Why We Need Ken Burns Now More Than Ever

I’ve never understood why so many of my fellow historians get so bent out of shape over Ken Burns. My first exposure to Burns was his award-winning documentary about the American Civil War back in the early 1990s, which all these years later I think still holds up quite well.

I don’t mind admitting that I’ve always been a fan of his work, though that doesn’t mean that I’ve never been critical of his efforts.

It seems to me that his goals have always been transparent. He is a storyteller and his intended audience is Americans of all walks of life. Whether his subject is Thomas Jefferson, WWII, the Holocaust or Vietnam, Burns hopes to offer a narrative that can bring Americans together around a shared historical narrative.

This has always been a daunting task, but never more so than the current moment. Next year marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In anticipation of this anniversary Burns is slated to release his most recent and arguably timely documentary—The American Revolution, which premieres on PBS in November.

I think it is inevitable that we will witness two distinct responses to this film, one coming from the community of academic historians and the other from the general public. Two conversations that have little to do with one another and one that we’ve seen plenty of times before.

Some of this dynamic can be seen in a recent piece in Politico by Nathaniel Moore. I highly recommend reading it. Moore clearly admires Burns, but is suspicious of his reputation as something akin to America’s official storyteller.

One particular statement by Burns caught the author’s attention as well as by historians on social media.

‘We wanted to rid ourselves of the fashions of historiography,’ Burns summarized at one event, ‘and make a film that simply shows what happened.’

This line went down well with the crowd but brought the project’s limitations into focus. This kind of ‘just the facts’ claim, while posing as humility, in fact masked Burns’ grandiosity. There is no story of the past that is told without a concept of historiography. Whatever you write, you are taking a stance on your subject and on the practice of history itself. The suggestion that other historians are not also interested in ‘show[ing] what happened’ is, at best, careless.

Moore was correct in taking Burns to task for this claim for the reasons referenced, but I also think he may have missed part of what Burns was trying to impart to his audience.

It is true that stories about the past do not exist in some abstract object realm from which historian pull from, but Burns may have also been trying to remind his audience that while his work is dependent on generations of historians, it is not a work of critical/analytical history.

In other words, there is a difference between the way academic historians engage a historiography in framing and researching a specific subject and the ways in which any historical documentary is, to one degree or another, influenced by the current historical zeitgeist.

Let me be clear that I have no problem with historians critiquing the work of Burns or any other documentarian. It is our job to point out factual and interpretive shortcomings, but this can be done while acknowledging that Burns is not a historian.

Here is the passage that stood out to me:

Burns’s narrative improves on the one most Americans will have received in school. The film broadens out from the conventional, America-centric story to detail how the colonies’ rebellion grew into a global war, one that strengthened the French empire and broke the Iroquois Confederacy, an alliance of six peoples that had brought relative peace for generations. Woven into the traditional story of Great Men are firsthand accounts of people left out of usual histories of the war — women, the Indigenous, Black people both free and enslaved. In a time when the Trump administration is trying to minimize these people’s role in public life, emphasizing instead the achievements of white men at every turn, this inclusion is no small public service.

Most of Burns’s films do this to one extent or another. In today’s political climate, the film will be a major success if for no other reason it expands how we think about the Revolution.

Let’s face it, most people who seek to reduce the Revolution down to the claim that this country was ‘stamped from the beginning’ as racist or maintain that the ideals of the Declaration of Independence were nothing more than epiphenomenal will certainly be sorely disappointed.

And the exploration of slavery and other subjects that challenge a traditional view of the Revolution will be dismissed by conservatives as a product of “critical race theory.” You know the drill.

That will leave us with Burns’s audience, which is bipartisan, somewhat diverse, and hungry for history that both challenges their preconceptions of the past and one that provides opportunities to draw connections between that past and the present.

As historian Johann Neem has recently pointed out: “To sustain democracy, we need to be a people, and to be a people, we need to share not just the present but also the past.” Where you like it or not, Burns is attempting to do this work.

I think a case can be made that we need Ken Burns now more than ever. We are witnessing daily assaults by the Trump administration against institutions like the National Park Service, the Smithsonian, NEH, and the National Archives, all of which are responsible for educating the public. There is a good chance that programming at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia (NPS), where the Declaration was signed, will offer little in the way of education and reflect the Trump propaganda machine.

I look forward to watching and critiquing the new Burns film along with the rest of the country.

We are going to need all hands on deck at both the local and national level if we are to salvage anything positive and meaningful from this important anniversary over the next year and beyond.