On June 24, 1778, a total solar eclipse covered a wide swath of North America—from the Pacific Coast of Mexico to Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The eclipse occurred just a few days before the Battle of Monmouth, when George Washington’s Continental Army engaged General Sir Henry Clinton’s British Army—a standoff that nevertheless allowed the Patriots to claim a much-needed victory. The British, meanwhile, continued their retreat from Philadelphia to New York City. We wanted to depict this eclipse for our series The American Revolution, and in this we had a stroke of luck: There would be a total solar eclipse across much of North America on April 8, 2024.

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Filming the eclipse would be technically complicated, and if we were hampered by clouds or anything else—if we failed to get the shot—there could be no second take. (The next such eclipse in the United States will occur in 2044.) Our crew headed north from New York City, armed with four cameras. Three would be pointed at the sky and the fourth at the sun’s reflection on water. The exposure was going to change wildly in the course of the eclipse, and totality would last only a few minutes. We had intended to film in western New York, in what had been Seneca Country in 1778. But changing weather forecasts pushed us to consider other locations, and we ended up far to the east, in the Adirondacks. Somehow, everything worked out, and the footage we got is some of the most stunning camerawork in the series.

Challenging though it was, filming the eclipse was in one sense easy: We knew when and where it was going to happen, and we knew the effect would be powerful. Endeavoring to make a 12-hour documentary on a subject that predates the invention of photography, and whose sources are written in an 18th-century vernacular, was in other respects a daunting mission. For our series on World War II and the Vietnam War, we could talk with living witnesses and access archival footage. We had tens of thousands of photographs from the Civil War. The American Revolution had none of those elements.

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Our subject was also complicated by the myths that enveloped it. Generations of Americans have wrestled with the meaning and reality of the American Revolution, our national origin story. Even in 1783, John Adams knew how hard it would be to tell that story. “It would require the whole of the longest Life,” he warned a French historian, “to assemble from all the Nations and Parts of the Globe” all of the documentary materials needed “to form a compleat History of the American War, because it is nearly the History of Mankind for the whole Epocha of it.” The French historian never wrote the book.

As the historian Maya Jasanoff points out in the film, coming to terms with the Revolutionary War is an almost impossibl