After the airing of Henry Louis Gates's new Reconstruction documentary, an historian podered whether we need a new full-length documentary on the Civil War. The Ken Burns documentary series has been massively influential in how Americans view the war, but it is heavily colored by the romantic Lost Cause opinions of Shelby Foote.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...s61sf04KyctURVkf6dGfAPCgl7ajicBYoLK22ww_7u9Ik
Very interesting and persuasive. I agree with the argument that we need a Civil War documentary that looks at history with honesty and tells the whole story, slavery included, without bias. And tells it well.
Shelby Foote. Sigh. I don't know who you can find with the charm and stage presence that can rival Foote's. For the vast majority of viewers he was the highlight of the series, so he had a disproportionate influence. If a new series lacked an interpreter that interesting, Ken Burns would be the one people keep going back to.
I can think of many brilliant scholars that I now love watching on YouTube or Cspan whenever possible- Gary Gallagher, Brookes D. Simpson, David Blight among many others. I know now that it's always worth listening to them because I'll learn something new. I don't go to listen to their accents or get charmed and I'm starting to know their strengths and limitations. It took me a while to get there.
However, for the me of 1990, frustrated because I only got to watch half of the series because my husband taped over the rest, I saw no issues with the documentary and was highly influenced by the views of Shelby Foote. I was charmed by his beautiful accent and apparent insight. I was hardly alone in that.
How does a poor filmmaker compete with that?
Ken Burns has been very influential. When I took a university class on the war many years later the professor used huge excerpts from Burns to introduce different topics. By then I had watched all of David Blight's Yale course online, so I had a bit of an idea that the field is complicated and that interpretations keep evolving.
For most viewers Ken Burns will be seen as the best unless someone can make a film that is honest, complex and just as compelling. I hope someone can.