Ken Burns' Revolution Documentary Subverts Simplistic Stories

By Rich Wandschneider
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November 30, 2025


I have been watching the Ken Burns PBS documentary on the American Revolution, and am struck by the many things in that formative history of the nation that are not registered by the current political advocates of all stripes, and especially by those espousing “Christian Nationalism,” and particularly “White Christian Nationalism.”

I start with a bit of irony: the documentary says that the Continental Army was integrated, and that the American army would not be integrated again for 200 years. The Native Americans, who had been bounced between alliances with the French and English, now had to choose between the British and the Americans. The six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, or “Haudenosaunee,” which had held together with an ingenious arrangement of representative-democratic government over centuries, were splintered by the War.

Well before the War and revolutionary fervor, Benjamin Franklin had visited and studied the Haudenosaunee, and at a point years before the Declaration of Independence, had called a meeting in Albany of the then-seven colonies to explore following the Native lead in establishing a confederation of colonies. Delegates were impressed with the centuries-old alliance, and agreed to pursue it, but could not sell the plan to their colonies back home.

Washington’s troops that wintered at Valley Forge were 10 percent Black. That means over 1,000 Black men, mostly freed slaves, fought alongside white settlers and Indians. In another twist that doesn’t get in my history books, Burns’ documentary claims there were several languages spoken by the Continental soldiers that winter at Valley Forge: English, German, Dutch, French, and any number of Native American tongues. It truly was an integrated army.

https://www.postalley.org/2025/11/30/ken-burns-revolution-documentary-subverts-simplistic-stories/