CHAPTER 1 1. Ken Burns, “The Documentary Film: Its Role in The
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Notes CHAPTER 1 1. Ken Burns, “The Documentary Film: Its Role in the Study of History,” text of speech delivered as a Lowell Lecture at Harvard College, 2 May 1991, 6. 2. Ken Burns, telephone interview with the author, 18 February 1993. 3. Ken Burns, interview with the author, 27 February 1996. 4. Neal Gabler, “History’s Prime Time,” TV Guide, 23 August 1997, 18. 5. 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). 6. 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. 7. Ken Burns quoted in “A Filmmaking Career” on the Thomas Jefferson (1997) website at <http://www.pbs.org/jefferson/making/KB_03.htm>. 8. The $3.2 million budget for The Civil War was comprised of contributions by the National Endowment for the Humanities ($1.3 million), General Motors ($1 million), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and WETA-TV ($350,000), the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation ($350,000), and the MacArthur Foundation ($200,000). General Motors also provided an additional $600,000 for educational materials and promotional outreach. 9. Matt Roush, “Epic TV Film Tells Tragedy of a Nation,” USA Today, 21 September 1990, 1. 10. See Lewis Lord, “‘The Civil War’: Did Anyone Dislike It?” U.S. News & World Report, 8 October 1990, 18; Civil War Illustrated, July/August 1991; Confederate Veteran, January/February 1991, March/April 1991, July/August 1991; and Toplin, Civil War: Historians Respond. 11. The consultants as listed in the credits are Shelby Foote, Barbara J. Fields, C. Vann Woodward, Don Fehrenbacher, Stephen Sears, William McFeely, James McPherson, Bernard Weisberger, Mike Musick, Richard Snow, Eric Foner, Stephen B. Oates, Robert Johannsen, Tom Lewis, William E. Leuchtenburg, Daniel Aaron, Charles Fuller, Charley McDowell, Ira Berlin, Gene Smith, Robert Penn Warren, Jerome Liebling, Dayton Duncan, and Amy Stechler Burns. 220 KEN BURNS’S AMERICA 12. 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. 13. 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). 14. John Milius, “Reliving the War Between Brothers,” New York Times, 16 September 1990,sec.2,1,43. 15. Russell Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend: A Cultural Analysis of Birth of a Nation,”inCinema Examined: Selections from Cinema Journal, ed. by Richard Dyer MacCann and Jack C. Ellis (New York: Dutton, 1982), 167, 175. 16. Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” 166. 17. Statistical Research Incorporated (Westfield, N. J.), “1990 Public Television National Image Survey,” commissioned by PBS Station Independence Program, 28 September 1990, 2.1-2.8. 18. “CBS, PBS Factors in Surprising Prime Time Start,” Broadcasting, 1 October 1990, 28; “Learning Lessons from ‘The Civil War,’” Broadcasting, 8 October 1990, 52-53; Richard Gold, “‘Civil War’ Boost to Docu Battle,” Variety, 1 October 1990, 36; Bill Carter, “‘Civil War’ Sets an Audience Record for PBS,” New York Times, 25 September 1990, C17; Jeremy Gerard, “‘Civil War’ Seems to Have Set a Record,” New York Times, 29 September 1990, 46; and Susan Bickelhaupt, “‘Civil War’ weighs in with heavy hitters,” Boston Globe, 25 September 1990, 61, 64. 19. George F. Will, “A Masterpiece on the Civil War,” Washington Post, 20 September 1990, A23. 20. David S. Broder, “PBS Series Provides a Timely Reminder of War’s Horrors,” Sunday Republican (Springfield, Mass.), 30 September 1990, B2; Haynes Johnson, “An Eloquent History Lesson,” Washington Post, 28 September 1990, A2. NOTES 221 21. Harry F. Waters, “An American Mosaic,” Newsweek, 17 September 1990, 68; Richard Zoglin, “The Terrible Remedy,” Time, 24 September 1990, 73; Lewis Lord, “The Civil War, Unvarnished,” U.S. News & World Report, 24 September 1990, 74. 22. David Thomson, “History Composed with Film,” Film Comment 26.5 (September/ October 1990), 12. 23. Tom Shales, “The Civil War Drama—TV Preview: The Heroic Retelling of a Nation’s Agony,” Washington Post, 23 September 1990, G5. 24. Monica Collins, “A Victory for ‘Civil War,’” Boston Herald, 21 September 1990, 43. 25. “Ken Burns Wins First Lincoln Prize,” American History Illustrated 26.3 (July-August 1991), 14. 26. Ken Burns received honorary degrees from the following eight institutions in 1991: LHD (hon.), Bowdoin College; LittD (hon.), Amherst College; LHD (hon.), Univer- sity of New Hampshire; DFA, Franklin Pierce College; LittD (hon.), Notre Dame College (Manchester, N.H.); LittD (hon.), College of St. Joseph (Rutland, V.T.); LHD (hon.), Springfield College (Ill.); and LHD (hon.), Pace University. 27. Burns, interview, 18 February 1993. 28. “Ken Burns,” People, 31 December 1990-7 January 1991, 46-47. 29. Daisy Mayles, “1990 Facts & Figures: Fiction Sales Outpace Nonfiction,” Publishers Weekly, 8 March 1991, 20. 30. “Longest-Running Hardcover Bestsellers for 1991,” Publishers Weekly, 1 January 1992, 34. 31. Mayles, “1990 Facts & Figures: Fiction Sales Outpace Nonfiction,” 20. 32. Ken Burns, interviewed by David Thelen, “The Movie Maker as Historian: Conver- sations with Ken Burns,” Journal of American History 81.3 (1994), 1050. 33. Eileen Fitzpatrick, “Burns Sues Pacific Arts for Back Royalties on Videos,” Billboard, 22 October 1994, 9. 34. Burns, interview, 18 February 1993. 35. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford, 1988), 865. 36. Edwin McDowell, “Bookstores Heed Call on Civil War,” New York Times, 1 October 1990, D10. 37. Foote, Civil War: Red River to Appomattox, 1064; Lynne V. Cheney, “A Conversation with Civil War Historian Shelby Foote,” Humanities 11: 2, March/April 1990, 8. 38. Burns, interview, 18 February 1993. 39. “The Civil War: Ken Burns Charts a Nation’s Birth,” American Film 15 (September 1990), 58. 40. Ken Burns, “In Search of the Painful, Essential Images of War,” New York Times, 27 January 1991, sec. 2, 1. 41. 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). 42. Ken Burns, “Mystic Chords of Memory,” text of speech delivered at University of Vermont, 12 September 1991, 14. 222 KEN BURNS’S AMERICA 43. “The Civil War: A Television Series,” grant application with appendices submitted to National Endowment for the Humanities, 14 March 1986, 9. 44. Burns in Thelen, “Movie Maker as Historian,” 1035. 45. Daniel J. Boorstin, “The Luxury of Retrospect,” Life, Special Issue: The 80s (Fall 1989), 37. 46. Burns in Thelen, “Movie Maker as Historian,” 1037. 47. Burns, interview, 18 February 1993. 48. Burns in Thelen, “Movie Maker as Historian,” 1037. 49. Burns, interview, 18 February 1993. 50. Burns in Thelen, “Movie Maker as Historian,” 1040. 51. 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. 52. Ron Powers, “Glory, Glory,” GQ, September 1990, 218. 53. The final draft of the script, dated 17 July 1989, is in the Ken Burns Collection at the Folklore Archives of the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Civil War materials include all drafts of the script, all the filmed interviews with various scholars and experts (including outtakes), other footage, notes on decision making, test narrations, some financial records, correspondence, other related data. 54. Robert Sullivan, “The Burns Method: History or Myth-Making?” Life, September 1994, 42. 55. Cathryn Donohoe, “Echoes of a Union Major’s Farewell,” Insight, 5 November 1990, 54-55; and Susan Bickelhaupt, “Civil War Elegy Captivates TV Viewers,” Boston Globe, 29 September 1990, 1, 5.