On This Day

The Oscar-nominated director of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan releases an AI-generated animated series on TIME's YouTube, chronicling the American Revolution on its 250th anniversary. Made with Google DeepMind. SAG-AFTRA voice cast and original score. Each episode drops on the exact anniversary of the historical event it depicts. The reception is brutal: viewers and filmmakers call it 'AI slop.' Significant not for quality but for what it represents — a major Hollywood director founding an AI studio (Primordial Soup) and going all-in on AI animation.

America's first meme is born. Thomas Paine arrives from England and, nudged by Benjamin Franklin, writes what others hesitate to say. The pamphlet sends ripples from the colonies across the Atlantic.

A bookseller makes history. To break the siege of Boston, Henry Knox hauls captured British cannon from Fort Ticonderoga across more than 300 miles of snow and ice.

Beneath his public decorum, Washington is plagued by doubt: an undisciplined, poorly supplied army facing professional soldiers across the harbor, and consequences that would be absolute.

Six years to the day after the Boston Massacre, Washington undertakes a daring night maneuver to drive the British from the city.

Still reeling from the Seven Years' War, Louis XVI's court looks for a way to stab Britain in the back, and quietly takes its turn in the game.

In a world where kings trade soldiers like livestock, Burkhard dreams of a quiet life with Elsa in Hesse. He says his vows, and moments later he is gone.

Britain unleashes the largest force ever sent against the colonies, 427 ships, 1,200 cannons and 32,000 soldiers, with a plan to crush the rebellion in a single campaign.

June 5, 1776. John Adams wants to declare independence from the British Empire. The other delegates want dinner. The mutton was good, though.

Washington needs a symbol to unite a crumbling revolution and turns not to a general or a politician but to a seamstress in Philadelphia: the story of Betsy Ross and the flag.

Jefferson faces his greatest opponent yet, King George III himself, bare-chested and crown on. Rendered in a bold anime style, every blow landed is an idea worth fighting for.

A sketch comedy: the ghosts of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson return every Fourth of July to reckon with the country they built, the dream, the disaster and the $7 oat milk latte.

With the Continental Army out of gunpowder, Captain Lambert Wickes has one chance to change that, and it will cost him everything: a desperate race across open water with 400 kegs.

Washington builds the Life Guard, hand-picked soldiers sworn to protect him alone. One of them, Thomas Hickey, is secretly a paid British agent.

Washington preaches liberty to a nation while the people enslaved on his plantation live in bondage. Harry Washington, a groomsman at Mount Vernon, watches the Revolution unfold and makes his own decision about freedom.