Ken Burns Knows We’ve Been Here Before

Ken Burns thinks we’re going to make it. An award-winning documentarian, Ken’s celebrated career seeks to find humanity in our country’s imperfect story. He threads this idea through his documentaries about everything from our national pastime (“Baseball”), to our offbeat experiments (“Jazz”), and our violent beginnings as seen through his latest project, “The American Revolution.” As our nation's 250th anniversary approaches, he joins Nicolle at 92NY for an intimate conversation about the American experiment — how its failures and its successes inform each other and nudge the country forward. Ken understands that political turmoil is a hallmark of our democracy; fundamentally, we’ve been here before. To illustrate this, he shares the words of a German Hessian soldier spoken as he surrenders at Yorktown: “Who would have thought a hundred years ago that out of this multitude of rabble could arise a people who could defy kings?”

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