NEW YORK (AP) — On a chilly midweek afternoon, hundreds of New York City high school students gathered in the pews of Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan. The lesson was “Who tells your story?” The teachers, credentialed with prizes both competitive and honorary and with popular acclaim, were filmmaker Ken Burns and “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.
“I can’t believe there has been a louder sound in this church until today,” Burns said as the kids clapped and screamed for the two featured speakers.
“Hamilton” fans know well the origins of “Who tells your story?” The Wednesday event was timed for one of Burns’ most ambitious projects, “The American Revolution,” a 6-part, 12-hour documentary that premieres Sunday on PBS stations. He has promoted the film everywhere from Monticello to “The Joe Rogan Experience” and now has shared a stage with Miranda at the centuries-old parish where George Washington once worshiped and Alexander Hamilton and his wife, Eliza, are buried, a draw for “Hamilton” fans bearing flowers and other tributes.
“We’re in the business of telling stories,” Burns explained, as he and Miranda sat under the towering vaulted ceiling of Trinity, as if the church itself were a stand-in for history’s might. “I deal in fact. And Lin-Manuel can make things up. This question, though, who tells your story, is the animating question of humanity. It’s this story of great men, capital G, capital M, and rarely do we have an opportunity to widen that lens and tell everyone’s story.”
An All-Star production
Burns, co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt and screenwriter Geoffrey Ward (co-author with Burns of a companion book) drew upon thousands of books and other historical materials. The film’s narrators comprise what Miranda calls an “Avengers”-worthy cast, from Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep to Morgan Freeman and Laura Linney. And dozens of historians, spanning age and perspective, provided on-air commentary: eminences Gordon Wood and Bernard Bailyn (who died in 2020), non-academic historians such as Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff and Pulitzer-winning military authority Rick Atkinson, and leading scholars from a range of other fields, including slavery (Vincent Brown), Native American history (Ned Blackhawk) and the British Empire (Maya Jasanoff).
Students listened to history, watched history — Burns showed a brief clip from his documentary, about the deadly winter at Valley Forge — and created their own. If Miranda can make music out of federal debt or the election of 1800, then Shacoy Moodie and Arianna Richards of Equality Charter High School can rap an original piece about a good friend of Hamilton’s, John Laurens, a Southerner who sought in vain to enfranchise enslaved Black people and have them fight the British. “They deserve it all/each and every one/they deserve it all,” the students chanted in homage to the would-be freemen, as Burns smiled and Miranda leaned and nodded in rhythm.
Interviewed briefly after their joint appearance, Burns and Miranda said that their friendship began around 10 years ago, when the filmmaker visited backstage after a performance of “Hamilton.” They are a generation apart — Burns is 72, Miranda 45 — but very much in sync on their mission to educate. Burns speaks proudly of his documentaries on the Civil War and other subjects being part of course curricula, and Miranda welcomes the countless school productions of “Hamilton,” calling himself a theater kid whose subconscious goal is “to write the best school play possible.”
Burns thought it ideal for Miranda to appear with him at Trinity, if only because of all the interest in the revolution “in the wake of ‘Hamilton.’” Miranda added: “When Ken Burns calls, you say ‘Yes.’”
It’s complicated
Burns says he keeps a neon sign in his editing room that reads: “It’s complicated.” Whether speaking with the AP or with students, Burns emphasized the need to move beyond “top-down” history, while still appreciating the founders’ achievements. One student asked him about the legacy of George Washington.
“He’s deeply flawed. He owned hundreds of human beings, knew slavery was wrong, and not until the end of his life freed them. He was rash on the battlefield, running out, risking his life, and therefore the future of the United States,” Burns responded. “Having said this, we don’t have a country without him. He is tall and imposing, and he has a kind of dignity. Dr. Benjamin Rush said that the other monarchs of Europe would look like a ‘valet de chambre,’ a butler next to George Washington. He’s able to inspire men in the dead of night to fight for a cause.”
The Burns documentary arrives less than eight months before the country’s 250th anniversary, a time of deep political and social division that extends to how the founding story should be told. Beyond the will to break from the British, there has never been a consensus over the aims and meaning of the revolution, not even while it was being fought; the upcoming semiquincentennial has only heightened the differences. President Donald Trump h as called for a “grand celebration” in July 2026, and denounced “woke” history, criticizing the Smithsonian Institution for being preoccupied with “how bad slavery was.” The scholarly community — including some featured in Burns’ film — aims for a broader narrative, highlighting the contributions of women, the perpetuation of slavery and the uprooting and killing of Native Americans,
Burns’ aversion to the president is well documented. During a 2016 commencement speech at Stanford University, he called then-candidate Trump an “insult to our history.” Eight years later, addressing Brandeis University students, he called Trump “the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems” and urged attendees not to vote for him in November.
At Trinity, a student raised an issue Burns has confronted often: “What parallels do you see between the politics that led up to the American Revolution and today’s politics?”
The filmmaker has stressed that “The American Revolution” takes no sides, and pointed out Wednesday that he began it during the latter part of Barack Obama’s presidency and continued through the administrations of Trump and Joe Biden. Burns dedicates extensive time to stories of suffering and oppression but also shaped a heroic and open-ended message of the country as dynamic and unfinished, inspiring and imperfect.
“The best thing to do is to understand the past, our greatest teacher, so that we have a better sense of where we are and more importantly, become,” Burns said. Miranda added that he worked on “Hamilton” with a similar “animating” principle.
“How do I, as someone who was born in 1980, understand these people and begin to write from their perspective”?” Miranda said. “And what I learned was, and you’ll see this many times in Ken’s movies, is that the contradictions present at the founding are still contradictions, in the same way the fights you have with your siblings are your family fights.”
