The Pilgrim Society and Pilgrim Hall Museum is pleased to announce that internationally recognized filmmaker and writer Ric Burns will serve as the 2014 Forefathers Day speaker on December 20, 2014. He will discuss his current project, The Pilgrims: A Documentary Film.

Burns is best known for his eight-part, seventeen and a half hour series, New York: A Documentary Film, which premiered nationally on PBS to wide public and critical acclaim when broadcast in November 1999, September 2001, and September 2003.

Burns has been writing, directing and producing historical documentaries for more than 20 years, since his collaboration on the celebrated PBS series The Civil War, (1990), which he produced with his brother Ken and co-wrote with Geoffrey C. Ward. He founded Steeplechase Films in 1989 and has since directed some of the most distinguished programs in the award-winning public television series, American Experience, including Coney Island (1991), The Donner Party (1992), The Way West (1995), and Ansel Adams (2002), a co-production of Steeplechase Films and Sierra Club Productions. In 2006, Burns released both Eugene O’Neill and Andy Warhol to critical acclaim. The two films garnered 2006-2007 Primetime and News and Documentary Emmy Awards for outstanding writing for non-fiction programming; Andy Warhol also received a 2006 Peabody Broadcasting Award.

In 2009, Mr. Burns completed We Shall Remain: Tecumseh’s Vision, part two of a five-part history of Native America, followed by the Emmy nominated documentary Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World in 2010, both of which aired nationally as part of WGBH Boston’s American Experience.

Mr. Burns most recently finished Death and the Civil War, a film based on the best-selling book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by historian and Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust.

The Forefathers Day celebration is an annual tradition of the Pilgrim Society dating from 1820. Forefathers Day this year will be observed on Saturday, December 20 as the traditional date (December 21) this year falls on a Sunday. The day’s events begin with the members’ annual business meeting at Pilgrim Hall Museum at 4:00 p.m. The dinner follows at the Radisson Hotel Plymouth Harbor, 180 Water Street, beginning at 5:30 p.m. with a cash bar and the traditional succotash. Dinner will be served at 6:30, followed by a short program and Burns’s remarks.

To purchase tickets to the Forefathers Day Dinner, visit our on-line shop.