Abstract
Ken Burns laughs now about the apprehension he felt on September 23, 1990, the day The Civil War premiered on prime-time television and changed his life forever. He had just completed a two-month promotional tour, a grueling process at which he is particularly adept, being a highly quotable and charismatic speaker and storyteller. He checked out of his midtown Manhattan hotel on that Sunday morning and began the long drive back to his home in Walpole, New Hampshire. Suddenly seized with misgivings, he remembers thinking long and hard about the remarks of several reviewers who predicted that The Civil War would be “eaten alive,” going head-to-head with major network programming over five consecutive nights. That evening, he and his family were “completely unprepared for what was going to happen” next, as the first episode attracted 14 million viewers, while the full program reached nearly 40 million people by Thursday, the largest audience for a public television series ever. As Burns reminisced during a February 1993 interview, “I was flabbergasted! I still sort of pinch myself about it. It’s one of the rare instances in which something helped stitch the country together, however briefly, and the fact that I had a part in that is just tremendously satisfying.”2
Each generation, Lewis Mumford once said, rediscovers and reexamines that part of the past which brings the present new meaning and new possibilities.
—Ken Burns, 19911
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Notes
Shelby Foote, Civil War: A Narrative (Fort Sumter to Perryville, Fredericksburg to Meridan, Red River to Appomattox), 3 vols. (New York: Random House, 1958–1974); David McCullough, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (New York: Touchstone, 1972); and Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (New York: Ballantine, 1974).
Ken Burns, “Four O’Clock in the Morning Courage,” in Ken Burns’s The Civil War: Historians Respond, ed. Robert B. Toplin (New York: Oxford, 1996), 157.
Some of the more prominent critiques of The Civil War focusonerrorsindetail, the way the series abridges the origins of the war and the later matter of reconstruction, and the condensation of other complex issues, such as policy making and the formation of public opinion. For additional disagreements in interpretation see Jerry Adler, “Revisiting the Civil War,” Newsweek, 8 October 1990, 62; Jane Turner Censer, “Videobites: Ken Burns’s ‘The Civil War’ in the Classroom,” American Quarterly 44.2 (1992): 244–54; Mary A. DeCredico, “Image and Reality: Ken Burns and the Urban Confederacy,” Journal of Urban History 23.4 (1997): 387–405; Ellen Carol DuBois, “The Civil War,” American Historical Review 96.4 (1991): 1140–1142; A. Cash Koeniger, “Ken Burns’s ‘The Civil War’: Triumph or Travesty?” The Journal of Military History 55 (April 1991): 225–33; David Marc and Robert J. Thompson, Prime Time, Prime Movers: From I Love Lucy to L.A. Law—America’s Greatest TV Shows and the People Who Created Them (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), 307; Robert E. May, “The Limitations of Classroom Media: Ken Burns’ Civil War Series as a Test Case,” Journal of American Culture 19.3 (1996): 39–49; Hugh Purcell, “America’s Civil Wars,” History Today 41 (May 1991), 7–9; and Mark Wahlgren Summers, “The Civil War,” Journal of American History 77.3, 1106–07.
Koeniger, “Triumph or Travesty?” 233. Like many film scholars before him, Louis Giannetti writes, “Birth is a diseased masterpiece, steeped in racial bigotry,” in Masters of the American Cinema (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981), 67. This critical ambivalence about Birth of a Nation in general film histories dates back to Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926), Benjamin Hampton, A History of the Movies (New York: Covici, Friede, 1931), and Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939).
Russell Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend: A Cultural Analysis of Birth of a Nation,” in Cinema Examined: Selections from Cinema Journal, ed. by Richard Dyer MacCann and Jack C. Ellis (New York: Dutton, 1982), 167, 175.
Ken Burns, interviewed by David Thelen, “The Movie Maker as Historian: Conversations with Ken Burns,” Journal of American History 81.3 (1994), 1050.
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford, 1988), 865.
Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (New York: Anchor, 1974); John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (New York: Methuen, 1978); Richard P. Adler, ed., Understanding Television: Essays on Television as a Social and Cultural Force (New York: Praeger, 1981); Robert C. Allen, ed., Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); David Bianculli, Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously (New York: Continuum, 1992); Horace Newcomb, ed., Television: The Critical View, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford, 1994).
Bernard A. Weisberger, “The Great Arrogance of the Present Is to Forget the Intelligence of the Past,” American Heritage 41.6 (September/October 1990), 99.
Ken Burns, interviewed by Thomas Cripps, “Historical Truth: An Interview with Ken Burns,” American Historical Review 100.3 (1995), 752.
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Lawrence W. Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford, 1993), 8.
Ken Burns, “Thoughts on Telling History,” American History Illustrated 26.1 (1991), 27.
The literature encompassing memory studies is vast and found in many disciplines. A few well-known sources to start with are: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford, 1989); Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993); Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Bernard Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975; George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992); and Barbie Zelizer, Coveringthe Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
David Thelen, “Memory and American History,” Journal of American History 75.4 (1989), 1119.
Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12.2 (1995), 216.
Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
David Glassberg, “‘Dear Ken Burns’: Letters to a Filmmaker,” Mosaic: The Newsletter of the Center on History-Makingin America (at Indiana University), 1 (fall 1991), 3.
Ken Burns, “How I Met Lincoln,” American Heritage 50.4 (1999), 55.
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© 2001 Gary. R. Edgerton
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Edgerton, G.R. (2001). Rebirth of a Nation: Reframing The Civil War (1990) on Prime-Time Television. In: Ken Burns’s America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05482-1_1
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