| Summary/Abstract |
I’ll admit it. I have never been a fan of Ken Burns. While sympathetic to his clear passion for history, and to his desire to bring his stories to a wide audience, I have consistently found his films and series to be watered-down, formulaic, and ultimately uninteresting. For all of these reasons, I go into any Burns documentary with fairly low expectations; I’m usually hoping at most for a couple sequences that I can use in my courses, that can help communicate important ideas and events powerfully to reach students in ways that other formats cannot or do not. And use them I have. There are some sequences in The Civil War, The West, and, in particular, New York, that have been staples of my undergraduate surveys for years. Situational pedagogical usefulness, of course, does not validate the film as a work of historical explanation. Those larger films suffered from the same repetitive, over-simplified approach as his works on baseball and jazz, which my sport and music historian colleagues almost universally revile. So, given all of the above, and the fact that I write and teach about the American War in Vietnam for a living, I went into the viewing of Burns’s PBS documentary The Vietnam War with appropriately low expectations.
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