The American Revolution on PBS

Walter Edgar (University of South Carolina)

Walter Edgar is Professor of History, Emeritus at the University of South Carolina. He earned a BA from Davidson College and an MA and PhD from the University of South Carolina. He holds honorary degrees from Davidson College, the Citadel, Coker College, Coastal Carolina University, and Newberry College. Edgar served active duty in the U.S. Army, including a tour in Vietnam, after which he remained in the Army Reserve, retiring as a colonel. In 2008, Edgar was inducted into the South Carolina Hall of Fame, and in 2010, he became the third individual named a Laureate of the Lightsey Society and was inducted into the South Carolina Higher Education Hall of Fame. Edgar was the founder and first director of the University of South Carolina’s highly acclaimed Public History Program. In 1980, he was named director of the Institute for Southern Studies, a position he held until 2012. He held four distinguished professorships: Carolina Trustee Professor; Claude Henry Neuffer Professor of Southern Studies; George Washington Professor of History; and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts. In 2001, he was named a distinguished alumnus of the University of South Carolina. Edgar is a prolific scholar and has written or edited more than a dozen books and 60 articles and essays. His South Carolina: A History (1999) achieved both public and scholarly acclaim. Among his other publications are Partisans and Redcoats: The Southern Conflict That Turned the Tide of the American Revolution (2001); South Carolina in the Modern Age (1992); and The Letterbook of Robert Pringle (1973). He also edited The South Carolina Encyclopedia (2006). Since 2000, Edgar has hosted Walter Edgar’s Journal (now a podcast), and since 2007, South Carolina from A to Z on SC ETV Radio.

David Schmidt (Florentine Films)

David Schmidt is the producer and co-director, along with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, of The American Revolution, a six-part, 12-hour series premiering on PBS in the fall of 2025. He earned his BA at Dartmouth College. Schmidt began working with Florentine Films as a researcher and apprentice editor for The Roosevelts (2014), while also supervising the documentary’s seven-episode script. His research on The Vietnam War (2017) won him the Jane Mercer Footage Researcher of the Year award, and he also worked closely on that project with writer Geoffrey C. Ward and helped coordinate post-production. With Burns, Schmidt also produced the two-part biography Benjamin Franklin (2022) for PBS. He has contributed to several other films, including as an advisor to Country Music (2019), Hemingway (2021), and Muhammad Ali (2021). Having worked in Colonial Williamsburg while growing up in southeastern Virginia, he feels at home telling stories of 18th-Century America.

 Alan Taylor (UVA)

Alan Taylor is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History, Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He earned his BA at Colby College, and his PhD at Brandeis University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Early American History and Culture, he taught at Boston University and the University of California at Davis. He joined the faculty at Virginia in August 2014. Taylor is active in the California State Social Science and History Project, providing curriculum support for K-12 teachers in history and social studies. In 2002, he won the University of California at Davis Award for Teaching and Scholarly Achievement and the Phi Beta Kappa, Northern California Association, Teaching Excellence Award. Taylor is a prize-winning author of eight books, including American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 (2016); The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (2013) (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for American History; Winner of the Merle Curti Prize (OAH)); The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (2006) (2007 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize; 2005-2007 Society of the Cincinnati Triennial Cox Book Prize); American Colonies (2001) (2002 Gold Medal for Non-Fiction awarded by the Commonwealth Club of California); William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early Republic (1996) (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in United States History; New York State Historical Association Manuscript Award; Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize; Beveridge Prize in the History of the Americas; Bancroft Prize in American History); and Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820 (1990).