Carleton history professor Serena Zabin featured in new Ken Burns documentary, The American Revolution

The expertise of the Carleton history department spans centuries and continents. Its beloved faculty are part of the reason Carleton has been ranked #1 for its commitment to undergraduate teaching for the last 15 years, and their scholarship is recognized beyond the Carleton community.

Serena Zabin, Stephen R. Lewis Jr. Professor of History and the Liberal Arts, is taking her expertise national this month as a talking head in the latest Ken Burns documentary: The American Revolution.

A new six-part, 12-hour documentary series that explores the country’s founding struggle and its eight-year War for Independence, The American Revolution premieres on Sunday, November 16 and will air for six consecutive nights through Friday, November 21 on PBS (check out the official trailer on PBS.org or on YouTube).

“An expansive look at the virtues and contradictions of the war and the birth of the United States of America, the film follows dozens of figures from a wide variety of backgrounds,” the documentary’s press release explains. “Viewers will experience the war through the memories of the men and women who experienced it: the rank-and-file Continental soldiers and American militiamen (some of them teenagers), Patriot political and military leaders, British Army officers, American Loyalists, Native soldiers and civilians, enslaved and free African Americans, German soldiers in the British service, French and Spanish allies, and various civilians living in North America, Loyalist as well as Patriot, including many made refugees by the war.”

As a historian of early America, Zabin had heard rumors about this Ken Burns documentary for years, but hadn’t had any real interactions with it. Then, a couple years ago, two of the directors — Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt — reached out to her saying they had read her book, The Boston Massacre: A Family History, and they’d love to chat. By then, Burns, Botstein, and Schmidt had already shot most of the main footage, including all the reenactments, but they were still looking for engaging stories to pepper in.

“Because my book is full of juicy little stories about ordinary people, they wondered if I could give them some leads,” Zabin said.

When she met Botstein and Schmidt on Zoom, she immediately hit it off with both of them.

“We had so much fun that they invited me to come to New York to interview me for the film,” Zabin said. “They sent me a huge list of possible topics that they were thinking about and for which they wanted some scholars to guide them. I was honestly terrified, and started preparing this list as if I were back in graduate school and these were my qualifying exams! And it took some time before I stopped being nervous in front of the camera.”

Zabin shot several hours of film that day in New York. Botstein and Schmidt warned her afterward that they still had a lot of editing to do, and she might not make it into the final cut.

“But last year, Ken Burns, along with Sarah and David, showed a first cut of a few minutes of the film at the American Historical Association meeting, and there I was!” Zabin said. “It was certainly very exciting to have Ken Burns tell me that he’d been spending hours listening to me talk — and cutting my hours of tape down to a few minutes.”

Over the last few months, Zabin has also helped vet some of the pedagogical materials that will accompany the film for K–12 teachers, and therefore got to see even more of the film before its official release.

“I was really blown away by the gorgeousness of the film, the ways that the narration brought the past to life, and especially by really insightful things that so many other scholars shared,” Zabin said.

Coming up in 2026, the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution is a big moment for early American historians like Zabin, as research and ideas that they’ve spent decades developing now have a national audience.

“I feel so fortunate that I was at Carleton as I developed my last book on the Boston Massacre,” Zabin said. “I could never have written that book without the special collections that we have in Gould Library, and especially without the students who took my classes and who were my research assistants for many years. I hope that by being a part of this wonderful, enormous, 12-hour documentary I’ll be able to help a national audience understand how complicated and exciting the origins of the United States are. I hope they’ll be inspired to want to learn even more.”

PBS will show The American Revolution on Sunday, November 16 at 7 p.m. CST/8 p.m. EST. If you’re in Northfield, you can attend the Carleton screening of The American Revolution on November 16 at 6:30 p.m. in Boliou 104! Co-hosted by the history, cinema and media studies, and American studies departments, this premiere will include a light dinner and refreshments for all attendees along with an introduction and Q&A with Zabin.

Erica Helgerud ’20 is the news and social media manager for Carleton College.