Ken Burns and Nicolle Wallace: The American Experiment at 250
Documentarian Ken Burns and journalist Nicolle Wallace explore what America's history tells us about its future as the nation marks 250 years.
Why we picked this
Burns arrives with a new six-part documentary on the American Revolution — and the argument that the tensions dividing the country today map directly onto the ones that nearly killed it at birth.
Ken Burns, the documentarian behind landmark series on the Civil War, jazz, baseball, and Vietnam, sits down with Nicolle Wallace at the 92nd Street Y to discuss America at 250. Burns is releasing a new documentary on the American Revolution — one that upends the comfortable story: democracy, he argues, was not the obvious outcome when the fighting began. The founding was a near-miss, and the forces pulling against it are recognizable today.
Wallace, who hosts MSNBC’s Deadline: White House and the podcast The Best People, brings a journalist’s eye for current events to Burns’s long historical lens. Together they trace the arc from 1776 to now — examining the good, the bad, and the contradictions that have always defined the American experiment.
The conversation is a live recording of their ongoing exchange for audiences who want to sit with the question that comes up every generation: whether the experiment holds.