We Need to Burn the South Again

PBS

Airing over a span of five nights during tardily September in 1990, Ken Burns' "The Civil War" remains, to this day, the but documentary that claims to explain the entirety of the war that engulfed the U.s.a. in the mid-19th century. "The Ceremonious War"'s premiere became the well-nigh-watched PBS program at the time, with the nine-episode series conveying a total running fourth dimension of 11 hours, and to this day information technology remains 1 of the most popular shows ever to air on public broadcasting. Garnering scores of awards, "The Civil War" has now influenced generations of Americans and shaped their behavior about slavery, the war itself, and its aftermath. The documentary had an outsized effect on how many Americans recollect about the war, but it'south one that unfortunately lead to a fundamental misunderstanding about slavery and its legacies—a failing that both undergirds and fuels the flames of racism today.

With the recent debut of Henry Louis Gates's new multi-part documentary "Reconstruction" on PBS amidst cracking fanfare, I found myself reflecting upon why Americans desperately need an updated Ceremonious War documentary likewise. (You can, and should, stream the documentary for free on PBS.)

Watching "The Civil War" as a teenager several years after its initial release, I became enamored with the series—so much so that I spent my hard-earned money on the expensive companion book and the soundtrack for the haunting "Ashokan Adieu"—a song from the 1980s (not the Civil State of war era!) that played throughout the series. In many means, the documentary helped spur my own interest in U.S. history.

Yet every bit I grew older reading broadly on both the war itself and the 19th-century Southward, enjoying scholars such as Bell Irvin Wiley, John Promise Franklin, and Victoria Bynum, I realized that I barbarous in love with the series—just not for its historical accuracy. Instead, information technology offered a kind of self-satisfaction for me as a white American, and, more importantly, as a white Southerner. I came to realize that by downplaying the importance—and horrors—of slavery, and instead concentrating on hard-fought battles, valiant, virile soldiers, and heart-wrenching tales of romantic dearest and loss, the documentary specifically targeted one audience: white people.

While there are several difficulties with "The Civil War," the fact remains that the entire production was written, directed and produced by white men with little in the way of historical training and few connections to academic historians. While undoubtedly masters of the mediums in which they were trained, biographer Geoffrey Ward, producer Ric Burns, and Ken Burns himself surely had blind spots and lacked the diverse perspectives necessary to convey the sheer magnitude and long-lasting impact of the state of war.

Many professional person historians immediately took effect with "The Civil War," and their concerns were published in a 1997 volume edited by Robert Brent Toplin. Featuring essays by some of the nearly well-known scholars of the day, including Eric Foner and C. Vann Woodward, with responses past Ken Burns and Geoffrey Ward, Ken Burns'southward The Civil War: Historians Answer did niggling to lessen the continuing affect – indeed, the cultural and intellectual legacy – of the film itself.

It's worth noting that filmmakers not trained as historians, like Ava DuVernay (Thirteenth) or Marlon Riggs (Ethnic Notions, Colour Adjustment), take been able to produce challenging and authentic documentaries. Indeed, through lenses similar theirs, the Civil War narrative would accept been much more nuanced and would have encompassed of a wider set of experiences and ideas. PBS's own highly rated Civil Rights documentary, "Eyes on the Prize," aired in 1987, but a few years prior to "The Civil War." Although written and directed by a variety of people, "Eyes on the Prize" was – and nevertheless is – considered proficient, audio history, and is still existence screened in history classes across the U.S. today.

With funding and filming taking place in the late 1980s, "The Ceremonious War" did reflect the fourth dimension in which information technology was made. James McPherson's Battle Cry of Liberty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, and Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, a all-time-selling novel from 1974 about the Battle of Gettysburg, withal exerted obvious influence. Both of these popular histories were focused almost solely on military history – battles, soldiers, and life on the warfront, and they seemingly guided the general focus of both the editing and production of "The Civil War."

But scores of other field-changing histories were overlooked by the documentarians: Eric Foner's magnum opus Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 won the Bancroft Prize the same year Battle Weep of Freedom won the Pulitzer. Conveying on themes from Due west.E.B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Foner's work opens in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation, and unquestionably places slavery at the heart of the Civil War. In so doing he shatters the myths of the infamously pro-Lost Crusade Dunning School, whose racist theories had shaped Americas historical narrative since the early 1900s. Not simply did these white Southern-sympathizers somewhen determine how the Civil War and Reconstruction would be taught throughout U.S. schools, they also quickly came to dominate popular culture equally well, about famously in the wildly pop Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith's 1915 blackface moving picture.

Among many other omissions, the documentary more often than not ignores the piece of work of the Freedmen and Southern Guild Projection (FSSP), a group of highly regarded historians based out of the University of Maryland.* By the mid-1980s, the FSSP had produced considerable new scholarship explaining both the political importance and daily brutalities of slavery, also as the complicated transition out of it. By "transcribing, organizing, and annotating" tens of thousands of documents explaining "how black people traversed the bloody ground from slavery to liberty" between 1861 and 1867, the FSSP's enquiry could have been easily incorporated into "The Ceremonious State of war."

The problem of having an all-white, all-male (and non-historian) production team was further compounded by Burns' choice of interviewees. 8-and-a-one-half minutes into the first episode, Shelby Foote, a Mississippi-built-in writer with an accent as thick and sweet every bit Tupelo dearest, made his unforgettable debut. The descendant of wealthy, slaveholding planters who fought for the Confederacy, Foote, a writer and announcer with no historical background, made the commencement of many appearances in which he spoke with the authority of a historian, merely with none of the scholarly understanding of the war. All the same Foote was then charming and stereotypically "southern" that the Burns brothers used his interviews every bit the dominant narrative throughout the entirety of the flick.

At 9 minutes into the get-go episode, the motion picture's only historian with a doctorate, Barbara Fields—now recognized as one of the world'south foremost scholars on race and racism—unequivocally stated that slavery was the primary cause of the Ceremonious War. The bloodiest time in our nation's history, she argued, was about "humanity, human dignity, human being liberty."

Simply Foote was given the final discussion in the scene. Instead of slavery, he claimed, the Ceremonious State of war occurred because of our "failure to compromise." Fields would receive approximately eight-and-a-one-half minutes of airtime throughout the 9 episodes, while Foote, whose quotes could best be described as a Confederate apologia, would be featured for an astounding 45 minutes and 56 seconds.

In a 2011 article for Slate, historian James Lundberg also took the moving-picture show to task, especially for its extraordinary and disproportionate focus on Foote. "For all its appeal, however," he wrote, "'The Civil State of war' is a deeply misleading and reductive motion-picture show that often loses historical reality in the mists of Burns' sentimental vision and the romance of Foote'south anecdotes."

To be sure, "The Civil War" skews towards propagating the idea of the Lost Crusade, often venerating Confederate officers and soldiers if not the Confederacy itself. The kickoff episode alone reveals how deeply this ran: Inside the opening few minutes, narrator David McCullough literally attributes the crusade of the war to states' rights. In what would go a refrain among groups ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the Sons of Amalgamated Veterans, his declaration resonates: "What began as a bitter dispute over wedlock and states' rights..."

The first mention of slavery is not until six minutes into the film, at which time it is invoked with McCullough erroneously stating that Robert E. Lee "disapproved" of slavery, a fact easily challenged by the fact that Lee fought to inherit enslaved people who his father-in-police force, George Washington Parke Custis, wanted to free. Presently after, the first African-American is mentioned: a brusk vignette about the author, activist and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, referred to as a "runaway boy" even though Douglass was about 20 years quondam when he escaped slavery. After a very cursory 4-infinitesimal discussion (a full minute less than the fourth dimension devoted to the Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack), slavery—and the enslaved themselves—are rarely discussed.

The sins of omission in "The Civil War" unfortunately are not without consequence. Considering and so many Americans accept had their basic understanding of the causes of secession, the realities of racial slavery, and the atrocities of the Confederacy greatly shaped by this documentary, current twenty-four hour period topics, from the Confederate Monument/flag debate to the button for reparations past American Descendants of Slaves, remain bitterly divisive, even though clear historical answers obviously exist.

Past focusing on a type of war machine history wherein all sides can be seen as—in some way—heroic, "The Civil War" allows us, as white Americans, to forget well-nigh the reasons why we were fighting in the commencement identify. It allows us to focus just on an antiseptic form of history that makes us feel good, on a narrative that emotionally relieves us of sins that should not exist relieved. It allows usa to convince ourselves that the dishonorable were in some way honorable; it reassures our sense of selves equally inculpable white Americans; it allows us a psychological laissez passer for the sins of our forefathers.

While all major projects inevitably have detractors focusing on what was left out, the film's near silence on a range of topics—from Native Americans and campaigns in the West to labor problems and the divided South—might let it to exist called a good work of military history, merely non much more than that.

Nosotros desperately demand a new Civil War documentary that tin can be seen by broad swathes of the American public. Because pic is such an emotionally resonant medium, and such a wonderful ways of bringing a scholarly subject to the general public, it is imperative that true experts of Ceremonious State of war era and slavery studies apply this medium to (re)brainwash the American people about our own history.

Americans would greatly do good from a new telling of the Civil State of war, of its causes and effects, of its soul-crushing violence and its joyful freedoms, of its heartening triumphs and abject failures. But it must be the story of ALL Americans—not just of white politicians and soldiers. Ideally this new documentary would depict on the burgeoning and innovative field of slavery studies, featuring the work of new scholars.

By the end of the documentary, Ken Burns and his squad made the Ceremonious State of war seem well-nigh unavoidable, and by making Americans believe in the state of war'southward inevitability, the moving picture allows whites a type of psychological "laissez passer"—forgiveness for the sins of our forefathers—for both the war and its cause. By focusing on reconciliation, and by advancing a story that centered on personal stories of common soldiers, "The Ceremonious State of war" provided a soothing narrative of American greatness—one that oft bordered on the importunate idea of American exceptionalism.

Minimizing hundreds of years of uncompensated, brutalized slavery, omitting the apple-polishing failure of any blazon of reparations, and completely ignoring the racist violence following the end of the war, "The Civil War" ultimately allowed white Americans to altitude themselves from current-day racism and the persistent (and worsening) racial wealth gap. Information technology pardoned sinners who had never asked for pardon; it erased the sadistic violence of the era that all the same has yet to be fully exposed; information technology made information technology all, somehow, feel worth it.

Earlier this month, though, with the airing of "Reconstruction" on PBS, Americans got to see what a documentary written and produced by, and featuring, a diverse bandage of historians could exercise to reframe the dominant narrative. Viewers learned basic facts about the era which were not— and devastatingly, even so are not—taught in textbooks. "Reconstruction" laid a sound and authentic base of operations of political and cultural history upon which other filmmakers volition surely build.

Unfortunately, information technology seems as if "The Civil State of war" volition not hold upwards confronting historical scrutiny equally well as "Reconstruction" likely will. As Eric Foner opined in his critique of "The Ceremonious War," "Faced with the choice between historical illumination or nostalgia, Burns consistently opts for nostalgia." As we've seen in "Reconstruction," historical reality, no affair how painful and violent and bright, can be effectively and evocatively portrayed though documentary motion-picture show.

*Editor's annotation, April 24, 2019: This story has been updated to analyze the level of attention the producers of "The Civil War" paid to the inquiry conducted by the Freedmen and Southern Guild Projection (FSSP). Historian Barbara Fields was an editor on the project, and her advent in the serial gives voice to the FSSP's views.

Civil War Confederacy Picture show Reconstruction Television

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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-we-need-new-civil-war-documentary-180971996/

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