On June 24, 1778, a total solar eclipse covered a wide swath of North America—from the Pacific Coast of Mexico to Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The eclipse occurred just a few days before the Battle of Monmouth, when George Washington’s Continental Army engaged General Sir Henry Clinton’s British Army—a standoff that nevertheless allowed the Patriots to claim a much-needed victory. The British, meanwhile, continued their retreat from Philadelphia to New York City. We wanted to depict this eclipse for our series The American Revolution, and in this we had a stroke of luck: There would be a total solar eclipse across much of North America on April 8, 2024.
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Filming the eclipse would be technically complicated, and if we were hampered by clouds or anything else—if we failed to get the shot—there could be no second take. (The next such eclipse in the United States will occur in 2044.) Our crew headed north from New York City, armed with four cameras. Three would be pointed at the sky and the fourth at the sun’s reflection on water. The exposure was going to change wildly in the course of the eclipse, and totality would last only a few minutes. We had intended to film in western New York, in what had been Seneca Country in 1778. But changing weather forecasts pushed us to consider other locations, and we ended up far to the east, in the Adirondacks. Somehow, everything worked out, and the footage we got is some of the most stunning camerawork in the series.
Challenging though it was, filming the eclipse was in one sense easy: We knew when and where it was going to happen, and we knew the effect would be powerful. Endeavoring to make a 12-hour documentary on a subject that predates the invention of photography, and whose sources are written in an 18th-century vernacular, was in other respects a daunting mission. For our series on World War II and the Vietnam War, we could talk with living witnesses and access archival footage. We had tens of thousands of photographs from the Civil War. The American Revolution had none of those elements.
Our subject was also complicated by the myths that enveloped it. Generations of Americans have wrestled with the meaning and reality of the American Revolution, our national origin story. Even in 1783, John Adams knew how hard it would be to tell that story. “It would require the whole of the longest Life,” he warned a French historian, “to assemble from all the Nations and Parts of the Globe” all of the documentary materials needed “to form a compleat History of the American War, because it is nearly the History of Mankind for the whole Epocha of it.” The French historian never wrote the book.
As the historian Maya Jasanoff points out in the film, coming to terms with the Revolutionary War is an almost impossible task. The stakes are so high, the events so complex, the mythology so entrenched, “that it has made the way that Americans think about this period very unreal and detached.”
The challenges of making the documentary, by contrast, were quite concrete. We tried to capture the lives of the millions of people the Revolution affected—to make the uncertainties of their time palpable and vivid, even though we all know the outcome, and to represent faithfully the circumstances in which so many people chose to fight for and against the Revolution. This work led us to new perspectives on the fundamental questions about the founding: What is the role of government? What responsibilities come with the privilege of citizenship? What would I be willing to risk in the service of my country and my principles? What am I willing to die for?
By January 2024, Philadelphia had gone almost two years without an inch of snow on a single day. For many people, this was a welcome relief. For our team, it was a big problem. The Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) was the Patriot seat of government for much of the war, and Congress stayed in session there through several winters. We had already filmed winter scenes in Deerfield, Massachusetts; Valley Forge, Pennsylvania; and Ticonderoga, New York, among other locales. But the winters of the Revolution were notoriously harsh, and the film wouldn’t be complete without more snow.
With a major winter storm expected to hit the East Coast from the Chesapeake Bay to the Canadian border on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the following Tuesday, we quickly mobilized. There was an obstacle: Historic sites would be closed for the long weekend, and their staff hard to reach. We had to plan everything overnight, get permits ironed out, and send four camera crews in four different directions: to Providence, Rhode Island; Charlestown, New Hampshire; Tivoli, New York; and Philadelphia.
We came back with beautiful footage—and a realization. The East Coast’s ever-changing, unpredictable climate was at times our most unanticipated and vexing adversary in bringing the story of the Revolution to life. Even with all the benefits of modern weather forecasting, along with plowed roads and airport deicing, we were still at its mercy. That constant challenge made what Washington and the American soldiers faced during their war all the more remarkable to consider. Weather guided the course of the Revolution far more than it guided our production.
“Turns of weather that we know are coming for weeks on end hit the people of the 18th century completely by surprise,” the writer Nathaniel Philbrick explains. “They’re not just fighting each other. In a profound way, they are fighting the American climate and geography and topography.”
Weather became an unexpected and unheralded character in deciding battle after battle: What an American private called an “outrageous” storm contributed to the Continental Army’s doomed assault on Quebec City in 1775; what the historian Rick Atkinson describes as a “providential fog” saved Washington’s army by allowing it to escape to Manhattan after the disastrous Battle of Long Island in 1776.
Weather was not the only unpredictable natural force at play. From 1775 to 1783, far more people succumbed to disease than died in combat. Typhus, typhoid, dysentery, and, worst of all, smallpox—that “dread disease of humanity,” as the historian Colin G. Calloway calls it—incubated in fetid army camps before spreading across the continent. Even people far from the battlefield—on the Pacific Coast, in Spanish Mexico, and in the Caribbean—suffered from the war through famine or epidemic. Few in North America were untouched by the Revolution.
The process of filmmaking brought an intimate understanding of geography as well as weather. Archival maps are works of art, and we use many in the film. They told us where troops were positioned and what commanders were thinking as they drew up their plans; they also staggered us with their beauty. Those maps marked how battles played out and where campaigns went wrong. They recorded patterns of settlement and made wildly speculative claims to western lands. But we had to be careful about how we used them, because those maps reflected their makers’ point of view. Sometimes cartographers were working with bad information, and sometimes they intentionally misrepresented reality. “Maps at the time show the colonies extending well into the interior,” the scholar Maggie Blackhawk points out. “They’re aspirational, in many ways. They’re an argument rather than a conclusion.”
To account for discrepancies in the cartographic record, we created more than 100 new maps for the series and spent years ensuring their accuracy. The challenges were many; far more than borders have been altered since 1775. Dams have redirected waterways, and rivers have changed course all on their own. Kaskaskia, Illinois, for instance, today lies on the western side of the Mississippi River, the opposite bank from where it stood when George Rogers Clark claimed it for the United States, in 1778. Coastal cities have spent the centuries reclaiming land by filling in marshes. A bird’s-eye view of 21st-century Boston does not much resemble one from the Revolutionary period, when the Back Bay was still a bay. Major arteries on the modern map, such as the Erie Canal, hadn’t yet been dug, so we had to erase them.
Though we expected to have little to go on when recharting 18th-century eastern North America, old maps and other documentation gave us hundreds of places where people lived in 1775. But amassing those data from various sources and plotting them accurately on our new maps was a much bigger undertaking than we had imagined. North America changed rapidly in the second half of the 18th century as more people arrived from Europe or were taken forcibly from Africa and the settler population pushed farther into Indian Country. We hired the geographer Charles E. Frye, who scanned data from hundreds of archival maps and placed them over modern maps based on satellite imagery, correcting for changes in topography and hydrography, as well as the imprecision of the original mapmakers. Our resulting maps show North America as it was. The 13 colonies have no drawn western borders, reflecting ongoing boundary disputes and a moving line of settlement. Native nations across the continent, and especially those that shared a frontier with the early United States, are prominently marked, while Cherokee, Shawnee, Delaware, and Haudenosaunee towns have as visible a place as many settler towns in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Quebec.
At the time of the Revolution, “70–80 percent of the continent is still controlled by Indigenous people—politically, economically, and militarily,” the historian Michael Witgen notes. “It’s not a separate place. It’s not this timeless space where Native people are sort of existing in harmony with nature and that they have no interest in the outside world. Native people want the good stuff that Europeans are bringing. Europeans want the wealth that they can get from Native people. Native powers are as important to the global market economy as a place like Virginia or a place like New York.”
“The small scale of our maps deceived us,” a Londoner wrote as the war entered its third year, “and, as the word ‘America’ takes up no more room than the word ‘Yorkshire,’ we seem to think the territories they represent are much of the same bigness, though Charleston is as far from Boston as London from Venice.” The Londoner drew an unwelcome conclusion: “We have undertaken a war against farmers and farmhouses, scattered through a wild waste of continent.”
Armies carried their destruction across the former colonies, over the mountains to Cherokee and Haudenosaunee lands, onto the Great Lakes and the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, south along the Gulf Coast, into Florida, and north to Canada. After France and later Spain and the Netherlands entered the war with Great Britain, navies brought it to the West Indies, Western Europe, the Mediterranean, even India.
The American Revolution was a world war fought in the age of sail. Thousands of miles separated its theaters of action, and coordinating campaigns at that distance proved a nightmare. The post roads and sea lanes, typical avenues of communication in peacetime, were under constant threat during the war. Many letters were intercepted or lost. Even unimpeded transmissions could carry orders only as fast as the fastest horse or the quickest ship. It took weeks at best for the British high command in London to get news from North America, and their orders heading west, unaided by the Gulf Stream, took even longer. In 1775, people in England didn’t even know there was a war until 40 days after “the shot heard round the world.”
In 1781, American and French armies had to walk hundreds of miles in the heat of summer to get from Westchester County, New York, to Yorktown, Virginia. “It’s hot and humid, and, as the French write, ‘infested by mosquitos,’ ” the historian Iris de Rode observes. “They have to create bridges. They have to get obstacles out of the way. And we’re not talking just about men marching. We have a lot of animals behind them. In order to not walk in the middle of the day, they start in the middle of the night. So it’s pitch-dark. You’re walking on little paths, probably quite muddy. And you just walk.”
The North American landscape itself became a star of the series. We filmed for 165 days at more than 150 locations in and outside the original 13 colonies, in every season, at every time of day, and from every vantage. We often reduce the East Coast to the I-95 corridor and easily dismiss its natural beauty—particularly within the megalopolis of asphalt, concrete, and steel between the Potomac and Merrimack Rivers. It’s undeniable that we have paved over much of our past, but there’s still grandeur to see, and we tried to capture as much of it as we could with our cameras. Filming pine trees on Maine’s seacoast and palmettos off Charleston left us with stark reminders of North America’s botanical diversity as well as its vastness.
The true protagonists of our series are, of course, the people who experienced the war, and we devoted much of our research to understanding the texture of their lives. There are oil-on-canvas portraits from the period, but they depict only a very small subset of society, people who had the time to sit for a painting and the means to pay for one. Because so few portraits were made, we can’t know what most people looked like. But there’s no shortage of first-person testimony from the Revolution. Even if someone’s likeness died with them, their writing may have survived. Several times throughout the series, we put handwriting on the screen as evidence that these lesser-known characters had been alive too.
We pored over papers at historical societies, combed through old newspapers, exhausted museum catalogs. We got involved with online ancestry forums, stalked auction houses, cold-called collectors. Some of the portraits in our film are in private hands and haven’t been on public display in decades, including understandably rare portraits of Benedict Arnold, a figure shunned by postwar American artists.
The central question was this: How could we understand the experiences of people who lived through our founding—not from our own perspective, but from theirs? “War in itself, however distant, is indeed terrible,” 16-year-old Betsy Ambler, of Yorktown, wrote when the British army invaded Virginia in 1781. “But when brought to our very doors—when those we most love are personally engaged in it, when our friends and neighbors are exposed to its ravages, when we know assuredly that without sacrificing many dear to us as our own lives, our country must remain subject to British tyrany—the reflection is indeed overwhelming.” We wanted the film to bring the audience closer to the reality of how North America felt and looked and sounded to the men, women, and children who waged and witnessed this war. These were real people, with real hopes and fears not so different from our own.
The commitment of reenactors and historical interpreters to this project was crucial. Their period-perfect, handsewn clothes are just the start. They have spent countless hours researching the lives of the people they give over their weekends to portraying. We were with reenactors on the battlefield, with blacksmiths at their forge, with weavers at their loom—anywhere our cameras could capture the scale of the war effort required to win independence. We worked with several reenactor groups throughout production, but the Jersey Greys most of all. They agreed to drill for us at night in a snowstorm, to march through deep mud, and to build what they believe to be the largest redoubt in North America, which gave us insight into how much work went into being a soldier.
Thousands of civilians followed armies during the Revolution. The soldiers were willing to cook food or mend clothes, but laundry, we learned, was mostly women’s work. And clean clothes were a necessity, given the ever-present threat of disease. We filmed reenactors washing bloody garments, which is one of the very first shots in the first episode, and we return to that imagery at a key point in the series. “Imagine what a battlefield looks like after a battle,” the historian Kathleen DuVal says. “It has a lot of bodies. It has a lot of blood and gore. And it was the job of women to go in and take care of those bodies, to clean them up, to identify them, if they could, to see over the burial of bodies. Part of the work of war is dealing with death.”
The bloody civil war at the heart of the Revolutionary story was far beyond what we had previously appreciated. “The United States came out of violence,” Maya Jasanoff observes. Those seven words ought to be self-evident; a war is a war, after all. And yet, welcoming that idea can shock the system because our popular conception of the American Revolution is so often encased in bloodless, gallant myth. The real Revolution was a savage civil war: eight years of uncertainty, brutality, and terror that tore communities apart and left tremendous loss in their aftermath. That doesn’t in any way diminish its inspiring outcome; it only underscores how much people were willing to sacrifice to create the United States.
One of the most astonishing aspects of the Revolutionary War, the historian Christopher L. Brown says, “is that you had such different places come together as one nation. I’m not sure there is a state, anywhere in the world, in the late 18th century, that has as wide variety of people who inhabit it.” And so, the nation “ends up cohering, not around culture, not around religion, not around ancient history. It was coming together around a set of purposes and ideals for one common cause.”
When the Revolution began, many American rebels had no intention of breaking with the British empire. They still wanted Parliament to leave them alone, to treat them with the same “salutary neglect” that had allowed previous generations of American colonists to flourish. Most of them still wanted to remain subjects of the British King. War would change that. To win, the Patriots would have to unite the colonies, declare American independence, promise more political participation to grow their coalition, secure French support, and ultimately create a government strong enough to function without jeopardizing individual rights and liberties. None of that was on the table from the start. The United States that emerged from the war was a nation no one could have imagined before the shooting began in April 1775.
The war changed how Americans thought about themselves, their connections with one another, and their relationship to their government. Understanding that—understanding the circumstances under which the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were created—only reinforces the vitality of those founding documents.
By the end of the American Revolution, Betsy Ambler had lived for years as a refugee and lost her hometown forever. “The War,” she later remembered, “tho’ it was to involve my immediate family in poverty and perplexity of every kind was in the end to lay the foundation of independence and prosperity for my Country, and what sacrifice would not an American, a Virginian, at the earliest age have made for so desirable an end?”
The American Revolution will air on PBS beginning November 16, 2025. This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “How Do You Film the Revolution?”
