Ken Burns’ new PBS series, The American Revolution, reframes the founding war as a brutal, chaotic conflict fought on multiple fronts and driven by impossible odds. From fractured command to ...

Choosing your favorite Ken Burns series has as much to do with your historical interests as the quality of any individual projects. That’s because he doesn’t really make subpar documentaries, although ...

In Ken Burns’s newest documentary, the war for independence was also a civil war. Amid a bitter fight over history, its timing feels urgent. Critic’s Notebook In Ken Burns’s newest documentary, the ...

It would be hard to imagine today, but for a week in the fall of 1990, it seemed almost everyone in America was watching the same thing, at the same time. Nearly 40 million people tuned in for at ...

Throughout his career, Burns has developed and perfected the tricks of his particular trade: the evocative use of music and quotations from speeches and correspondence; the use of actors to read the ...