James M. Lundberg: *Sarcasm* Thanks a Lot, Ken Burns
James M. Lundberg is assistant professor of History at Sacred Heart University.
Whenever I teach a course on the American Civil War I see a spike in the number of students eager to spend three hours a week with me. This would be flattering if it had anything to do with my particular talents as a teacher. But as I hear the pleas of wait-listed supplicants begging for spots in my class, I am reminded that I owe my popularity to the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and his legendary series The Civil War....
For all its appeal, however, The Civil War is a deeply misleading and reductive film that often loses historical reality in the mists of Burns' sentimental vision and the romance of Foote's anecdotes. Watching the film, you might easily forget that one side was not fighting for, but against the very things that Burns claims the war so gloriously achieved. Confederates, you might need reminding after seeing it, were fighting not for the unification of the nation, but for its dissolution. Moreover, they were fighting for their independence from the United States in the name of slavery and the racial hierarchy that underlay it. Perhaps most disingenuously, the film's cursory treatment of Reconstruction obscures the fact that the Civil War did not exactly end in April of 1865 with a few handshakes and a mutual appreciation for a war well fought. Instead, the war's most important outcome—emancipation—produced a terrible and violent reckoning with the legacy of slavery that continued well into the 20th century....