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Ken Burns

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Revisiting 25 Years of Revisionist Claptrap

With its usual promotional hype, PBS re-broadcasted its 1990 program The Civil War. This 25-year-old program, along with Jazz and Baseball constitutes Ken Burns' trilogy on racial relations. Wanting to make the Civil War "comprehensible to a contemporary audience", Burns chose to present a "social history", one that was heavily influenced by contemporary socio/political sentiments. Burns publicly admitted that he…
Gail Jarvis
September 24, 2015
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PBS’s “The Civil War”: The Mythmanagement of History

This piece was originally printed by Southern Partisan magazine in 1990. In the September issue of the American Historical Association's newsletter, a rave review predicted that the PBS production "The Civil War" might become "the Gone With the Wind of documen­taries." After watching almost all of it, I would suggest Uncle Tom's Cabin as its fictional alter ego. But let…
Ludwell H. Johnson
May 25, 2015