America is 250 years old, and the columns holding up the edifice of democratic institutions are visibly cracking. Paul Rieckhoff sits down with the great Ken Burns — the storyteller who has taught more Americans about their own country than anyone alive — for a conversation that refuses to sanitize the moment. They dig into the American Revolution as Burns has newly rendered it, the return of Confederate names to U.S. military forts, the medals for the soldiers of Wounded Knee, Hegseth addressing the generals, and the quiet renaming of the Department of Defense back to the Department of War. Burns calls balls and strikes, and the strike zone is a lot wider than the sanitized version most of us were handed in school.
Along the way this becomes a masterclass in patriotism that has nothing to do with a jersey or a party. Burns and Rieckhoff move between Yogi Berra and George Washington, Jackie Robinson and Johann Ewald, Yorktown and Fort Lee, and land on the founders' warning that the conservative scholar Yuval Levin sharpened for our moment — they'd be less surprised by a would-be monarch than by a legislative branch that simply abdicated. If you're exhausted by the MAGA machine, disgusted by the rigged two-party system, and still stubbornly in love with the American project, this is the America 250 episode worth carrying with you into Independence Day.
In this episode
- Ken Burns on why the founders would be shocked not by a strongman but by a Congress that abdicated Article I
- The Wounded Knee medals reversal and what Burns calls "obvious racist editing" of American history
- Renaming forts back to Confederate generals — traitors, in Burns' words — and the cost of that message
- Baseball as a barometer of America: immigration, Jackie Robinson, and why every player wears 42 on April 15
- Yogi Berra, the White House, and an argument about whether Jackie was safe or out at home
- The Department of Defense becoming the Department of War, and Hegseth's unprecedented address to the generals
- George Washington resigning his commission and the presidency — and George III calling him "the most important character of the age"
- Johann Ewald, the Hessian foot soldier who watched a "multitude of rabble" defy kings
- The founders as deists, the First Amendment, and Jefferson on his neighbor's twenty gods
- Burns' core teaching: "There's no them. There's only us."
