Ric Burns

Ric Burns: Talks at GS Session Highlights

Ric Burns

Producer Rick Burns presents his new film *The Pilgrims* to dismantle the national myth of Plymouth as the birthplace of American democracy by highlighting its origins as a failed religious separatist experiment. The narrative centers on Governor William Bradford's manuscript, which documents the colony's catastrophic mortality, its opportunistic alliance with the surviving Wampanoag, and its eventual economic salvation through the beaver fur trade rather than democratic ideals. Burns argues that a 19th-century reprint of this lost history transformed a desperate 17th-century survival story into the definitive, yet distorted, foundation of American national identity.