• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 3, 2025

The weapons that won American independence are the subject of a timely new episode of “Nova” that is set to air just days before the great date in American history when the Revolutionary War began.

The musket shots heard ’round the world rang out 250 years ago on April 19, 1775 in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. 

“Nova: Revolutionary War Weapons” airs next Wednesday, April 9. The show is a modern-day look at the techniques and weaponry of the eight-year war, and how the war -- like so many other wars before and since -- served as an incubator for innovation in the hardware of deadly conflict.

The show is the first of what the TV Blog predicts will be many TV salutes and documentaries marking the semiquincentennial of the Revolutionary War this year.

The most-anticipated of all of them is a new sprawling documentary series from Ken Burns, who has finally turned his attention to the Revolutionary War after first gaining fame with “The Civil War” in 1990, followed by “The War,” about the American experience in World War II (2007), and “The Vietnam War” (2017).

His new series, titled simply “The American Revolution,” is scheduled to premiere on PBS on Sunday, November 16, and run for a total of six consecutive nights ending on Friday, November 21.

If memory serves, Burns has said in the past that assembling a documentary about the Revolutionary War presented special challenges since the war, obviously, took place before the innovation of photography and, later, film and video.

On next week’s “Nova,” vintage restored and reconstructed weapons from the Revolutionary War era are tested and demonstrated by modern-day experts and engineers in order to gain a better understanding of the challenges faced by the brave “citizen soldiers” who would come to form the victorious Continental Army.

In the screenshot above, one such expert takes aim with a musket at a block of gelatin whose density is designed to approximate the mass of a human torso, to learn the effect of a 60-caliber musket ball. The damage to a Revolutionary War soldier was severe indeed.

Besides the musket, “Nova: Revolutionary War Weapons” examines long rifles, tomahawks, gabions (a method of assembling rocks and stones into temporary fortifications), cannons and even the first military submarine.

The show also investigates the weapons and tactics of Native Americans in the colonial era, and how some of those weapons and tactics were adopted by the Continental Army to fight the British.

“As we near the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord and the first shots of the American Revolution, now is an ideal moment to reflect on how much warfare has changed,” said “Nova” Co-Executive Producer Chris Schmidt.

“Grasping the mechanics of these weapons and the harm they cause will enhance people's understanding of just how challenging our struggle for freedom was,” he said of the show, which was directed by Stuart Powell.