DALLAS >> Ken Burns needs no introduction. As the designated documentarian of the American experience — with series about the Civil War, Vietnam, jazz and baseball, among many other topics — Burns is a brand name, a “Simpsons” reference and a national treasure.

This November, as we head into the country’s 250th year, his much-anticipated series on the American Revolution hits PBS.

As part of the lead-up, he appeared at the Winspear Opera House on Tuesday with his co-director Sarah Botstein and historian Jane Kamensky, who runs Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello. Burns will show about 45 minutes from the series, and the trio will then chat with KERA’s Krys Boyd.

I’ve admired many artists who turned out to be disappointing in person. Ken Burns is not one of them. He is, quite simply, one of the great storytellers of our time.

Q You know American cities very well. What’s surprised you about Dallas?

A Dallas came into my consciousness on Nov. 22, 1963. I was 10 and a half, and it was a punch to the gut. But I’m impressed by how Dallas has remade itself, reinvented itself in a vibrant way. When I began to visit in the ‘80s, there was a sense of, “We don’t talk about that.” But now there’s an embrace of the history and an extraordinary art scene, so it feels like one of the great metropolises of these United States.

Q The Founding Fathers are on stamps and bills and monuments. How do you bring them alive again?

A When you put people on marble statues, they become un-human. We lose them. George Washington on the dollar bill, and he never told a lie, which is not true, and he’s chopping down the cherry tree, all exaggerations invented by a writer named Parson Weems.So you give back their humanity. Show their flaws. When George Washington starts out, he’s a 22-year-old militia colonel firing at the French to set off the French and Indian War. He’s this rich planter from Virginia who’s coming to Philadelphia to figure out our developing rift with the mother country.We also do a lot of first-person voices, and we have the greatest cast ever assembled. Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Morgan Freeman, Samuel Jackson, Sir Kenneth Branagh, Damian Lewis, Laura Linney, Claire Danes. I’ll stop, but you get the idea.Remember this is a period without photographs and newsreels. So for the past 10 years, we’ve pored through records to find signatures, the notice of a birth or death, anything to bring alive the so-called ordinary people, the Patriots, who actually did the fighting and dying in our Revolution, and without whom we would not have our country.

Q It was your documentary on Benjamin Franklin, watching Franklin fall out with his son [who stayed loyal to the crown], when I started to wonder, for the first time: If I’d lived back then, would I have been a Loyalist?

A Oh, Sarah, thank you! People always ask, what do you want audiences to take away? We’ve told a big, complicated story with lots of moving parts. How people respond is how they respond. But I’d love people to place themselves into this moment: What would I have done? Would I have been willing to die for a cause? Would I have been willing to kill for a cause? History is only a powerful teacher if you realize these people are very much like us. This film has a failed invasion of Canada, inoculations, scandals about expense accounts, love affairs, spies. It resonates so much with today, and it’s good to ask those questions, even if you can’t answer them.

Q Recent Gallup polls have shown record lows of pride in America. What do you make of that?

AThey’re not informed, or they’re distracted by the binary world we live in, this computer world where everything is a one or a zero. Good or bad, red state or blue state, I’m right, you’re wrong. There’s nothing like that in real life. I find everything about the United States extraordinary. Do we have problems? Every country has problems. But we invented the idea of citizens. We had the first revolution proclaiming the unalienable rights of all people. Everybody that came before us were “subjects.” And the great danger in the atrophy of knowledge — because we’re taking civics and history out of our curriculum — is that you become ignorant and susceptible to being superstitious peasants and subjects again. When the founders talked about the “pursuit of happiness,” they meant lifelong learning. They were borrowing from the classical period. That virtue would make you a good citizen, the highest thing in the land.

QThis series will come out shortly before the U.S. celebrates 250 years as a country, and I keep thinking: We need this. We need to celebrate who we are.

A Let’s recommit to the values that our founders fought so hard to create. And you will meet people who will make you so proud. A 14-year-old fifer who joins the militia outside of Boston, a 15-year-old from Connecticut who signs up after the Declaration of Independence, a little girl from Yorktown who’s 10 when the war begins, and her memoir and letter to her sister explaining what happened is one of the most beautiful things. We have first-person voices of British officers and British kings and British prime ministers and Irish soldiers and Scottish soldiers and German soldiers and German commanders and their wives.