“The Civil War”’s premiere became the most-watched PBS program at the time, with the nine-episode series carrying a total running time of 11 hours, and to this day it remains one of the most popular shows ever to air on public broadcasting. How Human Y Chromosomes Replaced Those of Neanderthals in a Quiet Genetic Takeover, 3-D Reconstruction Reveals the Face of an Ancient Egyptian Toddler, Engineered 'Super Enzyme' Breaks Down Plastic, Portrait Displays Hundreds of Animals Killed by House Cats, Why Sweden’s Ancient Tradition of Calling Home the Herds Is Women’s Work, The World's First Happiness Museum Opens in Denmark, Nero, History's Most Despised Emperor, Gets a Makeover.

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.

But it must be the story of ALL Americans—not just of white politicians and soldiers. “Faced with the choice between historical illumination or nostalgia, Burns consistently opts for nostalgia.” As we’ve seen in “Reconstruction,” historical reality, no matter how painful and violent and vivid, can be effectively and evocatively portrayed though documentary film. In many ways, the documentary helped spur my own interest in U.S. history. The documentary had an outsized effect on how many Americans think about the war, but it’s 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.

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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 love and loss, the documentary specifically targeted one audience: white people. Her award-winning first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, was published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press. 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 Cry of Freedom won the Pulitzer. We desperately need a new Civil War documentary that can be seen by broad swathes of the American public. Airing over a span of five nights during late September in 1990, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. Many professional historians immediately took issue with “The Civil War,” and their concerns were published in a 1997 volume edited by Robert Brent Toplin. Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s documentary series, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War, explores the transformative years following the American Civil War, when the nation struggled to rebuild itself in the face of profound loss, massive destruction, and revolutionary social change.

For African Americans living in the former Confederacy, Reconstruction was what historian W. E. B. 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 Farewell”—a song from the 1980s (not the Civil War era!) By the end of the documentary, Ken Burns and his team made the Civil War seem almost unavoidable, and by making Americans believe in the war’s inevitability, the film allows whites a type of psychological “pass”—forgiveness for the sins of our forefathers—for both the war and its cause. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, and Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, a best-selling novel from 1974 about the Battle of Gettysburg, still exerted obvious influence.

Post-Civil War America was a new world. The sins of omission in “The Civil War” unfortunately are not without consequence. Can Scientists Stop the Plague of the Spotted Lanternfly? Share this video on FacebookFacebookShare this video on TwitterTwitter, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War | Inside Look. In a 2011 article for Slate, historian James Lundberg also took the film to task, especially for its extraordinary and disproportionate focus on Foote. The problem of having an all-white, all-male (and non-historian) production team was further compounded by Burns’ choice of interviewees. Unfortunately, it seems as if “The Civil War” will not hold up against historical scrutiny as well as “Reconstruction” likely will.

It pardoned sinners who had never asked for pardon; it erased the sadistic violence of the era that still has yet to be fully exposed; it made it all, somehow, feel worth it. 17th Annual Photo Contest Finalists Announced. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Foner’s work opens in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation, and unquestionably places slavery at the center of the Civil War. 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.”. Here is an extended first look at Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. It allows us to focus only on an antiseptic form of history that makes us feel good, on a narrative that emotionally relieves us of sins that should not be relieved. Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents a vital new four-hour documentary series on Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. At nine minutes into the first episode, the film’s only historian with a doctorate, Barbara Fields—now recognized as one of the world’s foremost scholars on race and racism—unequivocally stated that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War. 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 issues and the divided South—might allow it to be called a good work of military history, but not much more than that. The aftermath of the Civil War was bewildering, exhilarating...and terrifying. “Reconstruction” laid a sound and accurate base of political and cultural history upon which other filmmakers will surely build. California Do Not Sell My Info But first, we need you to sign in to PBS using one of the services below. *Editor's note, April 24, 2019: This story has been updated to clarify the level of attention the producers of "The Civil War" paid to the research conducted by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP). Instead of slavery, he claimed, the Civil War occurred because of our “failure to compromise.” Fields would receive approximately eight-and-a-half minutes of airtime throughout the nine episodes, while Foote, whose quotes could best be described as a Confederate apologia, would be featured for an astounding 45 minutes and 56 seconds. Share this video: The first episode alone reveals how deeply this ran: Within the opening few minutes, narrator David McCullough literally attributes the cause of the war to states’ rights. Here is the extended first look at Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. * By the mid-1980s, the FSSP had produced considerable new scholarship explaining both the political importance and daily brutalities of slavery, as well as the complicated transition out of it. Viewers learned basic facts about the era which were not— and devastatingly, still are not—taught in textbooks. As Eric Foner opined in his critique of “The Civil War,” “Faced with the choice between historical illumination or nostalgia, Burns consistently opts for nostalgia.” As we’ve seen in “Reconstruction,” historical reality, no matter how painful and violent and vivid, can be effectively and evocatively portrayed though documentary film. Not only did these white Southern-sympathizers eventually determine how the Civil War and Reconstruction would be taught throughout U.S. schools, they also quickly came to dominate popular culture as well, most famously in the wildly popular Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 blackface film. A comprehensive and compelling history of the United States immediately following the Civil War. Americans would greatly benefit from a new telling of the Civil War, of its causes and effects, of its soul-crushing violence and its joyful freedoms, of its heartening triumphs and abject failures. Minimizing hundreds of years of uncompensated, brutalized slavery, omitting the abject failure of any type of reparations, and completely ignoring the racist violence following the end of the war, “The Civil War” ultimately allowed white Americans to distance themselves from current-day racism and the persistent (and worsening) racial wealth gap.