Ken Burns is wrong - "The American Revolution", his new six part mega-series, needs to be a lot smarter than this interview

Is this recent interview with YouTuber Theo Von, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns says this:

"... the great ideas are the greatest ideas ever. I actually think the American Revolution is the most important event since the birth of Christ. 

I really, really firmly believe that because if you think about it, up until that moment, everybody was under an authoritarian rule. They were subjects. They were superstitious peasants. And we created citizens. And that's a big deal. 

When we say we hold these truths to be self-evident, there was nothing self-evident about what Jefferson was about to say, that all men are created equal. No one on earth had made that proposition that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Let's go. That is not stuff that the world had ever really heard. 

He had distilled a century of enlightenment thinking. He'd been goaded on by what was happening in in the breakdown of relationships with the British over stuff and what became a quarrel between Englishmen suddenly got broken out into natural rights ..."

This is so far wrong, and historically illiterate, as to be mind-boggling.

If this is some insight into the narrative that Ken Burns' forthcoming mega-series will present, it will be a massive disappointment. It might play well into Trump 2.0-era 'America First' patriotism and jingoism, but not even Thomas Jefferson himself believed what Burns is here attributing to Jefferson.

Professor Garry Wills' magnificent Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (published 1978, see previous post here) is THE core text of the past generation, and expressly, repeatedly, shows the origins of the concepts, statements and vocabulary that the Committee of Five drew upon, frequently referring to Francis Hutcheson, John Locke and the 1688 'Glorious' Revolution among a host of prior inspirations.

The key words than Burns uses here – "inalienable" is from Hutcheson / "all men", "evident", "liberty" and "happiness" are from the intro to William Prince of Orange's 1688 Declaration.

The massive danger of USA250 is that it will mutate the history to play into the narrowness of present-day nationalisms – certainly in America, and probably in Ireland too – rather than challenge, educate and inform.

Liberty was not invented in Philadelphia in 1776. As Samuel Rutherford treasonously wrote in rural Scotland in 1644 – "every man is born free".