Ken Burns and I have just met at Bowling Green, the tiny park at the bottom tip of Manhattan, when he brings up “all the lives that have been through here.” He doesn’t mean the tourists lined up to take selfies with the bronze bull, or anyone in the last century or even the one before that. Although he lives in New Hampshire, he’s an on-and-off New Yorker with a place in Soho and a daughter in Brooklyn, and he’s walked downtown this morning to discuss his docuseries The American Revolution, 12 hours of lofty ideals and bloody bayoneting and the contradictions underlying “all men are created equal.” (It will premiere on PBS on November 16.) Here, in the middle of British New York, and before that Dutch New Amsterdam, is where muskets were fired and the empire had its very last outpost in

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