Here is Mackenzie Farkus of Boston Public Radio: Perhaps what most attracted Burns to document Franklin’s life wasn’t his status as one of America’s Founding Fathers, but rather how Franklin’s life relates to today’s world. “We don’t work on our...
Ken Burns
The bones of Sullivan Ballou
If you have watched the Ken Burns documentary The Civil War you might remember Sullivan Ballou. The Union officer stole the show with the letter he wrote to his wife Sarah a week before he was killed at the First...
Ken Burns on Monuments
The documentary filmmaker recently appeared on Chris Cuomo’s show on CNN. Watch: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOwrd2kRQcA&w=560&h=315] I tend to agree with Burns’s case-by-case approach. I am also with Annette Gordon-Reed on non-Confederate monuments....
American History Night With Ken Burns
Thursday night, March 26, 2020. Here is PBS press release: PBS will make the Ken Burns documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History available to its stations beginning March 26. PBS is calling it “American History Night with Ken Burns.” The event happens...
Ken Burns and “Sour Grapes”
Yesterday I had the chance to be part of a small group discussion with Martin Luther King Jr. biographer Taylor Branch. During the course of the conversation someone asked him if his work had been criticized by academic historians because...
More Reviews of “The Vietnam War”
The Burns-Novick eighteen-hour documentary on the Vietnam War ended earlier this week. I am still trying to get my head around everything I saw. Since I am not a historian of the war and have not read too much about...
Reviews of Ken Burns’s “The Vietnam War”
I am not an expert on the Vietnam War. I have not taught this subject in nearly sixteen years. As a result, I am no position to offer a critique or review of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s PBS documentary, The...
Drew Gilpin Faust Defends the National Endowment for the Humanities
Drew Gilpin Faust, a Civil War historian and president of Harvard University, has taken to the op-ed page of The New York Times today to defend the National Endowment for the Humanities. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Sept. 17, 1862, was the...
Ken Burns Defends the Humanities and Storytelling
Last night documentary film-maker Ken Burns used his National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture to defend humanities and the art of storytelling. Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed reports: Ken Burns, the documentary maker who brought the Civil War, the...
What If Ken Burns Produced *Star Wars*?
I know nothing about Star Wars. I will not be seeing the new film (I honestly do not know the title of it–I will have to look it up). I have never seen any of the Star War films. Isn’t...
Does Ken Burns’s *The Civil War* Have a “Lost Cause Narrative?”
Shelby Foote I have seen Ken Burns’s The Civil War multiple times. I often showed clips of it when I taught a course on Civil War and Reconstruction. I was glad to see that PBS will broadcast the documentary on...
Messiah College History Department Recites the Gettysburg Address
Produced by Megan Piette and inspired by Ken Burns: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpsvx3GIG58]...
Ken Burns: “The Address”
Ken Burns is working on a new documentary film about the Civil War. It is called “The Address” and it chronicles the story of a group of Vermont schoolboys with learning disabilities who memorize and recite the Gettysburg Address. Here...