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
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 […]