Over the course of the last week we saw six nights of two-hour episodes of Ken Burns' latest production, The American Revolution.

Did I ever know that the Revolutionary War lasted as long as it did, or like so many people assumed it was all done and dusted in 1776? Yes, I knew about Yorktown, but not in the complex way this program led up to it.

This was a "warts and all" representation of the period, how we started with the Declaration of Independence and from there how it unfolded. The brutality of everyone, including George Washington (what he did to the American Indians near the end of the war was pretty much genocide - erasing their communities in a wide swath of what is now New York State.) That the British held out, after defeat, and were more compassionate toward the formerly enslaved people who fought with them. Washington kept them together so their owners could retrieve them (and two were returned to his home, plus five to Jefferson) while the British negotiated that anyone who served with them for at least a year was given a document that declared them free.

The diagrams of the fields of battle were well-designed so you could see what they were talking about. This in particular on the Battle of Long Island - did I know about that? - and how troops pulled their own form of Dunkirk, 9000 troops and horses and guns across the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan overnight (conducted by any military leader available with maritime experience).

Anyway, it was a stark representation of a period in time that aligns with the upcoming 250th anniversary since the Declaration of Independence (also called the semiquincentennial or the quarter millennium, etc.) And a reminder of what our politics and the jerk in the White House is doing to us today. Trump is his own version of Benedict Arnold, but beholden only to his family's pocketbook. It would be wonderful if this inspired more people to speak up, protest, vote, and act locally to make a difference. The state of New Jersey was pivotal in putting a stop to the British carnage several times, they were particularly active and aggrieved by the events of the day. And when the group of settlers poured east from "Indian lands" to take on the Loyalists, it was like the Ghost Army in the Lord of the Rings (the film version, not the book), pouring into the area and dispatching the Loyalists. The program took time to sum up events after the war, there was no Reconstruction like after the Civil War, but they had the business of creating a nation of disparate states and writing a Constitution by Deists who had the welfare of the nation in mind. One that hopefully will seem all the more important today as it is shredded by Christian Nationalists.