This line went down well with the crowd but brought the project’s limitations into focus. This kind of “just the facts” claim, while posing as humility, in fact masked Burns’ grandiosity. There is no story of the past that is told without a concept of historiography. Whatever you write, you are taking a stance on your subject and on the practice of history itself. The suggestion that other historians are not also interested in “show[ing] what happened” is, at best, careless.

But the advantage of Burns’ crowd-pleasing approach was plain: unrivaled reach. Even in this era of nasty fights over school curricula, his films have remained above the fra

n his denouncement of Trump at Stanford, he said, “I have come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known truth. History is a mysterious and malleable thing, constantly changing, not just as new information emerges, but as our own interests, emotions and inclinations change. Each generation rediscovers and reexamines that part of its past that gives its present new meaning, new possibility and new power.”

But the nature of that responsibility was precisely the big idea that was lost in the movie — for facts don’t speak for themselves. If they did, the facts of the revolution would not have inspired people as disparate as Confederate rebels and Martin Luther King, Jr.

for facts don’t speak for themselves.

Vignettes and battle dates won’t offer the American people what they need to think through the toughest questions raised by the country’s founders: What is true liberty and when is it time to give up on politics and take more drastic measures to secure it?

. Some 51 percent of his men were too sick to stand duty, unable to conduct the counter-siege operations that Cornwallis knew were required. American and French forces penned the troops in until Cornwallis surrendered in October, which in effect decided the outcome of the American Revolution. 

As reviewers and readers noticed immediately, I take issue with how Chernow handles women and slavery in his own biography of the first president. In the introduction, I tally up the various problematic words he uses to describe Mary, Washington’s mother—<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ucifDwAAQBAJ&amp;newbks=1&amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;lpg=PP1&amp;dq=you%20never%20forget%20your%20first&amp;pg=PR36#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false">26 of them</a>, including “crusty” and “shrewish”—and try to set the record straight on family dramas he just plain invented. And I note that as hard as Chernow is on Mary, he is remarkably soft on Washington, a man who owned hundreds of people and did not free one during his lifetime.&nbsp;

Jessie Serfilippi, a 27-year-old part-time interpreter at the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, New York.&nbsp;

In his biography, he writes that “the memories of his West Indian childhood left Hamilton with a settled antipathy to slavery.” In her paper, Serfilippi counters that “there is no indication, either in documents from Hamiton’s childhood or adulthood, that the horrors of slavery he witnessed on St. Croix turned him into an abolitionist.”&nbsp;

My own explanation: George Washington may have won Ron Chernow the Pulitzer, but Alexander Hamilton defines his legacy. Serfilippi’s paper was a direct challenge to the man he’d sold as an “uncompromising abolitionist.”&nbsp;

“‘As Odious and Immoral a Thing’” that most historians have long considered factual: Hamilton bought and sold people. He accepted money in exchange for labor performed by an enslaved person belonging to his household. Here’s what Serfilippi found: At the time of Hamilton’s death, his estate included enslaved servants valued at 400 pounds. “There’s just no denying it after seeing that specific piece of evidence,” she wrote to me in an email. “There’s no debating that he enslaved people. To say he didn’t is to erase them, and I will not let that happen.”&nbsp;

But let’s be realistic here. This is a historic site in Albany, New York, and no matter how many visitors the Schuyler Mansion gets, it’ll never come close to matching the number of people who have purchased Chernow’s book or memorized the <em>Hamilton</em> soundtrack. Every new edition of <em>Alexander Hamilton</em> will continue to state that Hamilton <em>may </em>have enslaved people, omitting evidence that shows he did. That narrative will dominate the conversation—for now. There’s a long game to be played here, and that’s exactly what the Schuyler Mansion is doing by supporting work like Serfilippi’s.&nbsp;

As devoted to such patterns as we are—they allow us to make sense of the past, to forge <i>history&nbsp;</i>from the unfathomable welter of time gone by—we must also recognize their essential artificiality; they are products of historiography, not intrinsic features of the events themselves.

Joseph Plumb Martin’s <i>Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier</i>, first published in Hallowell, Maine, in 1830, offers both a counter-record of the facts of the War and a counter-method for relating them.

Martin’s <i>Narrative&nbsp;</i>recalls the real-life drudgery of an enlisted man. He finds heroism in the endurance of poverty, cold, hunger, boredom, confusion, and mismanagement; he shifts the terms and the burdens of American virtue from the gentry to the common folk.

As Martin’s anecdote rambles on, the significance of this crowd action becomes clear: the War is, quite literally, out of control—its chaos cannot be managed in or through the settled rules and narratives of the marketplace or the military hierarchy.

heroism may be as simple as getting drunk without getting in trouble; military leadership may consist in threatening the rogues under one’s command. Martin’s reaction to his general officer’s diatribe mixes awe, contempt, and a strong sense of the inconsequentiality of it all

Benjamin Franklin’s acknowledged illegitimate son, raised by Franklin and his common-law wife, Deborah Read.

When George III became King, William was appointed Royal Governor of New Jersey. Ben Franklin could not have been more proud

signed the charter for Queen’s College (now Rutgers

In August 1775 Franklin traveled to New Jersey to convince William to join the rebellion

As a Loyalist William believed America’s best chance to succeed lay in remaining with Britain. He also believed most Americans would not support the rebellion

William secretly informed the British of revolutionary activities. Unfortunately for him, a packet of his letters was intercepted by the rebels who passed the information to the Continental Congress, declaring William Franklin

“a virulent enemy to the people of this country and a person who may prove dangerous.

he wrote to Governor Trumball of Connecticut, “I suffer so much in being buried alive, having no one to speak to day or night...that I should deem it a favor to be immediately taken out and shot

William’s wife died while he was imprisoned. During all his travails, his father exerted no effort on his behalf, leaving the son to face the consequences of his decisions. In 1777 suffering from ill health he was exchanged with another prisoner and allowed to go to New York. From there he departed for England where he would live in exile for the rest of his life.

In William’s August 1784 letter to Benjamin Franklin, he wrote he hoped his father might care “to revive that affectionate intercourse” that William valued above all else

“There are natural duties that precede political ones and cannot be extinguished by them.

“to find him taking up arms against me, in a cause wherein my good name, fortune and life were all at stake”

was something he could not forgive

He lost his family and his country while Franklin lost his only son.

African Americans who had been fighting in Massachusetts were grandfathered into the army after new rules went into effect on July 10, 1775, which barred both free and enslaved black Americans from enlistment.&nbsp;

Records show that only about 5,000 black soldiers fought for American independence with the army over the eight years of war. But we also must remember that the Continental Army was never larger than 15,000 strong at any given time, and that the army became divided into four separate entities by 1780: northern, main, southern, and western. Having a detachment of three hundred men with less than fifty of whom were black is not insignificant, nor should we assume it was that way for purely racial reasons.&nbsp;

, but a sizable amount, particularly those who were enslaved, were signed up by their masters to serve in their place.

Despite the ban of enlisting slaves into the army, those serving in place of their masters were taken. When policies loosened, and individual states began recruiting whoever they could get to satisfy muster rolls for the army, more enslaved people filled the ranks of the army.