For more than four decades, documentarian Ken Burns has helped shape Americans’ understanding of their history. His distinctive filmmaking style has brought stories ranging from the Civil War to the history of jazz to life for millions of viewers. But how does a storyteller so reliant on the photographic record tackle events that predate photography?
In developing his 12-hour miniseries The American Revolution, which aired in 2025, Burns and his team at Florentine Films turned to a different kind of historical document—maps. In depicting an era before cameras, maps provide a window into America in the late 1700s, showing locations in the context of conflict, change, and more.
For Esri chief cartographer Charlie Frye—a specialist in GIS engineering and information product design who has worked at Esri since 1994—helping Florentine Films with this effort was an extension of a passion project that mapped his ancestry and connected it to America’s Revolutionary War.
A Personal Quest
Frye’s journey began with a simple suggestion.
“My wife thought I needed a hobby because I was working too much,” Frye said. “So, I started in on genealogy and I found out I had an ancestor who fought at the Battle of Breed’s Hill.” The battle, often called the Battle of Bunker Hill, took place near Boston, Massachusetts, in June 1775.
That ancestor was Isaac Frye, a second lieutenant who, as his descendant soon discovered, served for a longer continuous period than any other officer in the Continental Army. This discovery sparked a quest that has spanned more than 20 years.
Frye, a geographer and information scientist, used GIS to organize his research, plotting his ancestor’s movements and battles. He quickly ran into a fundamental problem—the world of 1775 was quite different from the world of today.
To fully understand Isaac’s story, Frye had to envision Isaac’s world. Eventually, this project grew into a massive undertaking—creating a comprehensive GIS repository for the entire American Revolution, including roads, towns, forts, and tribal territories from hundreds of historical sources. It was Frye’s deep, personal, and technical expertise that eventually led him to work with Florentine Films.
Mapping a Revolution
When Burns and his team were in the production stage of The American Revolution, they faced the challenge of illustrating a complex, eight-year war without photographs. While there are some historical paintings and sketches—along with diaries, letters, journals, and military records—these resources often lack the geographic detail needed to show troop movements or understand the strategic landscape. Maps were the answer—but not just any maps. As Frye explained, historical maps present their own challenges for a modern audience.
“Eighteenth-century maps don’t bring people into the picture,” he explained. “They’re generally very difficult to orient to because they’re not the geography we’re used to—it’s not the mapping convention that we’re used to.”
For one thing, floods and storms have shifted the locations of waterways over the years. Coastal cities have reshaped shorelines. Many contemporary manmade features didn’t yet exist. In fact, Frye said, the average person in the 18th century never even saw a map; maps were mainly available only to wealthy and powerful individuals.
For The American Revolution, Florentine Films wanted to create maps that felt authentic to the period but could also be immediately understandable to a 21st-century television audience. This required collaboration. Frye provided the geographic backbone—a massive geodatabase with thousands of curated features, each with a citation tracing it back to a specific historical document, including nearly 150 maps.
Frye passed this data along to design director and visual effects expert Molly Schwartz, who designed the visual style, and animator Brian Lee, who brought the maps to life. The team produced more than 90 maps for the series, many going through 10–20 drafts.
This process was managed by Florentine Films coproducer Mike Welt, who made sure that each map aligned with the film’s narrative. Welt and Schwartz scrutinized every detail, from town name spellings to wilderness trail locations.
“There was a crossover point where the maps became part of the storytelling,” Welt said. “We worked hard to show an accurate 1775 continent beyond the 13 colonies—and when people who have otherwise been erased in most of our histories appear on the map, they become present and they matter. It reframes the story for viewers.”
Frye also went through every map at least three times to make sure every place was correct. This process allowed the filmmakers to depict everything from the grand sweep of the Great Wagon Road (which ran from Pennsylvania to southern colonies) to the brutal details of the Battle of Breed’s Hill with unprecedented accuracy.
Uncovering Hidden Histories
The project did more than just illustrate known events—it revealed forgotten histories and challenged long-held assumptions. One of the most significant outcomes was a set of maps depicting the locations of North America’s Indigenous tribes in 1607 (just before European colonization began) and in 1775, and another at the outset of the Revolutionary War.
“This was a map showing something I’d never seen before,” Frye said, explaining that he compiled it using the Smithsonian Institution’s Handbook of North American Indians.
“The purpose was to show that the vast majority of North America was populated by more than five million people” prior to European settlement, Frye said, a contradiction of the deep-seated myth that Europeans colonized an empty or sparsely populated continent. “I don’t know if today’s school textbooks show this, but mine and my generation’s textbooks did not.”
By locating these people on maps, the project provides a powerful visual counternarrative. Specifically, by depicting North America before and after more than a century of wars, disease, and colonial policy, the maps show the devastating impact on Indigenous populations.
Sharing a Vision
Frye’s work on the documentary is just part of his mapping journey. He was recently awarded a Heller Fellowship at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. The fellowship, cosponsored by the university’s department of geography and environmental studies, has given Frye a platform to share his methods and expand his vision.
Frye also plans to transform his personal repository of maps into a collaborative resource that other historians, authors, and students can use and contribute to.
“I started with ArcMap side by side with ArcCatalog to provide previews of the scanned archival maps,” he said. “During the COVID-19 shutdown, I learned that the ArcGIS for Personal Use accounts included access to ArcGIS Pro, so I moved my work to ArcGIS Pro. I share everything via ArcGIS Online.”
Frye’s other plans include developing workshops to teach others how to build a historical GIS from the ground up.
“I’m trying to figure out how I describe that process so that somebody else can do it a lot faster, or at least without so many do-overs,” he said.
From a hobby that grew out of a desire to connect with his own past, Frye’s work has blossomed into a contribution to America’s collective memory. His maps provide countless viewers of The American Revolution with a new, more intimate understanding of the nation’s founding. His fellowship promises to empower a new generation of storytellers and historians with the tools to explore their own questions about the past.
For Frye, the goal is to encourage deeper and more nuanced engagement with history, moving beyond simplified narratives to appreciate the complex realities our ancestors faced.
“I want people to get out of the habit of thinking history is something you funnel down to a sound bite,” Frye said. Instead, he explained, “you should take those sound bites and unpack them and figure out what they really meant.”
