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 SYNOPSIS With dramatic readings from letters and diaries of the period plus live-action recreations, "Liberty! The American Revolution" traces the events leading up to the war and America's fight for freedom. In 1763, the French have left and America is at peace, under British rule. But dissension is mounting, signified by the Boston Tea Party and the publication of Tom Paine's book, "Common Sense". We follow the course of the Revolution as George Washington assumes command, Benjamin Franklin goes to France seeking support, and Americans come together in a conflict that will forge a new nation. The series concludes with the creation of that extraordinary document, the United States Constitution. The companion book, by historian Thomas Fleming, was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection. The series received the George Foster Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. CREDITS
Producer / Directors: Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer VISIT THE WEBSITE: pbs.org/ktca/liberty
Featured Cast Members:
 Host: Forrest Sawyer Narrator: Edward Herrmann Co-Producer: Ronald Blumer, Sharon Sachs Editors:
Show 2 Sharon Sachs Show 3 Sharon Sachs with Molly Bernstein Show 4 Sharon Sachs, Alison Ellwood with Molly Bernstein Show 5 Sharon Sachs Show 6 Josh Waletsky Sound: Roger Phenix Music: Richard Einhorn, Mark O'Connor Featured Musicians: Mark O'Connor, Yo-Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis, James Taylor, The Nashville Symphony A Middlemarch Films production for KTCA
Distributor: REVIEWS
It's exciting, it's suspenseful, it's a big Boston Tea Party of a PBS event. So give me 'Liberty!' or give me nothing! This documentary about the Revolution is that dazzling -- a great old story retold smartly and captivatingly... (the series) affirms how much of a kick history can be.
This is the best TV history lesson since Ken Burns re-fought the Civil War. It's a gift to all ages and stages of Americans, native or new... If only Liberty! had been around when I went to school.
The Middlemarch people...have taken the musty smell of the archives out of history. They have gone beyond the visits to the Disney-like colonial-period restorations... They are interested in human interconnection and have managed to breath life into the cardboard figures we all learned about in our fifth-grade classrooms... What a story!
"Ken Burns, meet Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer. When in the pursuit of a new documentary to make, you might learn a thing or two from them. Hovde and Meyer have produced and directed Liberty! The American Revolution, an engrossing six-hour documentary that brings history to life and makes real
people out of our often mythical founding fathers."
"Liberty! leaves you amazed by the people who fought for and shaped our country. They made some horrible mistakes, but most of the choices they made were almost miraculously right; including cutting loose from those stiffs on the English throne. Watch the royals if you want, but save some time to honor the people who made sure royalty-watching was sport rather than an obligation."
"...this offering presents our country's founding upheaval as it really was - a close run thing marked as much by incompetence, fear, betrayal and brutality as it was by glorious victory and lofty ideals, a struggle in which far more Colonial Americans were opposed or indifferent to the rebellion tboo supported it. This was a struggle in which far less greatness and glory appends to the American military triumph than to what a handful of unusual men (and women) were able to do with independence once they had won.
"Liberty! offers an exhilarating history lesson. Producer-directors
Muffie Meyer and Ellen Hovde have met a daunting challenge with
ingenuity...they have to supply visuals for a war before photography. They
use drawings, paintings and maps, but they take another step to make the
Revolutionary patriots more accessible. Where (Ken) Burns used actors' voices to intone the words of Civil War figures, "Liberty!" puts actors ... in period costumes and has them deliver fact-based soliloquies to the camera. ... In another program, it might be sacriledge to offer history on such terms. But here the style makes that time, from 1763 to 1789, come vibrantly to life."
"Liberty! The American Revolution" delivers six hours of smashing entertainment. The score is by Richard Einhorn and Grammy Winning violinist Mark O'Conner, who performs with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, trumpet player Wynton Marsalis and the Nashville Symphony. ...Liberty's strength is its ability to package its wealth of information and insights into a riveting production that plays as suspenseful drama while illuminating the most important period in American history." "...alive with human intellect, foibles, anxiety, anger, passion and humor. Inevitably incomplete but consistently surprising, "Liberty! The American Revolution" is an engrossing drama and an irresistible enticement to learn more. ... The contributing historians - including women, blacks and Indians - describe events with such urgency you would think they happened yesterday. Some of the British scholars who explain the Tory side sound as if they're still annoyed with us.
The most pleasant surprise...is how "Liberty!" contradicts
conventional TV wisdom. The medium supposedly is partial to action and
uncomfortable with ideas. But "Liberty!" is, if anything, more
compelling when it's concerned with the concepts of freedom and
self-government than when it's showing reenactments of patriots ambushing
redcoats. Let that be another lesson to us."
"Listening to the words of men like Benjamin Franklin and James Madison
after watching the Sunday morning politican interview shows, you may wonder
where the eloquence of American statesmen has gone. But even the Founders
could falter. What can Boston's John Adams (Peter Donaldson) have been
thinking of when he said about New Yorkers, 'They all talk very fast, verv
loud and a1together without paying any attention to each other.. Nobody has
any manners here.' It was Adams, too, who reflected at the First Continental
Congress, 'We don't have men fit for these times.' Liberty!, which
covers eight years of diplomacy, war and suffering, and ends with the
ratification of the Constitution, proves how wrong even he could be."
"Liberty! producers, headed by Catherine Allan, have delivered a
magnificent production, as entertaining as it is educational. ...
Liberty! is, without question, the most detailed account of the birth
of our country ever presented on television."
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