James Forten was nine years old when he stood among the crowd outside the Pennsylvania State House to hear the newly signed Declaration of Independence read aloud for the first time. In 1776, he was a free Black boy, for whom the universal human rights laid out in the Declaration were far from promised, nor intended to be so as a result of the forthcoming revolution. Forten still fought for America. At 14, he joined the Continental Navy and, upon being captured by the British, chose imprisonment at home over an offer of release to England. He survived the war and went on to grow a flourishing sail-making business. It made him one of richest men in Philadelphia and funded wide-ranging abolitionist efforts, including William Lloyd Garrison’s famous paper, “The Liberator.”

Those who tune into the latest documentary from prolific filmmaker Ken Burns, “The American Revolution,” will learn about Forten in the final episode. His is one of many lesser-known stories in the six-part, nearly 12-hour series and, perhaps, a favorite of Burns, who invoked the young revolutionary during a panel discussion at New York University last week: “He does not for a second believe these self-evident truths don’t apply to him,” Burns said emphatically of Forten’s immediate grasp of what the Declaration of Independence could mean. “He knows they apply to him.”

To Burns, Forten seems to offer a model for how today’s young people, too, might pull from foundational American ideals to shape their own vision of the future. The documentarian was at N.Y.U. as part of a campaign to promote his new film among students at colleges and universities. On November 19, the “Campus Conversation” brought together Burns, his co-director Sarah Botstein, two experts featured in the film — law professor Maggie Blackhawk of N.Y.U and history professor Christopher Brown of Columbia University — and a moderator, politics professor Patrick Egan, also of N.Y.U. They asked each other: At a time when students might feel removed from — or repelled by — their nation’s early and flawed history, how could this film’s fresh telling be helpful to them, even inspiring?

Coinciding with the event was an announcement from its host school: The day prior, N.Y.U. launched its new Berkley Institute for Civil Discourse and Civic Solutions. It’s one of the latest centers of its kind, designed to promote engagement with diverse perspectives, in an ongoing trend towards building them on college campuses. Egan, the moderator of the Burns conversation, is the institute’s inaugural director.

Early American history would certainly be fertile ground for civil discourse centers interested in taking up and sorting through topics fraught with controversy. “The American Revolution,” for one, does not shy away from challenging, sometimes disturbing truths; their inclusion is part of an explicit mission to offer a complete portrait of this moment in history. The patriots of the 13 colonies may have bravely defended their freedom from tyranny, the film reveals, but they also hanged British representatives in the streets — poured hot tar over one in particular and covered him humiliatingly with feathers. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence asserting the necessity of liberty for all, while being attended to by an enslaved valet, the young son of Jefferson’s father-in-law and one of his slaves. George Washington, who also owned hundreds of slaves, was the revered general who led his forces to victory and recruited them in part by promising each enlisted hundreds of acres in Western, Native-populated land that wasn’t his to give away. 

At N.Y.U., Burns captured one of the most central and slippery contradictions of early America — as both anti-colonial mission and burgeoning empire at once. “We called it the Continental Congress and the Continental Army, and we knew where we were going,” Burns said in reference to plans for westward expansion. 

Confronting these contradictions may be how “The American Revolution” draws in today’s college students. In moving beyond a traditional or glorified rendition of the founding, the documentary digs up details that feel less tired or overfamiliar. Even more, it presents a period whose intense divisions are evocative of American life in 2025 and how people at every level of society, not just the top, drew from the emerging notions of equality and democracy to push for personal understandings of justice.

“The people who wrote it down may not have been representative of us, but the people who have put it into motion — even until today — are us. And it still is something that a lot of us are pushing for and that young people do care about it.”

Yasmeen Rifai, a junior studying politics at N.Y.U., attended the conversation with Burns and said she appreciated its inclusion of “all the other groups that are so often left out.” What resonated with her most was the discussion of how those at the margins adopted and repurposed certain foundationally American ideals, for example, from the Declaration of Independence.

“The people who wrote it down may not have been representative of us, but the people who have put it into motion — even until today — are us,” Rifai said. “And it still is something that a lot of us are pushing for and that young people do care about it.”

Young people in particular were central to the revolutionary movement, said Christopher Brown, the Columbia history professor who participated in both the panel and the documentary itself. So despite ongoing cycles of older generations grumbling about the politics of younger ones, a youthful inclination to fight for the future appears to be as old as the country itself. “Political activism is part of our culture. It's part of what freedom is about,” Brown said in an interview with LearningWell. “So I also think that the Revolutionary Age is a little bit of a reminder that this is a country that was founded in political division and was energized by political mobilization rather than political quiescence.” That goes for politics across the aisle, he said.

Young people may find the applications of Burns’s film are not only political or intellectual but also personal. In the style of “formative education,” engaging with the liberal arts, history included, is a way of exposing students to different ideas and traditions they can then use to reflect on their own, larger values — moral, spiritual, and otherwise. Stanton Wortham, an anthropologist and dean at the Boston College Lynch School of Education, said this process of reflection is what he and others in the formative education field call “discernment.”

“It's a projection of yourself into a historical situation,” Wortham said of the practice for students of history. “That gives you a chance to develop not just intellectually because you're learning new things and learning how to reason and look at evidence and so forth, but it also gives you a chance to engage with this ethical challenge that somebody else was facing and think about your own values and what your own values would lead you to do.”

The purpose of the approach, then, is not to tell students what to believe, but rather to expose them to the kind of provocative questions that let them consider for themselves. When it comes to the American Revolution, questions of tyranny and rule, justice and violence, might emerge. “A lot of people got killed. Was that okay? Was it okay that a whole bunch of people got killed for these particular ideals because they imagined a particular way of life was right?” Wortham said he might ask students of the period. “Does that apply today? There are lots of people today who are living in situations that are unjust, so should we be supporting people who are fighting back against what we or they consider as unjust things?”

Of course, all the ways students could interact with Burns’s new film are not a promise that they will, in fact, do so. Yasmeen Rifai, the junior at N.Y.U., had yet to see the series at the time of the campus event, although she said the conversation did make her want to start. Christopher Brown said former students now in their 30s and 40s have written to him to say they saw him in the documentary, though more recent ones have not. 

Amanda Garvey is only a first-year at N.Y.U. but already knows she wants to pursue a major in history. She attended the conversation with Burns last week because, she said, she loves the American Revolution. Originally from Bucks County, Penn., she grew up a short drive away from where George Washington once famously led troops across an icy Delaware River and towards a crucial victory in the war for independence.  

By Garvey’s discernment, the panel discussion illuminated an important and enduring legacy of not just crisis, but possibility. “What's happening right now, it's kind of a crazy time. I think the idea that these people were fighting for what they truly believed in — I think it still can be applicable today,” she said.

“Not everything is lost. There’s still hope, and I like that.”

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.