I am looking forward to the upcoming, much-anticipated Ken Burns television mini-series focused on the United States’ Revolutionary War.

I have studied the United States’ Revolutionary War on my own for some time.  I took an interest in it and read several biographies and listened to one series of lectures on the “Revolutionary Period in the Americas” which covered all the “revolutions” in North, Central and South America.

I use the word “revolutions” in quotes because one theory put out by current historians is that there were really only three actual revolutions:  the Haitian, the French and the Russian.  The rest, including the United States’, were all transfers of power between members of the already ruling class, often involving a war, often a war fought by those who had nothing to gain from its outcome.

Some historians go so far as to consider the United States’ Revolutionary War as really the United States’ first Civil War.  This theory holds that the combatants were actually all British citizens – citizen against citizen, so-called loyalists versus so-called “Patriots”, although I’m pretty sure that the loyalists considered themselves “Patriots” too.

My Canadian heritage motivated me to look into Canadian history as well.  Canada: a country with no “Revolutionary” war and no “Civil” wars (although their conflicts with First Nations were on par with those of the United States).

So, I am very interested to see how the United States’ “Revolutionary” War will come out of this documentary.  Will it be the glossy, sterilized, sanctified, ratified and homogenized version we all were fed in secondary school, or will it be something closer to my growing awareness of what it actually was?

My independent study has led me to ask:  I wonder what would have happened had we not had a “Revolution” – just skipped it altogether.  Would we have been better off?  Would we more or less just have eventually wandered away from British rule, choosing to go our separate ways in mutual relationship as did Canada and Great Britain?  Were we just impatient and willing to send our boys into battle for an ideology?  What would our society look  like if it were not built on this paradigm of winners and losers?  Would we have been better off had all those “loyalists” who fled to other parts of the British Empire stayed and not fled?  Would maybe the Civil war have also not happened, or happened differently?

I wonder.  And that’s why I’ll be watching.  I hope you will too, and I hope you wonder with me.

Premiers on PBS November 16 at 6pm.  For more information:  https://www.pbs.org/show/the-american-revolution/