review · The New Yorker · 2025-11-17 · source reviewed
What was the Revolution for?
Jill Lepore
Lepore praises the series as unusually faithful to sophisticated scholarship and intellectual history while placing it inside the contested politics of the 250th anniversary.
Reception is kept separate from historiography because an argument about this film is not automatically an argument about the Revolution. Lepore’s verdict is strongly favorable: she calls the film intellectually serious, attentive to difficult scholarship, and unsparing about the costs borne by women, Black Americans, and Native nations. She also treats the series as an intervention in the public struggle over who controls the Revolution’s meaning during the 250th anniversary. That praise usefully counters Rakove’s criticism; neither review becomes the companion’s official verdict.
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