But adding Native Americans, Black Americans, and women as part of the grand story taught to us in grade school – about a dashing General George Washington and his brave patriot troops – deploys, on its face, a laudable aspiration. The effort also deserves praise for including real historians instead of the media commentators pervading previous Burns films.

Still, there’s more to consider. First, among the eminent historians included in the film, Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood – both Pulitzer Prize-winners – published their classic works on the history of the revolutionary period decades ago (Bailyn in 1967 and Wood in 1991). I read them in grad school in, 1992.

However, the groups Burns now claims to finally include, in fact, have appeared in serious historical accounts for nearly a half century!

Why are there always news books about Abraham Lincoln? Because historians constantly ask new questions, revisit and reinterpret old evidence, and uncover new evidence.

Conversely, Burns does not challenge with new questions or pose fresh inquiry in pursuing the contradictions, virtues, and the social complexities (even hypocrisies) among the founders and patriots, and between them and those loyal to England’s King. Instead, he delivers what is now a very conventional, if not old, interpretation.

For our YouthFacts.org purposes, and our focus on truths about young people, Burns misses a clear opportunity.

Young peoples’ contributions appear sprinkled throughout The American Revolution. But only in passing. The ranks of the Continental army were constituted of this 15-year-old, that teen girl’s diary reflections, that 16-year-old, another 14-year-old. Youth left their families, farms, and took up arms against the Red Coats and their cannons.

How much effort would it have taken to recognize youth, along with the other diverse groups, Burns highlights? And what would acknowledging their sacrifices in that bloody episode of American history mean for our current perceptions and assumptions of today’s youth?

Nearly every day brings another claim, another frantic panic, another prohibition – another layer of how technology brainwashes young people, how their unformed capacities produce anti-social behaviors, expose them to one mental disorder after another and worries about their growing up tranquilized by computer screens.

Unless we argue that the unchanging neurobiology and undeveloped brains of 18th century young people recklessly led them into battle against the world’s most powerful army, we must question today’s pervasive assumptions about youth development theory and young peoples’ inherent incapacities for becoming “thriving adults.”

We owe those teenagers thanks for helping to establish the nation; yet today we rarely ask or expect anything from them.