Thanks Ken Burns. Good gravy this is insane level revisionist history.
Is PBS Okay?: “Masterpiece History” Might Be Erasing Slavery From The American Revolution Tad Stoermer Oct 8, 2025 From a PBS Tiktok, Question: “Is there a little known fact about Thomas Jefferson that more people should know?” Answer from Jane Kamensky (president of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello): “An important thing to remember when we think about Jefferson and the second continental congress is it was a gathering of young and rather ordinary people. Um so at the time of the writing of the declaration, Jefferson was in his early 30s. Um he was uh still relatively newly married and uh and the life of his wife and growing family here was foremost in his mind. um as he was thinking with a group of like-minded men and all of the women and laborers, enslaved and free who made up their worlds about the kind of world they wanted to build.”
This historian literally is trying to tell us that Thomas Jefferson, owner of more than 600 human slaves over his lifetime who came from money and also married an heiress, was an “ordinary person” and that the other rich landowners and well to do people with time to involve themselves in politics were supposedly “young ordinary people”, and even more spectacularly, to try to assert that women, and even humans kept as property and exploited in the most horrifying ways, were somehow allowed to be involved in the thinking about building a government. We’re supposed to believe that?
I really hope that most people listening to this would immediately scoff and ridicule this historian and any historic documentarian that would put this bunk forward or endorse it, but I don’t know. I don’t know what the latest generations have been being taught in school about the American Revolution and the early United States.