As America prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday next year, TV’s most eloquent historian, Ken Burns, reminds us in his latest sweeping epic just how grueling the nation’s birth pangs were. “It’s our creation myth, our creation story,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Atkinson (The British Are Coming), one of many distinguished storytellers enlisted in The American Revolution, which feels like a fitting bookend for Burns, whose breakthrough work The Civil War premiered 35 years ago.

Over six nights and 12 hours (beginning November 16), Burns and co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, with writer Geoffrey Ward, reveal in fascinating and exhaustive detail how a rebellion against British tyranny became a bloody, world-altering battle for independence on a continent that, lik

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