(Ken Burns' documentaries have always been filled with lies and omissions as the left continiously want to erase
their bad influences on history.)

From: https://shorturl.at/H045j (nypost.com)

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Opinion

Ken Burns' `childish canard' makes a woke mockery of America's founding

By Rich Lowry
Published Nov. 24, 2025, 6:43 p.m. ET

Few documentary films have the natural authority of a Ken Burns
production.

The narrator of his works, Peter Coyote, is as close as we have today
to "the voice of God," the phase once associated with legendary CBS
anchor Walter Cronkite at the height of the power of broadcast news.

This makes it especially outrageous that Burns feeds the viewers of
his new epic documentary, "The American Revolution," a childish canard
right at the outset.

Burns implies that the Iroquois Confederacy, a union of six Indian
tribes or nations in New York state, crucially influenced the founding
of the United States.

This is a nice fairy tale, but has no connection to reality - and
Burns and his colleagues, who worked on the documentary for about a
decade, had time to verify this claim.

At the beginning of the film, the narrator intones that "long before
13 British colonies made themselves into the United States," the
Iroquois had "a union of their own that they called the Haudenosaunee
- a democracy that had flourished for centuries."

We are told that Benjamin Franklin "proposed that the British colonies
form a similar union," the so-called Albany Plan.

He printed a famous cartoon of a chopped-up snake illustrating his
point with the legend, "Join or Die."

The narrator continues, "Twenty years later, `Join or Die' would be a
rallying cry in the most consequential revolution in history."

There's much to unpack in this passage, which is carefully constructed
to be misleading without being flagrantly false (although it doesn't
succeed).

It is certainly true that the Iroquois had forged an enduring
confederacy, but this was hardly a unique contribution to political
practice.

History is littered with all sorts of other examples of this form of
alliance: Greek city-states forged a confederacy against Persia in 478
BC.

The film suggests a connection between a statement made by the
Iroquois leader Canasatego recommending a union on the one hand and
Franklin on the other, but this is will-o'-the-wisp stuff.

Canasatego made his statement at a 1744 conference over the Treaty of
Lancaster, a negotiation between the Iroquois and several colonies.

For his part, Franklin cited the Iroquois having a confederacy in one
sentence in a 1751 letter about the possibility of a colonial union.

That's it.

It's not true that the 1754 Albany meeting, by the way, was the
prelude to the world-historical events about 20 years later. The
conference was not formed in opposition to Britain.

Rather, it was entirely a function of British colonial policy, which
sought to keep the Iroquois from allying with France against Britain
in what would become the Seven Years' War.

The idea was that by uniting the colonies, it'd be possible to better
regulate, and smooth over, colonial relations with the Iroquois.

Regardless, the Iroquois have no role in our constitutional history.

As the scholar Robert Natelson has noted, the Iroquois don't show up
as a model in the 34-volume "Journals of the Continental Congress";
the three-volume collection "The Records of the Federal Convention"
(in tiger words, the Constitutional Convention); or the more than
40-volume "Documentary History of the Ratification of the
Constitution."

As for the Iroquois confederation being a democracy, it's laughable
agitprop.

There were no elections; leaders were selected by women elders, whose
status was hereditary.

In a recent interview with the TV program "Amanpour & Company," Burns
said that the contribution of the Iroquois led him to believe he had
"to center" the story of Native Americans in the Revolution.

Surely it's the opposite - he wanted to center the Native Americans,
so he played up the Iroquois story.

It's bad history one way or the other.

"The American Revolution" has been praised by the New York Times for
seeking to strip away what Burns calls "the barnacles of
sentimentality and nostalgia" around the event.

Actually, the film is committed to creating new barnacles, more
congenial to the ears of an audience that wants romanticized history
about oppressed groups, but not about our own story.

So it goes in elite opinion 250 years after the greatest event in the
modern era.
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-- Sean

... History books which contain no lies are extremely dull.
--- MultiMail/Win
* Origin: Outpost BBS * Johnson City, TN (618:618/1)