A MISTAKEN FORM OF TRUST: KEN BURNS’S THE CIVIL WAR AT THIRTY

jgoodguy

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My views.
Some folks are upset that Burns' account is more popular than theirs.
It was a failure to comprise, duh, over slavery. The political system broke down over slavery.
Everyone wants someone else to pay to write the story as they want, but in a way that will very likely turn off the viewers.
Some folks are upset that the state of history 30 years ago was not perfect.

Yes I am in a bad mood.
 

5fish

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Some folks are upset that Burns' account is more popular than theirs.
They are right but I admit I love watching the show. But I was not as deeply as invested in Civil War history then as now.

At the time I did not care for Foote and his creaming his jeans for Forrest...

Like @diane , she adores Forrest and I can't figure out why... There were at least two better cavalry men than Forrest... The funny thing is he die out until segregation in the 1950's erupted. He was brought back to life as a backlash to segregation...
 

jgoodguy

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They are right but I admit I love watching the show. But I was not as deeply as invested in Civil War history then as now.

At the time I did not care for Foote and his creaming his jeans for Forrest...

Like @diane , she adores Forrest and I can't figure out why... There were at least two better cavalry men than Forrest... The funny thing is he die out until segregation in the 1950's erupted. He was brought back to life as a backlash to segregation...
The Confederate Battle Flag has about died out until resurrected for the Civil Rights Movement. I suppose the whole CSA was reborn for that.

I don't remember much of Foote's fondness for Forrest filmed in the documentary.

I get a bit miffed at the insistence I see of putting but it was about slavery in every frame, especially by book writers.

And finally, the standard academic texts of the time were not much different.
 

jgoodguy

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I can hum the show tune though.
 

diane

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Ken Burns' documentary ages well and has served as a much needed introduction to the Civil War for a great many. I would never have known who Ed Bearss was, for example, and I'm very glad to have discovered him.

Shelby Foote is another. His viewpoint was the South of his day and region of the South - Mississippi. Foote was raised in what was called "Forrest Country" during the war, and for a few generations afterward. He was raised, like his contemporary Faulkner, listening to stories of glory days from old veterans and in a stagnant South that needed a hero. (Confederate, of course.) The South today is not stagnant, decaying or stuck in the past. 30 years ago, that was still a thing.

Ed Bearss opinions on Forrest were much divergent from Foote's - no hero worship but no bias, either. Bearss presented Forrest as the excellent military mind he was, gave the devil his due but no more. That's a fair approach, and how most of the country approaches Confederate heroes. No gods, they, just soldiers doing their jobs. Same applies to the Union heroes.

Burns' had a lot of 'stereotypes' for both good and bad, and he did help bring down the 'benevolent slavery' myth. That was a balm used by the planters to make their consciences shut up - paternalism. He also introduced Lincoln as not the Great Emancipator but as the first American president to actually do something concrete about it. His motives were to keep the united in United States, and I liked how that was brought out.

All told, I do think Burns' did his best work on that series.
 

diane

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They are right but I admit I love watching the show. But I was not as deeply as invested in Civil War history then as now.

At the time I did not care for Foote and his creaming his jeans for Forrest...

Like @diane , she adores Forrest and I can't figure out why... There were at least two better cavalry men than Forrest... The funny thing is he die out until segregation in the 1950's erupted. He was brought back to life as a backlash to segregation...
Oh, I don't adore Forrest. I find him a fascinating study in contrasts and contradictions, a Dorian Grey type picture of the slave owning South at that time.

Better cavalrymen than Forrest? Some don't think he was a cavalryman at all! Myself, I'd suggest John Buford, John Wilder (who, win or draw, beat Forrest just about every time they met up) or Ben Grierson. Confederate - Forrest was not as good a cavalryman as Jeb Stuart because he didn't have the training Stuart had, or the support of his superiors. If Bragg had felt about Forrest the way Lee felt about Stuart, the war in the west would have gone better for the Confederacy. They would not have lost Ft Donelson and a whole army right off the bat, for one important thing.
 

jgoodguy

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Oh, I don't adore Forrest. I find him a fascinating study in contrasts and contradictions, a Dorian Grey type picture of the slave owning South at that time.

Better cavalrymen than Forrest? Some don't think he was a cavalryman at all! Myself, I'd suggest John Buford, John Wilder (who, win or draw, beat Forrest just about every time they met up) or Ben Grierson. Confederate - Forrest was not as good a cavalryman as Jeb Stuart because he didn't have the training Stuart had, or the support of his superiors. If Bragg had felt about Forrest the way Lee felt about Stuart, the war in the west would have gone better for the Confederacy. They would not have lost Ft Donelson and a whole army right off the bat, for one important thing.
I wonder just how one portrays the people of the South of the time in their own words without having captions it was really about slavery crawling all over the scene.
 

diane

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I think that was something Ken Burns found he had to deal with. There's simply no way to talk about the CW reasonably without addressing the elephant in the room. So many just threw a table cloth over it!
 

jgoodguy

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I think that was something Ken Burns found he had to deal with. There's simply no way to talk about the CW reasonably without addressing the elephant in the room. So many just threw a table cloth over it!
They did that in that day and time. I think Burns was a pioneer when included African Americans talking about slavery.
 

diane

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Yes. African Americans had the same experience Indians did - people talking around them as if they weren't there!
 

rittmeister

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Yes. African Americans had the same experience Indians did - people talking around them as if they weren't there!
or women - you want to read up about medical research for women
 

diane

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Oh, I have. :eek: There were medical experiments on the slaves, too. Wade Hampton's father told several stories of that exact thing he did to his slaves. (It didn't stop after freedom, either.)
 

rittmeister

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Oh, I have. :eek: There were medical experiments on the slaves, too. Wade Hampton's father told several stories of that exact thing he did to his slaves. (It didn't stop after freedom, either.)
they didn't cut up female corpses (decency!) but males to do research
 

5fish

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What do you think Ms. Fields right... AS long as Ken Burns the Civil War the standard confederate monument will stay...



Starkman-Hynes concludes, “The year 2020 has brought a profound reckoning with the Civil War’s legacy – and it is long past time that reckoning reached Ken Burns. His beloved documentary invites viewers to revel in the drama and emotion of the war without ever acknowledging its legacy of white. Echoing Keri Leigh Merritt and others, it’s time for a new Civil War documentary: one that honors Barbara Fields’s observation that the Civil War isn’t over – and can still be lost. Every Confederate monument can be toppled, but as long as Ken Burns’s The Civil War is seen as the definitive telling of the story, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Nathan Bedford Forrest will remain on their pedestals.”
 
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