Looking beyond myths of American Revolution

DIRECTORS KEN BURNS, DAVID P. SCHMIDT AND SARAH BOTSTEIN REVEAL A FEW EYE-OPENING PERSPECTIVES IN A SIX-PART PBS DOCUSERIES THAT EMPHASIZES THE COMPLEXITIES OF WAR

- BY MICHAEL ORDOÑA

IMAGES from the series: "Battle of Long Island" by Alonzo Chappel, top, a portrait of John Greenwood by John Ramage, above, and "George Washington" by Charles Willson Peale.

Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History

WHAT DO YOU THINK you know about the American Revolution? Nearly 250 years later, as we continue to debate what the Founders intended, we may find at times that we've been led astray by legend, hornswoggled by hand-me-down history. What we thought we knew and what we didn't know can be surprising, as a new PBS documentary series reveals. The conflict was so brutal, broad and complex that it strongly motivated Indigenous people and those who would come to be known as African Americans to fight on both sides. It turns out Benedict Arnold was a certified badass for America. And George Washington, the biggest star of this momentous drama, was something of a bungler whose teeth were not wooden and who conducted a campaign to destroy Indigenous food stores. "George Washington is flawed, makes bad military decisions, but without him, we don't have a country," says multi-Emmy and Peabody Award winner Ken Burns, one of the three directors of the six-part docuseries "The American Revolution," premiering Sunday on PBS. The show doesn't reject the "Great Man" school of history so much as it converts it to a "Great Men Don't Win Championships; Great Teams Do" approach.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art