The introductory narrative of "The American Revolution" takes up a style Burns established at the outset of "The Civil War."

“The war grew out of a multitude of grievances lodged against the British parliament by British subjects living an ocean away in 13 otherwise disunited colonies,” says narrator Peter Coyote a few minutes into Episode One of “The American Revolution,” now showing on PBS.

“It was also a savage civil war that pitted brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, American against American, killing tens of thousands of them,” Coyote says.

It is a sentence that might have been lifted verbatim from Burns’ other epic documentary about a war fought on American soil -- “The Civil War,” the series that made him a star filmmaker when it premiered 35 years ago in 1990. 

Problem-solving is practiced and preached at Bradleyville, a small school district tucked among rolling rural hills in south-central Missouri. When faced

The state’s school voucher program has exhibited “a myriad of accountability problems” and caused a funding shortfall for public schools, a state audit released this week shows. The audit, encompassing the 2024-2025 school year, was presented this week to lawmakers, who are spending the weeks leading up to the legislative session learning the woes of […]

Senate Democrats said FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's plan will 'undercut some of the most effective tools for addressing inequities in home connectivity.'

FCC chair Brendan Carr is on a crusade to Trumpify the airwaves.

The scandal that briefly made Brendan Carr a household name this fall was an outlier several times over. For one thing, FCC chairmen rarely make news. More than that, Carr usually knows better than to draw too much attention to himself. A seasoned bureaucrat, he has a knack for pulling the strings of power in ways that escape public scrutiny. But when he issued a mob-style threat over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue that Republicans didn’t like—“We can do this the easy way or the hard way”—he made the Trump administration’s appetite for censorship unignorable.

Most of the administration’s efforts to manipulate the media up to that point had retained at least a patina of deniability. Here, by contrast, was an uncomplicated threat of government interference—one that prompted Disney, ABC’s parent company, to fall in line by suspending Kimmel’s show. This was too much even for some of the Trump administration’s biggest cheerleaders; Senator Ted Cruz called Carr’s comments “dangerous as hell.” After a few days of public outcry, Kimmel was back on the air.

The whole episode was an unusual misstep by a skilled Washington operator. The hallmark of Carr’s tenure as chair of the Federal Communications Commission has been the exploitation of bureaucratic procedure to consolidate ownership of communications infrastructure in Trump-friendly hands, while keeping those actions out of both the court of public opinion and the literal courts.

To liberals, this is an obvious attempt to rig the media. To conservatives, however, it is a long-overdue unrigging. Why should the national networks devote airtime every night to liberal comedians who incessantly mock Republicans?

“For those that benefited from a two-tier system of justice, today’s even handed treatment feels like discrimination,” Carr posted on X in March, paraphrasing the economist Thomas Sowell. The left, in other words, got so used to controlling the media that it doesn’t even notice the bias.

“The public airwaves belong to the public, and yet for the past 40 or 50 years, they have been used and abused as a propaganda tool for one party’s political agenda,” Daniel Suhr, the president of the Center for American Rights, a conservative litigation nonprofit, told me. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re watching NBC, ABC, CBS, or PBS; you’re going to get the same left-wing viewpoints permeating both the news and the entertainment shows.”

An analysis of the only intact Neanderthal inner nose bones known to exist reveals that our ancient cousins' enormous noses did not evolve to withstand harsh climates.

EASTHAM – This year’s sea turtle stranding season is officially here as Mass Audubon and the New England Aquarium confirm local strandings, with the first occurring last Thursday when a group…

A federal judge says the Trump administration "overplayed its hand" by inserting partisan language into workers' out-of-office autoreplies.

Thanks to Charlie Brown TV specials, we know that holidays are supposed to have some kind of “true meaning.” Thanksgiving is the fat bird of holidays all stuffed with history, art, tradition, and celebration. But if it has a meaning—you can find it in hand turkeys made from a single handprint. That’s the true meaning of Thanksgiving.

The tradition of tracing a child’s handprint is older than Charlie Brown, even older than the pilgrims. The handprint art found in prehistoric caves is estimated to be 40,000 to 45,000 years old. The oldest may be 64,000 years old. No one knows how many cave handprints exist in caves scattered around the world.

Thankfully, humanity can trace the handprint art of the Paleolithic era through thousands of years directly to the traditional Thanksgiving art of drawing hand turkeys.

Antoine Haywood, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications Journalism assistant professor, has been selected by UF to participate in the 2025-26 Southeastern Conference (SEC) Faculty Travel Program. He will receive funding to support his research and teaching collaboration with Dr. Jabari Evans from the University of South Carolina’s College of Information and Communications. 

Over the past half century, Ken Burns has become America’s storyteller. His documentaries provide a history of the nation through biographies, sports, music, and other subjects. His most recent film, “The American Revolution,” which was supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, premiered in November on PBS. He spoke about it with Pew recently in his barn office in New Hampshire.

Merriam-Webster, the country’s oldest dictionary publisher which is headquartered in Springfield, just released an updated Collegiate edition with 5,000 new entries.

New College of Florida is on its intellectual deathbed.

Once an authority-challenging, free-thinking institution for students passionate about learning, a place where difference was celebrated and creativity encouraged.

Now, it is becoming a third-rate jock school with overpaid administrators and underachieving freshmen, a casualty of Ron DeSantis’ culture wars.

NCF has announced it “will happily be the first college in America to formally embrace and sign President Trump’s vision for higher education,” a document called the “Compact for Academic Excellence.”

This compact has little to do with “excellence” and everything to do with coercion and control.

A team of scientists have revealed the shocking reason why Neanderthals never truly went extinct.

This comes after a new study has suggested that the archaic species of humans didn’t actually go extinct, as many have believed.

Claims made by scientists in Switzerland and Italy argue that homosapiens, which is our species of human, actually mated with Neanderthals until there was a gradual ‘genetic assimilation’.

In the study, experts explained: “Our results highlight genetic admixture as a possible key mechanism driving their disappearance.

“Neanderthal disappearance rather than a true extinction might be conceived as the result of genetic dilution.”

It is already common knowledge that homosapiens had sex with Neanderthals because its DNA has been found in modern day humans.

Kevin Curry, a food influencer and a former SNAP recipient, explains where SNAP recipients can get the most up-to-date information on their benefits, and how anyone can find free or affordable food. 

Alaska's public schools are being used as emergency shelters, though many of the buildings are crumbling.