Celebrating the United States semiquincentennial, Chautauqua presents Week Six, “America at 250: In Partnership with The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.” The milestone anniversary offers an opportunity to survey the previous quarter millennium – how a collection of British colonies became the world’s pre-eminent constitutional democracy, with major successes, failures and continued struggles along the way – alongside world-renowned leaders in historical education. To begin this weeklong commemoration, Chautauqua welcomes Ken Burns and Jeffrey Rosen back to the Amphitheater stage for a two-day conversation on themes and threads from the pair’s latest projects: for Burns, the November 2025 PBS documentary “The American Revolution,” and for Rosen, his October 2025 book The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton and Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America.

Ken Burns has been making documentary films for almost fifty years. Since the Academy Award nominated “Brooklyn Bridge” in 1981, Burns has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including “The Civil War”; “Baseball”; “Jazz”; “The War”; “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea”; “Prohibition”; “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History”; “The Vietnam War”; “Country Music”; “The U.S. and the Holocaust”; “The American Buffalo”; “Leonardo da Vinci”; and, most recently, “The American Revolution.”

Future film projects include “Emancipation to Exodus” and “LBJ & the Great Society,” among others.

His films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including seventeen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards and two Oscar nominations. In September of 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Burns was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award. In November of 2022, he was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.

Jeffrey Rosen is chief executive officer emeritus of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization whose mission is to educate the public about the U.S. Constitution. His latest book, The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton and Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America, was released in October 2025. It highlights how the opposing constitutional visionaries continue to drive the debate over the power of government today. Rosen appeared as part of the 2025 Chautauqua Forum on Democracy, where he was publicly announced and recognized for the first time as the newly appointed 2025–26 Chautauqua Perry Fellow in Democracy.

Rosen is currently a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. He was previously the legal affairs editor of The New Republic and a staff writer for The New Yorker. In his former role at the National Constitution Center, he was the host of “We the People,” a weekly podcast of constitutional debate.

Rosen is the author of seven other books, including the New York Times bestseller Conversations with RBG: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law, as well as biographies of Louis Brandeis and William Howard Taft. He is a graduate of Harvard College; Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar; and Yale Law School.

This program is made possible with generous support from Thomas B. Hagen and The Susan Hirt Hagen Lectures Fund.