“I’m a storyteller. I’m a filmmaker. I’m not a historian,” Ken Burns says shortly before the release of his 10-years-in-the-making behemoth, The American Revolution . Few would argue the first two points, but I’m not so sure about the third.

During an hour-long chat, the 72-year-old sainted son of public television spits out names, dates, and data points with remarkable recall—at one moment revealing the 18th-century origins of the Lower Manhattan streets just a few blocks away, listing them in an orderly East-to-West fashion, as if reading from a map. (I’ll never think of Wooster Street. the same way again.) And few people have spent this much time—his first film, Brooklyn Bridge, came out 44 years ago—educating the masses about American history with Burns’s level of clarity, humanit

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