I used to be pretty obsessed with the American Revolution.

One of the greatest thrills of my life was getting to teach that particular stretch of American history as part of my curriculum when I taught 5th grade.

It’s like if I got to teach about baseball - it was something I already knew a lot about, and it was fun for me to have a reason to research it even more.

I haven’t paid as close attention to it in the past decade, but when I saw Ken Burns was putting out a documentary about the American Revolution, I figured I should probably make time to watch it.

I stayed up the first night it was on PBS - last Sunday, from 8-10pm. They aired it every night at that time from Sunday through Friday.

I was kind of wrecked after the first night - 10pm is past my bedtime. I thought it just wasn’t in the cards.

And then on Monday I checked out the PBS website to see if there would be a time when they would stream it…and they were already streaming all 6 episodes.

Game changer.

I watched a little bit at a time over the next week or so - usually in half-hour chunks, and I finished it on Monday after taking most of the weekend off.

I think the immediate thing that struck me watching the doc was relief - I remembered a lot of what I knew so well years ago, and listening to the narration I was happy to hear I had gotten so much of it right. (Though apparently I was mispronouncing Pitcairn, which I only [mis]pronounced the way I did because someone told me how to say it and I listened to them. Shrug.) (And, listen, it’s not like I thought I was teaching it wrong but if they had started spouting information that was unfamiliar to me in the doc that would have been a problem. And it didn’t happen.)

I also know you can’t include everything, but I couldn’t believe how little about Paul Revere and William Dawes was included in that first episode. There are other moments like that where I used to dive deep in my research, and they just breezed by it. (But it means I have plenty to offer in terms of supplemental information, even after 12 hours of documentary. So we can chat if you’d like.)

And I guess that means there’s probably supplementary stuff online, but I don’t know if I need to watch more. I think they could have gotten away with a couple of episodes that pushed three hours - maybe add some more about the events of April 18, 1775 - they spent a lot of time on April 19 - I feel like April 18 was pretty exciting with everything that was going on.

But the doc seemed a lot more battle-focused, so fine. I would have liked to see more about the spy networks. That’s interesting stuff too. (They did talk about Nathan Hale, but it was quick.)

The big thing for me is watching a documentary requires a lot of attention. It’s a different watch than other things - if I found myself trying to multi-task like I do watching anything else, I missed information.

There were a couple of times I had to go back and rewatch to just make sure I didn’t completely miss it - one with George Washington’s early failure during the French and Indian War, because I didn’t quite get what they said, and then I don’t know how but I had forgotten they covered the taking of Fort Ticonderoga, which I think was just one of those moments that was covered very quickly.

I liked the documentary a lot. I would use parts of it if I was still teaching. There was a lot of artwork I had never seen before…a lot of the historians were really likable and easy to listen to. (Sometimes I watch a documentary and think, “ugh, not this guy again.” I didn’t think that here.)

I’d never watched the Burns documentary on the Civil War, or the one on jazz. I think I watched most of baseball, but maybe not all of it?

It’s really fascinating stuff, how you can cover all of that content and be interesting. I don't want to sound like I’m complaining about what wasn’t there - I thoroughly enjoyed what was there, and appreciate the efforts made to emphasize the inconsistencies of slavery and the treatment of the Native Americans by the Americans seeking liberty.

I don’t know that I’ll ever rewatch this because it’s a big time commitment. (Although I thought of it as ‘less than a baseball game’ each night since they were 2 hours and I spend 2-and-a-half or so watching Mets games for six months every year.)

But I would definitely recommend it to others.

Or I can just share what I know since now I feel pretty confident I know just about everything worth knowing about the American Revolution.