Behind the American Revolution, A Barnard Name Rising

Most Americans learn about the American Revolution in school, but Sarah Botstein ’94, co-director of the upcoming Ken Burns docuseries The American Revolution, believes they’ll be surprised by how much they don’t know. 

“I think it is fascinating that our collective base-level understanding and thoughts about the revolution don’t do it justice. It’s an incredibly surprising story. It’s so unlikely that we were going to win. It’s about so much more than taxes and representation. It’s a global war,” Botstein said. “We wouldn’t have won without the French. It involves all kinds of nations, all kinds of people. And it is a really surprising and complicated and wonderfully inspiring and devastating story.”

Since graduating from Barnard College, Botstein has produced some of the most popular and acclaimed documentaries on PBS. Her latest, a six-part docuseries called The American Revolution airs starting Nov. 16 on TV and online. The series is 12 hours long and took co-directors Botstein, Burns and David Schmidt nine years to complete. The film’s release was timed for 2025, the 250th anniversary of the start of the war ­­­­— the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. 

Botstein stresses, though, that she didn’t only think about the American Revolution for those nine years. During that time, she and Burns also released their film on the Vietnam War, made a film about Ernest Hemingway, a documentary about the U.S. and the Holocaust and another about the prison education system. 

“At the different stages of production, we’re juggling a few balls — we’re shooting, we’re doing interviews, and actually, it’s good for my brain to be like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna spend the next few weeks really thinking about the Revolution … But then I’m going to go think about something else,’” Botstein said. “That’s really helpful, intellectually. That’s energizing.” 

Botstein, who was an American studies major at Barnard with a focus on the post-World War II era, said there was at least one thing in each episode that surprised her to learn. Overall, Botstein said, she realized how the American Revolution was, in many ways, actually a civil war.

“With the American Revolution, these were British subjects at war with their mother country, so that’s a civil war,” Botstein said. “But also families were divided, communities were divided, brother against brother. It’s a civil war in that it divided neighborhoods and families. Not everybody was a rebel, not everybody believed in the cause from the beginning.”  

While the American Revolution was, in many ways, a “great war of ideas” that changed the world for the better, Botstein said it was important to her and her co-directors that they also show viewers that it was a deeply devastating, brutal, long, and horrific war.

Working with Ken Burns

Botstein didn’t immediately know she wanted to make documentaries after graduating from Barnard in 1994. In fact, she didn’t know what she wanted to do at all. 

Instead of going to graduate school like the rest of her family, Botstein took a job as an assistant at a small firm with clients including General Motors — Burns’s corporate underwriter at the time. 

“He hired me for what I thought was 18 months-to-two years to work on our Jazz series, and that was almost 30 years ago,” Botstein said.

The career path stuck. 

“I thought … what he does combines so many of my interests — being an American studies major, and I love cultural history and thinking about how art and history and politics interact,” Botstein said. 

She, like much of Burns’s core team, has worked with him for a long time, something that “speaks volumes about him,” Botstein said. 

“We are intellectually different, we’re creatively different, we’re visually different, we’re different people, but I think we make each other better,” she said. 

Thirty years into her career, Botstein reflects on the mentorship and support Burns and others have given her. One of the most helpful things she’s experienced in her career is being trusted to try things on her own. She hopes to pass that onto the up-and-coming women that she works with, too. 

“Ken has given me enormous latitude and let me try and sometimes fail and sometimes succeed,” Botstein said. 

In an industry that is always changing, Botstein said her best advice to Barnard students and recent graduates who are considering a career in documentary filmmaking is to find work that you love. 

“My life and my work are all kind of intertwined, and I love that,” she said. “So I think finding work that you love, small, medium, and large, is actually the lesson.”