Guinevere MacLowry
Multimedia Journalist
Ken Burns and Jeffrey Rosen are like any old friends: they talk for hours about shared interests, travel together and cheer each other on in their respective pursuits. The only difference is that their conversations are often recorded for thousands of podcast listeners or delivered on stage to thousands of spectators. This morning, that stage is the Amphitheater, where the pair will kick off Week Six’s theme, “America at 250: In Partnership with The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation,” at 10:45 a.m. today.
Rosen, a historian and law professor at the George Washington University Law School, met Burns, a documentary filmmaker, in 2024 when he presented Burns with the Liberty Medal at the National Constitution Center. From there, the two started a podcast together, “Pursuit: The Founders’ Guide to Happiness,” and have been touring the country’s stages, most recently in Bar Harbor, Maine, just days before arriving at Chautauqua.
Rosen and Burns hold great reverence for the founding documents of America. 250 years later, these founding documents are exciting enough to Burns and Rosen to discuss, sparking conversations between the pair week after week.
“Recently [on the podcast], we’ve been going through the Declaration of Independence line by line and talking about the intellectual and political sources of all the famous phrases, from ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ to ‘unalienable rights’ to the meaning of the pursuit of happiness,” Rosen said. “It’s so exciting, and each time we reveal something new and meaningful.”
That instinct, to treat a 250-year-old text as though it will continue to surprise a person, is what audiences should expect this week.
he stage for two days in a row without a script, letting the conversation flow naturally as they play and respond to clips from Burns’ new PBS series “The American Revolution.” In their minds, the founding documents are not artifacts to be admired from a distance, but a portal into the arguments that built the country.
A portal only matters if it leads to something worth discovering, though, and that is where Rosen and Burns will turn the conversation toward the present. Rosen said he argues the American experiment succeeds precisely because it keeps urging the country to become more perfect. The right to vote has expanded. The promises of equality have reached groups once excluded from them.
“We’ve protected liberty, in particular the liberty of conscience, of freedom, of thought and speech, more inspiringly than any other country in the world, and as we’ve become more pluralistic, religiously and ethnically, we’ve protected the conscience rights of all of those different groups, just as the First Amendment promises.”
That belief carries a warning as much as a celebration. Rosen said he worries about a “post-textual age,” one in which people take their opinions from Instagram or from artificial intelligence rather than working them out for themselves. Deferring to any centralized authority, he said, whether a king, a pope or a machine, runs against the entire premise of the Enlightenment. The 250th anniversary, in his view, is a chance to recommit to reading primary texts and making up one’s own mind. Ultimately, Rosen said, he and Burns want audiences to come away with the same sense of historical fascination they have.
“It’s Ken’s job and my job to start to tell those stories so people get excited and then begin the incredibly exciting process of reading and learning more, because ultimately you’ve got to go down rabbit holes and follow your passion and read about what you’re interested in,” Rosen said. “But a great historian or a great teacher can spark that kind of interest, and hopefully our conversations will do some of that.”
