Ken Burns has made a career telling America’s foundational stories from less-than-obvious points of view, finding fresh angles on the legendary moments and participants and unearthing forgotten ones.

The Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated documentarian famous for sweeping histories of the Civil War, Baseball, the National Parks and more, was in town Sunday to promote his newest multi-part TV event – The American Revolution. Before previewing that mini-series at the Altria Theater, Burns gave the keynote address at the 250^th anniversary of Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech at St. John’s Church.

“As a filmmaker a challenge is… to avoid giving too much attention to iconic moments which often become mythologized,” he said. Patrick Henry’s call to arms, in the very room where Burns spoke, is just such a moment, the kind that becomes “so familiar that it often distracts from its original meaning and its place in the larger story.”

Burns, along with series co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, sat with reporters after the reenactment. “We decided not to [include Henry’s speech in the documentary] but to focus on other aspects of Patrick Henry,” Burns explained. “[Henry] at the First Constitutional Convention, and then earlier at a protest of the Stamp Act, he basically said in front of an audience… that just as Caesar had his Brutus, that King George could expect the same. Someone said, ‘That’s treason!’ And Henry said, ‘If that’s treason, let’s make the most of it.’ So we have that [in the series].

“We were trying to not always hit the familiar signposts.”

But seeing the reenactment put on by the St. John’s Church Foundation gave Burns and his co-directors a kind of FOMO, describing it as a kind of “phantom limb” experience seeing something newly worthy of inclusion after production is largely complete.

“You do it so spectacularly. But that was how long? 40 minutes? There’s no way you get all of that [in a documentary],” he said, almost wistfully.

On Sunday, Burns pointed out, there were more in attendance at Richmond’s oldest church than the 120 Virginians who witnessed Patrick Henry’s speech. Those included Gov. Glenn Youngkin and former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, national honorary chair of the Virginia250 Commission, who both took the stage before Burns and spoke about Patrick Henry and his immortal words.

But it was Burns who captured the context of those words and the meaning of the 250-year-old moment. “[Henry’s] words suggested that the air in this church was heavy with uncertainty, tension and a growing sense of urgency…”

There was no official transcript of Henry’s speech, he pointed out. “It lived the way spoken words do: On the lips of those who were there and then in the minds of those who followed. … Like many of our founding documents, his words speak about becoming something altogether new.”

That new thing, a country based not on race or privilege, but on ideas, has become our legacy, Burns said. It’s the legacy of those in power and the legacy, too, of the throngs outside the church, lining Broad Street, protesting the powerful.

“We as citizens have it as our right and also our responsibility to create a still more perfect union," he said. "The war of independence was fought in hundreds of places, in towns and cities where we scatter still, like Richmond, Williamsburg and Yorktown, but also in lesser-known areas – the backwoods and crossroads and waterways of an immensely huge continent. As we prepare to commemorate our founding, it is for all of us to help spread the word of those places and this place.”

Burns came back to the reenactment and how it transported him to that moment 250 years ago.

“It was wonderful, wonderful," he said. "It was so inspiring. I was particularly moved by Patrick Henry’s arguments. The idea that, When do you get prepared [for war]? After the frog’s been boiled? That’s basically what he said.”

Patrick Henry’s speech was a call to action “to remember that liberty is not self-sustaining, that vigilance is not the task of the past but the duty of the present,” Burns told the audience yesterday, then he quoted Henry. “‘The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone… it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave,’" and that, Burns concluded, “is as true today as it was 250 years ago.”