Articles: Ken Burns and the coming crisis of academic history

Rethinking History

Volumn 7, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 169-192

  Harlan, David ^a  

^a CALIFORNIA POLYTECHNIC STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Academic; Film; History; Ken Burns; Popular

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249151138     PISSN: 13642529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13642520308363     Document Type: Review

References (63)

1. Richard Zoglin, 'Feats of progress', Time, 3 February 1992, p. 55.
2. President Clinton invited Burns to show clips from his film Lewis and Clark: The Corps of Discovery in the East Room of the White House - the very place, Mr Burns pointed out to an interviewer, 'where Meriwether Lewis got down on the floor with Thomas Jefferson and spread out the maps from his journey'. Bill Carter, 'In historic footsteps', New York Times, 12 November 1997, p. E8.
3. Richard Zoglin, 'Feats of progress', p. 55.
4. Jim Rutenberg, 'TV notes', New York Times, 17 January 2001.
5. See his testimony before the House Energy, Telecommunications and Finance Committee, 12 September 1994.
6. Nearly thirteen million people watched at least the first two episodes of Baseball when it was first broadcast on PBS. As with The Civil War, no one knows how many have seen the video and/or read the book. Eleven million people watched the first two episodes of Jazz. Although that is twice as many people as usually watch PBS during prime time, it is only half the size of the audience for The Civil War. But as Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times' television critic, pointed out, 'There is a simple explanation, which does not necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the work or its subject. As the television landscape has become increasingly crowded with channels, each of his big documentaries has faced more competition than its predecessors. Even the kind of highly educated and intellectually curious viewers drawn to the work of Mr. Burns who once could find refuge only in PBS now have new outlets on cable, like the History Channel, Discovery and A&E. The challenges that face Jazz also face PBS as a whole.' Rutenberg, 'TV Notes'.
7. The nature of that refraction varies, of course, from viewer to viewer. The fact that Burns' films have been so enormously popular, and the fact that they have managed to evoke such intense responses from such a broad range of people, suggests that they are anything but univocal. What Lee Clark Mitchell once said about popular culture generally could just as easily be said about Ken Burns' films: 'Books and films that appeal overpoweringly at a given time resist a straightforward reading - indeed, attract disparate audiences because they do so effectively satisfy different constituencies. Readers and viewers simply respond to the same materials in differing ways, reconstructing texts to suit views that are often diametrically opposed.' Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 16.
8. See e.g. the selections in Robert Brent Toplin (ed.), Ken Burns's Civil War: The Historians Respond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
9. Christine Stansel, 'E Pluribus Sepia', The New Republic, 22 November 1999, p. 36.
10. A review of Burns' film, Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Her husband and colleague Sean Wilentz once described The Civil War as 'a televised version of the American Heritage technique, brilliant in its detail, evocative in its storytelling, but crushingly sentimental and vacuous in its historical judgments of the war's origins and meaning'. Sean Wilentz, 'America made easy: McCulloch, Adams, and the decline of popular history', The New Republic, 2 July 2001.
11. See Leon F. Litwack, 'Telling the story: the historian, the filmmaker, and the Civil War', in Robert Brent Toplin (ed.), Ken Burns's The Civil War: Historians Respond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 121-4 and 136.
12. See Thomas Cripps, 'Historical truth: an interview with Ken Burns', American Historical Review, 100(5), June 1995, p. 744. Burns' father was a well-known anthropologist at the University of Michigan - which may be why he takes this criticism so personally.
13. Burns as quoted in Cripps, 'Historical truth', p. 745.
14. Ken Burns as interviewed by Steve McClellan, Broadcasting & Cable Magazine, 14 March 1994, p. 34.
15. 'I am, in fact, what is called a yellow-dog Democrat by my Southern relatives.' Burns, 'Why I am a member of this party'. Burns in a speech delivered on 6 March 1998 in honour of then Vice-President Al Gore. It may be found at http:// douglass.speech.nwu.edu/burn-b31.htm.
16. On 'the idea of national identity, and the emotion of national pride', see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999). I have borrowed the phrase from p. 252.
17. See also Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), ch. 1, 'American national pride: Whitman and Dewey', pp. 3-38.
18. Burns as quoted in 'Ken Burns and Stephen Ives, on-line with People Magazine', 19 September 1996 (http://people.aol.com/people/interactive/ transcripts/b/burnstrans.html).
19. Mark Gerzon and Molly De Shong, 'E Pluribus Unum: Ken Burns and the American dialectic', Shambhala Sun, 7 June 2000 (http://www.shambhalasun.com/ Archives/Features/1997/Nov97/KenBurns.htm).
20. Bob Herbert, 'In America: Billie, Benny and The Duke', New York Times, 3 June 2000.
21. Stan Horton, '"Jazz" underscores success story of America', Cleveland Plain Dealer, 21 August 2000.
22. Ken Burns, 'Four o'clock in the morning courage', in Toplin (ed.), Ken Burns's The Civil War, p. 160.
23. My emphasis. Burns, 'Four o'clock in the morning courage', p. 160.
24. My emphasis. Burns, 'Four o'clock in the morning courage', p. 177.
25. Burns, 'Four o'clock in the morning courage', p. 160.
26. Ken Burns, 'My favorite baseball photograph', American Heritage, 45(6), October 1994. See the end of the 'Ninth Inning' of Baseball, where Donald Hall says, 'Baseball, because of the sense of its continuity, over the space of America, and the time of America, This is a place where memory gathers. It's a place that we can return to and it's a place that we can even imagine existing in the future.'
27. Which is what allowed Doris Kearns Goodwin, writing her memoir about growing up in Brooklyn, to know that if she wrote about baseball she was not 'just writing about myself'. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998);
28. Doris Kearns Goodwin as quoted in an interview by Stan Isaacs in Newsday, 3 December 1997, p. A49.
29. See Ken Burns' statement on ABC News' Primetime Live, 8 September 1994 (Transcript #366-2).
30. From one of the interviews about Baseball.
31. Burns as quoted in Donald Dale Jackson, 'Ken Burns puts his special spin on the old ball game', Smithsonian, 25(4), July 1994.
32. As Burns himself says, 'You have almost every classic form of Aristotelian poetics play themselves out on the baseball field.' Burns, 'Aristotelian poetics on the baseball field', Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 August 1994.
33. 'Working as a consultant on the [Burns brothers'] series "The West," I came to be fascinated by the kind of writing that television demanded. Watching [Geoffrey] Ward refine and polish a narrative meant to be read on the screen, I finally told him that I thought I understood the secret. "It's all topic sentences," I said. "No," he told me, "there are no topic sentences. The picture is the topic sentence."' Richard White, 'Mystery train', The New Republic, 8 May 2000.
34. Burns as quoted in 'Ken Burns and Stephen Ives On-line with People Magazine'.
35. Ken Burns on 'Nightline' (ABC), 26 September 1994.
36. Matthew Melton, 'Ken Burns' Civil War: epic narrative and public moral argument', Sync: The Regent Journal of Film and Video, 1(2), Spring 1994.
37. Ken Burns, 'The movie maker as historian: conversations with Ken Burns', Journal of American History (December 1994), p. 1046.
38. See Frank McConnell's insightful review of Baseball in Commentary, 18 November 1994.
39. Burns as quoted in Gerzon and De Shong, 'E Pluribus Unum'.
40. 'After race, the second sub-theme of this film is labor.' Burns as quoted in People magazine, 19 September 1994.
41. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 76.
42. Augustine as quoted by Gary Wills, Confessions of a Conservative (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), p. 197.
43. Gerald Early, 58-9 minutes into the Eighth Inning of Baseball.
44. Emily Dickinson, 'The world is not conclusion', Poem #501.
45. Burns as quoted in Cripps, 'Historical truth', pp. 746-7.
46. The same thing is happening in Great Britain - with the same surprising intensity. See Richard Evans, 'How history became popular again', New Statesman, 5 March 2001.
47. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Free Press, 1996).
48. Even more remarkable than Wilentz's condescending attitude towards popular history is the gendered nature of the oppositions he employs to describe it. Popular history is 'passive', 'nostalgic', 'sentimentally descriptive', 'fascinating but undemanding' and so on. Popular historians 'simplify', 'sensationalize' and basically 'gossip about the past'. Their books and films offer 'forms of reassurance' and 'sentimental appreciation rather than critical analysis'. Academic history, on the other hand, is distinguished by its 'love of historical facts'. It is 'meant to rattle its readers' by 'the advancing of strong, even heretical personal judgments' and 'a remorseless reexamination of the nation's past'. See Sean Wilentz, 'America Made Easy'.
49. Dan Carter, 'Fact, fiction, and film: Frankenheimer's George Wallace', American Historical Association, Perspectives, January 1998 (http://www.theaha. org/ Perspectives/issues/1998/9801/9801FIL.CFM).
50. Dan Carter's most recent books are The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995)
51. and From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: The Role of Race in the Conservative Revolution, 1963-1994 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996).
52. Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 23.
53. Mortimor Adler once drew a distinction between 'first-order disciplines' and 'second-order disciplines'. See Mortimor J. Adler, 'Philosophy's past', in his The Four Dimensions of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
54. 'First-order disciplines' employ a common methodology to produce empirical knowledge about specifically defined subject matter. 'Second-order disciplines' concern themselves with the critical examination of concepts, methods and assumptions used by first-order disciplines. That is not to say that they presume to resolve disputes within first-order disciplines; they are more like midwives. (The analogy is Wittgenstein's. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'Philosophical foundations and philosophical systems.')
55. I have borrowed this idea (and much else) from Robert A. Rosenstone's intriguing article, 'Does a filmic writing of history exist?', History and Theory 41 (December 2002), p. 143.
56. Margaret Atwood, 'In search of Alias Grace: on writing Canadian historical fiction', American Historical Review 103(5), December 1998, p. 1514.
57. DeLillo as quoted at http://www.greatbooks.org/library/guides/delillo. shtml.
58. Don DeLillo, 'The art of fiction', Paris Review 128, autumn 1993, p. 292.
59. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965.
60. I am indebted to Robert Rosenstone for this formulation, as for so many other insights. See Rosenstone's important statement, 'The historical film as real history', Filmhistoria 1(1), 1995, especially pp. 21-2.
61. For a popular expression of the idea that film and video are replacing the written text, see Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett, 1995).
62. For a deeper, more interesting (and enthusiastic) analysis by a partisan of what he interprets as the 'video revolution', see Mitchell Stevens, The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). I read Rosenstone as a much-needed corrective to Birkerts' all-too-fashionable despair and Mitchell's all-too-easy optimism.
63. I have borrowed this excellent phrase from Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 230.