You're listening to an airwave media podcast.

Then Franklin's world is a production of the

Omaha Institute and is sponsored by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Hello and welcome to episode 327 of Ben Franklin's world. The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our

early American past have shaped the present day world we live in.

And I'm your host, Liz Kovart.

How do we know what we know about Benjamin Franklin?

Many of us know what we know about Franklin and about history in general, because we read books, visit museums,

listen to podcast episodes, and watch documentaries. Now in many episodes of this podcast, we try to understand how the curators of the museum exhibits

we see and the authors of the books that we read come to know what they know about the past,

how they acquired all that information that they

display and write about. Now what we've never done before is spoken with a documentary

filmmaker to find out how they work and how they know what they know about the past.

So today we're going to rectify this.

As it happens, Ken Burns and his team at Florentine Films has just finished producing a brand new two episode documentary

film called Benjamin Franklin.

And as you may have guessed, the topic of this film is Ben Franklin.

David Schmidt served as a senior producer of Benjamin Franklin,

and he's going to take us behind the scenes of this film

by helping us dive deeper into Benjamin Franklin's life and work,

and by answering your questions about how

documentary films are made.

...