The Citizen Recommends: Ken Burns's American Revolution

There’s an American flag behind Ken Burns’s couch. For someone who’s made a career of telling uniquely American stories, winning countless awards in the process, it seems like a logical symbol for the background of his Zoom window. However, Burns reveals that there is more to the flag than meets the eye — it is actually a Navajo blanket.

“Somebody spent a lot of time, hundreds of hours, making something about the country that had dispossessed them of their land,” he says.

The Navajo American flag blanket represents Burns’s and his longtime collaborator and co-director Sarah Botstein’s nuanced approach to storytelling. They consider themselves “umpires” of history, calling the “balls and strikes” (successes and failures) of historical figures, rather than filmmakers who take a stance. In