Award-winning documentarian Ken Burns is coming to Kennebunk July 30 as part of the Graves Library speaker series to commemorate America’s 250th birthday. Longtime Maine journalist Rob Caldwell will interview Burns at a sold-out Kennebunk High School auditorium about his documentary series on the American Revolution, his passion for history, and five decades of telling interesting and unique American stories.
Caldwell has been exploring Maine’s interesting and unique stories for 43 years at News Center Maine, first as a general assignment reporter and anchor, and for the last 20 years co-anchoring the news magazine show “207.”
Despite all that experience — or indeed perhaps because of it — Caldwell said he’s a little intimidated by talking about storytelling with someone who most consider a master of the craft.
“It kind of intimidates me because I can’t imagine doing the series that he’s done, the length of them and the depth of them,” Caldwell said. “That’s what’s so impressive to me: that he goes long, but he also goes deep. He’s continued to do that kind of work now for decades, and it’s just remarkable that he has lost none of his enthusiasm. If you ever see him talk about his work, that’s evident. He’s always excited about what he’s doing and always excited about the next project to come.”
Burns’ most recent series, “The American Revolution”, was released on PBS in November 2025 and runs 12 hours over six parts. The work features voice acting from dozens of famous actors, including Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Ethan Hawke, Liev Schreiber, Claire Danes, Kenneth Branagh and Keith David. It also features interviews with Rick Atkinson, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, historian and author who spoke about his books on the American revolution for the Graves Library speaker series in June 2025, with former C-SPAN anchor Susan Swain.
Loretta Swift, the director of the Graves Library, said everything the library does is both for the community but is also born from the community, and the speaker series is no different. Donors make up 60 percent of the library’s budget, and the organization tries to harness the summer surge in population to host as many high interest events as possible.
“We have year round residents and then we have tourists and our seasonal residents in the summer,” Swift said. “We try to find programming that meets interests and needs in the community, but also creates interests and needs in the community.”
Swift said the library was able to connect with Ken Burns through a Graves Library patron, Hal Kushner, who was featured in Burns’ documentary “The Vietnam War.” Once Kushner helped the library reach Burns and he agreed to speak, the library tapped the community connections again to secure the 400-seat auditorium at Kennebunk High School. Swift, who joined the Graves Library as director in July 2025, said the many threads woven between the community and the library is what made the job so attractive to her in the first place.
“I saw how invested the library was in its community, but also how invested the community was in this library,” Swift said. “It’ss this beautiful symbiotic relationship, this partnership that is happening back and forth, this kind of give-and-take. “I knew I wanted to be a part of that.”
Caldwell, who studied American Civilization at Williams College, said he was excited to lead the conversation about the American Revolution with Burns and bring some of Maine’s history into focus.
“There was an event during the American Revolution that a lot of people don’t know about,” Caldwell said. “The British Navy came in and torched the city of Portland, which was then known as Falmouth. They fired on the city and then landed and literally set fire to buildings down on the waterfront. This happened before the formal declaration of hostilities, but it enraged a lot of colonists. They looked upon it as basically a war crime. This was one of the things that precipitated the revolution.
“Maine doesn’t have a real deep history in connection with the American Revolution, but there were battles that took place here,” Caldwell continued. “The burning of Falmouth, there was a battle off Castine, a battle at Machias. And of course, all the history from Massachusetts and even in New Hampshire. Lexington and Concord are not that far down the road from Kennebunk. We’re really lucky in that the history seems so close to us in a way that it doesn’t when you’re in Nevada or California or Arizona.”
The July event with Burns is sold out, but the Graves Library is hosting local historian Sharon Cummins on May 27 at 4 p.m. to share stories of Arundel citizens during the American Revolution. The event is at the library, and free and open to the public.
