re: The American Revolution-Ken Burns

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Since photography didn't exist then, we don't have the terrible battlefield pictures like from the Civil War.

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In endorsing Barack Obama for the U.S. presidency in December 2007, Burns compared Obama to Abraham Lincoln.

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I wonder if Burns ever mentions what the tax rate was on the colonists prior to the revolution?

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It is impossible for him to be fully truthful about History.

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I asked AI

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No, the majority of historians specializing in colonial America and the Founding era do not believe that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution were directly inspired by the Iroquois Confederacy (or its Great Law of Peace) when drafting the document.

While some Framers (particularly Benjamin Franklin) were aware of and admired aspects of the Iroquois system—such as its federal structure uniting distinct nations under a shared council—and while there were documented interactions (e.g., the 1744 Lancaster Treaty Conference where an Onondaga leader urged the colonies to unite, or Franklin's 1754 Albany Plan of Union that echoed confederation ideas), the prevailing scholarly view is that these amounted to indirect or incidental influence at most, not a direct model for the Constitution's specific provisions, powers, or mechanisms.

The consensus among most academic historians is that the Constitution drew primarily from European sources: Enlightenment thinkers (Locke, Montesquieu, Hume), ancient Greco-Roman models, English common law and parliamentary traditions, the colonial charters and state constitutions, and the Framers' own experiences under the Articles of Confederation.

Claims of significant direct Iroquois influence originated largely in the late 20th century (notably in works by scholars such as Bruce Johansen and Donald Grinde in the 1970s–1980s, and amplified around the Constitution's 1987 bicentennial and a 1988 congressional resolution acknowledging Native contributions). Many historians regard these claims as overstated, poorly sourced, or reliant on misreadings of primary evidence (e.g., conflating Franklin's admiration for Iroquois unity with adoption of their governmental structures).

Prominent critics (e.g., Elisabeth Tooker, William Starna, Philip Levy, Charles Mann, and others) have highlighted substantive differences: the Iroquois system emphasized consensus decision-making, matrilineal elements, and sachems selected by clan mothers, whereas the Constitution used majority rule, bicameralism with population-based representation, a single executive presidency, and judicial review—features with clearer European and classical antecedents. No Framer ever explicitly cited the Great Law of Peace (whose first full English translation appeared only in the late 19th century) as a model.

In short, while the Iroquois Confederacy deserves recognition as a sophisticated indigenous political system and may have contributed to broader colonial thinking about federal union, the idea that it directly inspired the Constitution is a minority position in modern scholarship and is often described as a myth or exaggeration.

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I won't attempt to watch this garbage.

I know what a lot of his narrative will already be.

For crying out loud, Burns worked the angle of racism into his documentary about National Parks. He's nothing more than a race hustler.

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I have long-found Ken Burns to be a dubious source of good history. While the man does indeed popularize topics that I love and enjoy, he frequently falls for legendary tales that can easily be verified as just that - legends - while reporting them as actual history. Case in point: in his classic documentary series on the Civil War, he falls for the Lost Cause legend that some 7,000 Union soldiers fell at Cold Harbor in less than 30 minutes. Any serious historian of the battle could tell you that that figure is bullshite.

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