What The American Revolution by Ken Burns gets right
...and what my novel imagines differently
Dramatization from the novel Tobacco Republic by R. A. Moss
This week, PBS premiered The American Revolution, the newest documentary series from Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. As with all Burns projects, the series dives deep into the myths, contradictions, and enduring questions surrounding the nation’s founding.
For fans of early American history—as well as those who enjoy asking “What if?”—it’s a compelling reminder of how fragile the story of the United States really was.
In watching the first episode, I was struck by how carefully the series handles the messy, divided, improvised nature of the Revolution. Consensus wasn’t guaranteed. Unity wasn’t inevitable. Destiny was anything but obvious.​ That tension sits at the heart of my own fascination with the period.
The documentary’s vision of the Revolution
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Preview of PBS’s new documentary “The American Revolution,” used here for commentary and critique.
​Burns and his team frame the Revolution not as a clean march toward nationhood, but as a chaotic, contradictory struggle filled with competing interests, regional tensions, and fragile alliances. The series reminds viewers that the colonies were far from a unified people:
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New England and the South held different economic and cultural priorities.
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Many colonists opposed independence entirely.
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Even the Founders clashed bitterly on strategy and principle.
One of the documentary’s strengths is how it portrays unity as an achievement, not a default setting. “We the People” was aspirational—something created through hard compromise and uneasy partnership.​ That idea becomes especially powerful in the moments where Burns highlights how easily things could have fallen apart.
The road not taken:
What if unity never happened?
This “fragile unity” theme is what sparked the central question in my novel Tobacco Republic:
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What if the 13 colonies never united?
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Where Burns documents how a nation was painstakingly formed, Tobacco Republic imagines a world where that formation failed—where the fissures between colonies hardened into borders instead of dissolving into a federation.
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In the novel’s alternate timeline:
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In 1776, the thirteen colonies vote to remain sovereign nations and form an alliance to win their independence from England.
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After the war, the new republics become rivals. Through invasions and annexations, they consolidate into seven small, contentious countries.
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The ideals of 1776 splinter into competing visions of liberty, power, and identity.
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The fractured continent becomes a chessboard for global empires.
History, Myth, and Imagination: The World of Tobacco Republic
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Tobacco Republic is a 21st-century spy thriller set in an alternate timeline where the American colonies never became the United States. Foreign empires dominate North America. Rival nations compete and conspire. And the sudden attraction between rival spies from Virginia and Pennsylvania will determine the future of a fractured continent.
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If you’re curious about how the Revolution might have unfolded differently—or how those differences would shape the present, click on the image or button below.
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