Ken Burns on America’s Unfinished Revolution – Harvard Magazine

Politics and Law | March 27, 2026

Ken Burns on America’s Unfinished Revolution

At Radcliffe, the filmmaker joined Harvard historians to discuss what the nation’s founding means today.

by Lydialyle Gibson

Toward the end of a discussion Wednesday at the Radcliffe Institute with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and three of the Harvard historians in his recent PBS series, “The American Revolution,” the conversation suddenly turned to the present, and the fraught politics of the Trump era.

“It’s interesting that we’re having the 250^th [anniversary of the Revolution] at this particular moment in the country’s history,” said Loeb University Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, speaking to a packed audience at the Knafel Center. Beside her on stage were Warren professor of history Vincent Brown and Saltonstall professor of history Philip Deloria, along with Burns and Sarah Botstein, who co-directed “The American Revolution.” Bruce Mann, the Schipper professor of law, moderated the discussion, which was co-sponsored by the Harvard history department.

“This is probably the first time that I’ve thought more about the grievances of the Declaration [of Independence] than the preamble,” continued Gordon-Reed, who is most famous for uncovering that Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s primary author, had fathered children with Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved.

The grievances have long been overlooked amid the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration’s opening lines, but the bulk of the nation’s founding document consists of 27 detailed complaints against the British king. The colonists accused him of violating their rights to self-government and trial by jury, as well as levying taxes without consent and quartering soldiers in civilian homes. Several complaints detail how the king used violence and intimidation to try to force the colonists into submission.

Until recently, Gordon-Reed said, audiences at her public lectures regarded the grievances as “relegated to the past.” Now, though, amid the upheavals of the Trump administration and the president’s sweeping assertions of executive power, the colonists’ grievances spark new interest. “I go to give talks, and people want to talk about the grievances,” she said. “You start thinking about, what does tyranny mean? What are the kinds of things that these people were rebelling against? The lesson is that the experiment [in American democracy] is ongoing. … There’s no moment that you can rest.”

Deloria, too, said his experience of the Declaration of Independence had changed. Last summer, he proposed a community reading of the document in his hometown in Michigan. “And many people said, ‘No, it’s too political,’” he recalled, to audible gasps from the audience. “I think what that tells us is … we must fight, we must continue to fight, not only for the principles of the Declaration, but for the right to speak the Declaration itself. That’s the moment we’re in.”

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