The George Washington story you haven’t heard with Ken Burns (Part 1)
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All biography is failure because even as you know in your own life, the people who are closest to us are in part inscrutable even to us. And how could we presume to reach back 250 years and say, aha, I now have George Washington? But he's a hell of a lot more complicated and therefore to me more interesting than the superficial sanitized Madison Avenue versions, not only of him, but of our revolution that we've been spoon-fed over the years. Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant.
Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. Ken Burns is the king of historical documentaries. He's done films about Mark Twain, Jackie Robinson, the American Buffalo, the Civil War, and now in his latest work, The American Revolution. The series excavates the stories that define our country and define our identities as Americans.
If we go back to our origin story, it has a therapeutic advantage to it. To know where you've been is to help you know where you are and where you may be going more precisely. The origin story is really important to reconstructing a collective narrative about ourselves. Because this is Ken Burns, who's known for breaking his films into multiple parts, we had to make this conversation a two-parter. So this is the first of two episodes where I sit down with Ken to talk about what we've gotten wrong about the American Revolution and how even our greatest heroes carry their own personal contradictions.
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