Ken Burns has had a busy year.

The famed documentary filmmaker and his co-producers, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, have stumped across the United States, speaking, gently of course, about their upcoming docuseries, “American Revolution,” which premieres Sunday on PBS .

During their six-month promotional tour across 32 cities and 17 states, the trio has consistently delivered a nonpartisan, hopeful message to Americans.

“We think always in sort of Chicken Little terms,” Burns told an audience during a panel event at Mount Vernon, Virginia, on Oct. 29, “that our time must be the very, very worst.”

“You can have at least the possible reassurance that things were really divided back then. It was a civil war,” he said of the American Revolution. “Examining the origin story provides yo

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