I recently watched twelve hours of the documentary series The American Revolution by Ken Burns. As an amateur historian, I think I could pass a college-level final exam on this and some other historical topics. Very little surprised me in this documentary.

But in retrospect, my deeper understanding had resembled the black and white outline in a coloring book. By comparison, Burns’ history is an oil painting by a master artist.

All Burns’ documentaries are thoroughly researched and told in an unembellished factual manner. Burns uses multiple first-person viewpoints from letters and diaries. Historians representing different groups—Patriots, Tories, slaves, free African Americans, British, French, and Indians—who participated in that world-changing conflict provide faceted perspectives.

The series has current relevancy in the way Americans think of the United States and should deepen their appreciation of the importance of compromise in forming and maintaining a union of disparate peoples.