews seized on points where Gilmore cited one case pro while several others contra sat comfortably side by side. Danzig concluded that these reviews simply missed Gilmore’s provocative point. They thereby mistook a “plum”—a dessert, an entertainment—for “meat.”

So with my review of some of the American Revolution reviews. What can they tell us about the Revolution, the Revolution (two different things), the critic, and the activity of criticism in late 2025?

First consider the self-named History Nerds United, which compiled comments over hundreds if not thousands of posts on their website threads. In the tradition of genre-fans generally (see the old Saturday Night Live skit with William Shatner and Star Trek fans), they howl at omissions of various types without engaging in what I term “double-entry bookkeeping.” What do I mean by double-entry bookkeeping? If you would put something into a work of fixed expanse, like an Elizabethan sonnet or (here) six television episodes, something must go. They fault Burns for leaving out their favorite things: revocation of the 1691 Massachusetts charter! more details on the diaspora of Loyalists as far as India! the postwar career of Benedict Arnold! the colonial fortitude shown during the battle of Lexington! the burning of Charlestown preparatory to Bunker Hill! names of additional officers like Israel Putnam! names of additional battles like Kip’s Bay! the Penobscot Expedition! So: What of equal weight and duration would they delete to keep the program at a svelte twelve hours? They do not often say.

I for one do not miss many of their suggested additions. They make a couple of interesting points for future work. In the manner of an old Saturday Night Live news item about human achievements broadcast into space (the first extraterrestrial message back from which was “Send more Chuck Berry”), I do think aliens might reply “TELL MORE ABOUT BENEDICT ARNOLD.” My friend, the distinguished Texas lawyer Tony Cavender, recently told me that after his career in the British Army, Arnold’s body was interred in an English church beneath a stained-glass likeness. But Benedict Arnold could well be the topic of another series, or at least a song along the lines of Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty.”

Sorry, where was I? Oh, yes, the reviews. The American Conservative December 2, 2025 by Alan Pell Crawford hits Burns in his first sixty seconds. The program opens with a caution by Native Americans to the settlers not to think they don’t claim territory; a pre-existing alliance among the Six Nations, called the Haudenosaunee; and an allusion to that union by Benjamin Franklin in 1754 as a motivation for the colonies to join in like manner.

Rich Lowry in the New York Post November 24, 2025 and Dan McLaughlin in the National Review November 22, 2025 are similarly outraged. They note that this theory that the tribal unification spurred the colonists’ actions has been countered in the scholarly literature.

John McWhorter in an opinion piece in the New York Times December 5, 2025 counters that critique, and I think he nails it. Burns never claimed a direct link of causation. Indeed anyone looking for “causes” (or absence of causation) in history will come away disappointed—we do not have a laboratory that can test what counterfactually would have happened if (here) the Six Nations had not aligned. The test of a work about history for McWhorter is whether he learned things that added to or contested his learning about a subject, and Burns’s series surpasses that test.

James Poniewozik in the review section of the New York Times commented on the cultural changes in the country during the eight years of gestation of the series. The most fascinating thing he finds is that Native Americans and blacks both free and enslaved had the agency to make choices whether to align with patriots/rebels or loyalists/Tories based on what they perceived to be each side’s strengths and likelihood of success.

There is also the entertainment angle. The best line from Daniel Feinberg  in the Hollywood Reporter is that The American Revolution is less opinionated than the work of Burns on The Vietnam War. Feinberg suggests that in the Southeast Asian documentary, Burns seems to be echoing Roger De Bris in The Producers, “They’re losing the war! It’s so depressing.”

Now for my personal reactions. The first was a critique. I join the conservatives in thinking that Burns gave short shrift to the classical sources from which the founders derived their visions and their strength. The accompanying book by Burns and Geoffrey Ward, tellingly titled The American Revolution: An Intimate History, has a single run-on line noting that Thomas Jefferson drew on “Aristotle, Cicero, John Locke” in drafting the Declaration of Independence. But as the critics say, he and other founders drew much more on the alliances and experiences of the ancient Greek city-states than on the Six Nations. George Washington in the midst of war had his troops attend a performance of Joseph Addison’s Cato. The book First Principles displays many other allusions and sources. Classics are cool again, with homeschoolers leading the way in revival of Latin instruction—Burns and Ward could have been more explicit on this clear influence while they were tracing fine lines to the Haudenosaunee joint venture.

The second is an illumination for which I am grateful. It comes from the book rather than the series I believe, and it is an explication of the greatest work of art of the era, “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”

Who has not seen this painting? Washington stands athwart the boat passing mini-icebergs en route to Trenton, rowed by soldiers of diverse stripes (a Scotsman, a person of color, a frontiersman). It turns out that is supposed to be James Madison holding the Stars and Stripes. It is stirring and iconic.

It is also a load of historical hooey. No one would stand in a boat like that. The Delaware had ice sheets not arctic bergs. That flag hadn’t been designed yet. It was pitch black. And so forth. But that unreality is not the remarkable point.

The revelation to me is that this painting of an American sallying forth to defeat Hessian troops was rendered by a German-American, Emanuel Leutzke, living in Germany at the time. He painted it not in the era but decades later, in 1851. His intent was to inspire the liberal reformers after the failed European revolutions of 1848 to keep fighting the authoritarian governments, through the example of the American Revolution. The liberals of the time were indeed disillusioned; the composer Richard Wagner, who played a small part in the 1849 Dresden uprising, supposedly refused to write the year “1850” for a while in protest against the failure there. So this quintessentially American work of art was an appeal from one revolutionary movement to another across the sea.

I learned many other things from the Burns series, especially the roles of foreign powers, the shifting Native American alliances, and especially the agency exhibited by those whose lives were thrown into upheaval. I don’t take it as the final word, but as a positive contribution to an eternal conversation. This meta-review affords one more reason that, after reviewing all the reviews of a work, and after all else fails, it may make sense to view the work itself—and to think about it for yourself.