An edition of Ken Burns's The Civil War (1996)

Ken Burns's The Civil War

historians respond

  • 0 Ratings
  • 1 Want to read
  • 0 Currently reading
  • 0 Have read

My Reading Lists:

Create a new list

Check-In

×Close
Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
Today

  • 0 Ratings
  • 1 Want to read
  • 0 Currently reading
  • 0 Have read

Buy this book

Last edited by MARC Bot
July 19, 2024 | History
An edition of Ken Burns's The Civil War (1996)

Ken Burns's The Civil War

historians respond

  • 0 Ratings
  • 1 Want to read
  • 0 Currently reading
  • 0 Have read

Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War made television history, breaking all viewing records for a PBS series. Indeed, forty million people saw it, more than the populations of the Union and the Confederacy combined. For a generation of Americans, this documentary is the Civil War.

Yet many professional historians criticized it sharply for ignoring the roles of minorities, pointing to a lack of women and of blacks throughout, a disregard for the aftermath of the war (particularly its legacy to race relations), a conventional emphasis on military history rather than social history, and uneven coverage of the military campaigns that gave short shift to the bloody Western front.

Ken Burns's The Civil War brings together detractors, supporters, and Ken Burns himself in a volume that will inspire readers to look again at this stunning documentary, at the way television shows history, and at the Civil War itself. C. Vann Woodward and Robert Brent Toplin describe the painstaking efforts to maintain accuracy and develop a sophisticated interpretation of history. But other contributors are sharply critical.

In "Noble Women as Well," Catherine Clinton describes the experiences of women during the war, disguised as soldiers, working as nurses in makeshift hospitals, or besieged in caves by enemy armies, saying that Burns ignores their stories completely.

Eric Foner and Leon Litwack are even more scathing, saying that the series distorts the legacy of the war by focusing on the preservation of the Union, ignoring the importance the institution of slavery had to those who fought the war, and neglecting the experiences of blacks both during and after the war: out of 28 people whose post-war careers are mentioned, only two blacks, both men, are included.

The filmmakers themselves respond in the last section. Geoffrey C. Ward, the series' writer, pleads for greater cooperation between filmmakers and historians. Ken Burns's essay is a defense of his art that is as well-crafted as the series itself. He discusses the unique limitations of television, pointing out, for instance, that television documentaries, unlike written history, require specific, identifiable visual images, limiting the coverage of subjects with little pictorial documentation.

And he praises the power of television to move, inform, and educate, pointing to its unique responsibility in an age where Americans receive more and more of their information through television and film.

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
197

Buy this book

Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: Ken Burns's The Civil War
Ken Burns's The Civil War: historians respond
1996, Oxford University Press
in English

Add another edition?

Book Details


Edition Notes

Includes bibliographical references.

Published in
New York

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
973.7
Library of Congress
E468.9 .K46 1996, E468.9.K46 1996

The Physical Object

Pagination
xxvi, 197 p. ;
Number of pages
197

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL1280347M
Internet Archive
isbn_9780195093308
ISBN 10
0195093305
LCCN
95012190
OCLC/WorldCat
32273446, 194425316
Library Thing
1033699
Goodreads
453693

Community Reviews (0)

Feedback?
No community reviews have been submitted for this work.

Lists

This work does not appear on any lists.

History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON
July 19, 2024 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
August 4, 2020 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
January 10, 2019 Created by MARC Bot import existing book