Bonus Episode: Following History's Stories, on Film | History Matters Podcast

Thirteen colonies rose up, rebelled against an Empire, and won their independence. These unlikely victors built a new nation on democratic principles that inspired similar movements around the world.

How should we tell the story of our nation’s founding? Guests Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, who co-directed The American Revolution with Ken Burns, explain how chronology and characters shape their longform PBS documentaries and accompanying curriculum materials, in a bonus episode of the History Matters Podcast.

“We always work chronologically. We don’t work thematically. And I think when teaching history, I have been fairly convinced that that’s the way to do it,” says Botstein. “When you teach thematically, you silo things. When you work chronologically, you show the complexity, the nuance, unbelievable heroism, the ways people do great things and terrible things all at once, particularly in the story of a war.”

Children are “capable of understanding these complex stories,” Schmidt says. “I think you can trust children’s intelligence a little more than we often do.”

The filmmakers describe the important role that characters play in keeping learners and viewers engaged. Their series follows George Washington and other leaders, as well as a native community in the Shenandoah Valley, young soldiers who volunteered for the fight, and Betsy Ambler of Yorktown, Virginia, who ages from 10 to 18 during the war.

“She lived much of her life as a refugee and her town was completely destroyed by that war. She never witnessed a battle, but she was impacted by the war every day,” Schmidt says. “These are people who are not dissimilar from you and me.”

“If you are following stories of these other people, you’re worried about what George Washington might do, because you are worried about them,” Botstein says. “It makes students understand why history matters. We’re all impacted by decisions that leaders make and by world events—small, medium, and large.”

They also discuss how visual artifacts like paintings and maps are especially engaging for young students and can help them understand a history story from different points of view.

“It’s really important when teaching history to show a variety of perspectives,” Botstein says. “To have empathy and openness and generosity, to try to understand why people did good things and why people did bad things, and how we can be optimistic in learning about history to make a better future, and make better on the promises that the revolution tried to inspire.”

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork, on behalf of the History Matters Campaign. Follow the History Matters Campaign on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X. Search #historymatters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

Transcript

David Schmidt

I think that you can trust children's intelligence a little more than we often do. And I think kids are capable of understanding these complex stories. And so when you meet them at a place where you trustーyou trust their curiosity, you trust their ability to understand these complex thoughts, you can really open the world to them. 

Barbara Davidson 

Welcome. This is a special episode of the History Matters podcast. I'm your host, Barbara Davidson, president of Standards Work and executive director of the Knowledge Matters Campaign.

Today we're sharing my conversation with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, co-directors and producers, along with Ken Burns, of a new six-part, 12-hour series on PBS called, The American Revolution. I talked with Sarah and David at length about storytelling. And why, as storytellers, they think it makes sense to work chronologically versus thematically. 

This is a topic of particular interest to those of us thinking about elementary history instruction. In their words, when you work chronologically, you show the complexity, the nuance, the unbelievable heroism, and the ways people do great things and terrible things all at once. 

Please enjoy this special episode of the History Matters podcast.

Barbara Davidson 

When did you guys recognize the role that film could play in the classroom?

Sarah Botstein 

So first I'll apologize for my voice. I've lost my voice, but I'm really excited to be here. One of the reasons, and Ken always says this, that we work in the universe of public television is because our films air on public television and they live in the classroom because film is such a dynamic teaching tool for any age group. You can read a wonderful book, you can read a great journal article, but when you bring people and stories and history to life with moving images, paintings, photographs. It just allows the student and the viewer to have a different experience. 

For the American Revolution, because of the 250th anniversary, we actually were creating and thinking about the educational materials while we were editing and making the film. We've been thinking about elementary, middle, high school, college, even adult interested learners and communities to think about the 250th anniversary, our origin story, the ways we've lived up to those founding documents and principles, the way we've fallen short, the lessons we can learn from it. And the great characters we've never heard of, and the great characters we all know but learn more about themーgood and badーbecause it just allows for students to imagine themselves in a different time, a different place, what they would have done and why it is important to celebrate our history and be proud to be Americans.

Barbara Davidson

So David, you've said in the past that the American Revolution is our founding moment. Can you tell us why in your mind this is such an important story for young people.

David Schmidt 

I think I might be a fun test case for this. I first watched The Civil War when I was eight years old. Really helped get me into history. I also grew up in Colonial Williamsburg, so I had that there too [laughs], 18th century America was my backyard. 

I'm the youngest child in my family. I've got four older siblings. And they all imposed on me their love of history, but they alsoーI don't know, I think there's also a way that I understand that children like to be talked to on a level of understanding. I think, I think that you can trust children's intelligence a little more than we often do. And I think kids are capable of understanding these complex stories. And so when you meet them at a place where you trust that theyーyou trust their curiosity, you trust their ability to understand these complex thoughts you can really open the world to them. 

You know, I hope that people who enjoy this film and learn something from it uh take the opportunity to go to the Battlefield at Saratoga, to go to Yorktown, to go to Colonial Williamsburg, to go to Boston, all sorts of places that I'm not mentioning right now, that you know, history is in your backyard. And the more you understand it, the better you understand it, the better you understand who you are and your community. 

You know, we all learned about the American Revolution when we were in grade school but we tended to learn pretty bullet-pointy history. And I think that there's a lot of context here that, you know, elementary school students can get some of, middle school students can get more of, and high school students can get all of, I believe, that really helps you understand how your country came into being and um in a large way, what it's like, why it's the way it is now.

Barbara Davidson 

I love that, that you share my beliefーand I think the belief of many people that are out in schoolsーthat kids are capable of so much more than we give them credit for. And that they have a hunger for becoming little experts on some of this information. 

So you all have a lot of experience in working with long form historical projects like this. How do you keep the audience engaged over a long period of time? And are thereーdo you think that there's maybe lessons from your experience for teachers about pacing, sequencing, scaffolding, and that kind of thing?

Sarah Botstein 

I think first of all, how you begin and end a story of a war is always a really hard and really difficult question. So how far back do you have to go to understand: How we got to July 4th, 1776? And how far after Yorktown do you have to go to understand how the war ended?ーis a really interesting question and one of the last things we finalize in any film that we make about a war. 

We always work chronologically. We don't work thematically. And I think when teaching history, I have been fairly convinced that that's the way to do it. When you teach thematically, you silo things. When you work chronologically, you show the complexity, the nuance, unbelievable heroism, the ways people do great things and terrible things all at once, particularly in a story of a war. 

So in telling stories I always want the viewer, in terms of sequencing, to be listening to a story about George Washington, but thinking about the two young soldiers that we know and what might be happening to them. Or the little girl in Yorktown and what's happening to her family. Or a native community in upstate New York or in the Shenandoah Valley. Like what's happening where and who's impacted by it? 

And then you care what George Washington is gonna do in a different way because there's a cost. Or if you're following those stories of the other people, you're worried about what George Washington might do because you care about them. So it goes in both directions. 

And I think sometimes thematic work works, but from my experience, I really think a good story, a good biography, and chronology are the most helpful ways for students to get a grasp on the dry dates and names and stuff that you kind of need to understand to get to the meat of the story. But the meat of the story are the people.

Barbara Davidson 

So how important is connecting these smaller human stories to the larger narrative?

Sarah Botstein

I mean, I think it makesーit makes, for students, understand why the history matters. We're all impacted by decisions that leaders make by world events, small, medium, and large. So I think in any great story, certainly about a war, you need to have both the military strategy-what happened narrative, and you need to have the consequences, which is the people on the ground fighting and dying.

David Schmidt 

There's so many different ways you could look at the story of the American Revolution and even the film that we're making. One way that you could look is through the perspective of an individual. So let's take Betsy Ambler for example. She's 10 when the war begins. She's 18 when it ends. She's from Yorktown, Virginia. She lived much of the war as a refugee and her town was completely destroyed by that war. She never witnessed a battle but she was impacted by the war every day. 

So when this war began, she was, you know, she wasーshe would have been in grade school if she were alive today. When the war ends, she's graduating high school. What it means to her as however old she was at the time, changes. It's such a long war that that will happen with people. They'll come of age with the war, with their country.

There's another character, James Forten, who was a Black boy born free in Philadelphia. He was 9-years-old when he saw, when he listened to the Declaration of Independence being read for the very first time to the public outside of the Pennsylvania State House. It was blocks from where he was born. He never questioned whether "All Men Are Created Equal" applied to him.

A few years later, he was 14-years-old and he signed up to fight in the American Revolution. Because he was Black, there was a possibility that if he were capturedーand he joined a, he joined the Pennsylvania Navy, so he was sailing on a shipーthere was a possibility that if he were captured, the British might enslave him. He had never been a slave, but there was a possibility in fighting for his country, he was putting his freedom on the lineーnot just his freedom, generational slavery, right? But he still made that decision. He still made that sacrifice. 

He was captured. He got a bad bargain, but a better bargain than he could have gotten, and was kept on a prison ship in Brooklyn, not enslaved. He was there for seven months. Afterwards when he was freed, he's 15, he walked home from Brooklyn to Philadelphiaーto Trenton without shoes. And then he found some shoes there, kept walking. When he got home, his mom didn't recognize him. He had lost so much hair. He was emaciated. 

You know, it's theーthese are people who are not dissimilar from you and me. That's the value in telling these individual stories is you can imagine that there areーif there are three million people in the borders of what were the United States at its founding, there are three million individuals who, who have their own stories. 

Barbara Davidson 

So, one major concern that I have about the instructional materials that are being used in social studies classrooms is that so many of the resources that I see out there seem to be obsessed with trying to tell a story by looking exclusively at primary sources.

So I'm wondering, maybe David in particular given your experience with living history and archaeology, how important are primary sources to telling an accurate and compelling story? 

David Schmidt

That's a great question. You know, we really did lean into the primary sources for this film, I will say. We didn't have any living witnesses for this war, obviously, as we did for the Vietnam War or World War II. So in order to get the first-person testimony, we couldn't put anybody on camera and ask them what they saw. We had to look to memoirs, diaries, journal entries, letters that people wrote in the time or shortly after about their memories of war. And we have hundreds of voices in this film. I do think that they really do help tell an incredible story that we wouldn't have without them. 

That said, we are also interviewing historians who have spent their careers, their lives learning this story, learning how to contextualize it, learning how to tell it. And theyーyou know, this film is nothing without them. So it does, in the case of our film, require both. But primary sources are hugely important and they're proof of people's time on earth. 

In the case of the revolution, we wereーI at least was very surprised at how many people left their memories. Now they knew they were living through history. So we have that benefit. A lot of people were literate more than almost anywhere else on earth at the time, particularly in New England. And so we can get the memories of people from a wide variety of Americans that, you know, I think we were a little surprised to have, but we still needed the context that the secondary sources provided.

Sarah Botstein

The only thing I would add to that is that, you know, we're working at a visual medium. So, the primary sources were enormously helpful to bringing characters to life and finding quotations to read and to make sure that our dates and facts and stories were accurate but we're also dealing with music from the time, paintings, etchings, pamphlets, you know, what memorabilia is left. So I think you can tie the primary resources to much more tangible ways for kids to think. 

You know, Washington Crossing the Delaware is a very famous painting. Where was that painting painted? When? Is that painting accurate or is that painting a myth? Would Washington have been standing up at the boat in the middle of the day looking heroic? No. And that's really fun for kids. Like it's a puzzle that they're taking apart in reverse. And you can use a primary source document and some representation of that moment to do both. 

Another thing I think might be fun for elementary kids are the maps. They were painted by every nation, reminding children that the American Revolution was a world war is pretty exciting. Most kids don't understand that. I have a 7-year-old and he was in school saying, "The French were important to the American Revolution." And like, he only knows that from being in my house for the last 10 years. And that's kind of exciting. 

And the French made maps, the British made maps, we made maps, the Germans made maps. They're very beautiful. They're fun to look at. Kids are used to maps. But they're also kind of wacky and inaccurate depending on who's making them and why. 

David Schmidt 

When I was in high school, I got in trouble once and got detentionーand I was playing soccer in the lecture hall, which I shouldn't have been doing. But anyway, they gave me detention and my detention was to stare at a wall for an hour, but the wall had a map on it and it was a glorious hour, got to stare at that. So I think, you know, kids can lose themselves in these maps, Sarah's totally right. 

Barbara Davidson

I'm going to wrap up you all with returning to where we started. What's one lesson in history, storytelling and so forth that you hope educators and students carry forward from this experience, from this film?

David Schmidt 

It's actually particularly hard with this subject of the American Revolution, because it's something we know basically from consciousness the result of itーor the outcome of it, I should say. We know who won. They didn't know they were going to win this warー

Sarah Botstein

Well, David, it's likeーit's so unlikely that they were going to win, right?

David Schmidt 

Yeah, they just didn't know it was going to shake out. If you accept how uncertain it was then their decisions begin to make sense. And that,you know, often they made the wrong decision. And I'm talking about they writ large here. It's not just in George Washington's camp, you know. The British didn't think they were going to lose this war or they wouldn't have fought it. Right?

So, you know how it's gonna shake out, but let's get in the heads of the people who didn't and think about that uncertainty. That to me makes me feel the most kinship with the people of the revolutionary generation is recognizing that uncertainty that I feel in my own life. They felt that too.

Sarah Botstein 

I think it's really important when teaching history to show a variety of perspectives and to have empathy and openness and generosity to try to understand why people did good things and why people did bad things and how we can be optimistic in learning about history to make a better future. And make better on the promises that the revolution tried to inspire.

Barbara Davidson 

The American Revolution premiered on PBS stations November 16 of this year. This is linked to in our show notes.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about our work at knowledgematterscampaign.org. 

To catch all of the History Matters podcast, make sure you subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.