Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns said the American Revolution has been “sanitized,” calling the war “dark and bloody.”
More...“I think we have sanitized the war. And I — I think it’s out of an understandable fear that if somehow we reveal how dark and bloody it is, that it will somehow diminish those big ideas in Philadelphia in [1776] and then 11 years later in [1787], when they do the Constitution,” Burns told NBC News’s Kristen Welker in an interview that aired Sunday.
“It doesn’t. They’re made — those ideas are made even more impressive because of the improbability of the struggle, the odds against success, the time it took to do it, the — all of the problems, the winters at Valley Forge and Morristown in which people are dying of disease,” he added.
Burns’s comments come amid heated debates about how American history should be presented, with mMore...any pushing for American history’s darker aspects, including slavery and the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans, to be highlighted more often.