Ken Burns’ upcoming six-part, 12-hour documentary “The American Revolution” doesn’t just tell the story of icons like George Washington or Benjamin Franklin. The series, which premieres Sunday on PBS, brings to life the ordinary people — teenagers, women, free black Americans, immigrants, and ne’er-do-wells — who history usually crops out of the frame.

We all know the headliners of the Revolution . We’ve seen them haloed in oil paint, read about them in thousand-page biographies, and even watched them rap on Broadway. It’s startling that, 250 years later, there are still major players we don’t know. Get to know eight of them.

John Greenwood: The teenage fifer who became Washington’s dentist

One of Ken Burns’ favorite figures in his documentary is a teenager that “even a lot of histo

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