but it's my privilege to bring on one of our nation's

pre-if-not-the-premier historian in our country

puts together documentaries like nobody else, but this is a little bit different

this is a book to picture book like no other

it utilizes maybe the best archives outside the Smithsonian in the country

our America is the name of it

and Ken Burns joins us now. Can congratulations on this

thank you, Brian. It's great to hear your voice and thank you so much. This has been a

labor of love for maybe 10 or 15 years. You know, I was

taught and raised, grown up. My dad was an amateur

still photographer and then at college

folks were still photographers, not filmmakers, and so they reminded me that the

still photograph is the DNA of everything I do. And so I've been thinking about

how to do a history of us. You know, I've made films

about the U.S. for almost 50 years, but I've also made films about us. That is

that two-letter lowercase plural pronoun and

what I've learned over those 50 years, Brian, is that there's only us. There's no them.

And so I was trying to figure out a way and I realized it doesn't have to be with the film.

It can be with a book that starts with the first selfie, the first self-portrait

ever taken in 1839, the year that photography was invented

and take us up more or less to the present. I'm in the history business. The

recent present doesn't interest me as much, but to sort of look in

...