Ken Burns 
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10/9/202
The Holocaust Documentary Disappointingly Skirts Big Questions of FDR's Responsibility
by Martin Ostrow
In another documentarian's view, the series unduly frames Roosevelt as a captive to global politics and antisemitism, not a leader with the power to change them.
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10/2/2022
A Holocaust Mystery: Ken Burns Gets Lost in a Bermuda Triangle
by Rafael Medoff and Monty N. Penkower
At the 1943 Bermuda Conference, British and American diplomats offered a symbolic show of concern for Jewish refugees, but made no substantial commitment to help. Ken Burns's recent holocaust documentary passes over this event.
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SOURCE: TIME
9/17/2022
Does Ken Burns's Holocaust Doc Face Thorny Questions about U.S. Actions?
by Olivia B. Waxman
Historians involved with the PBS project wrestle with the question of whether the United States could reasonably have done more to offer asylum to Europe's Jews or to stop their mass-scale murder.
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9/18/2022
Another Documentarian's Perspective on "The U.S. and the Holocaust"
by Martin Ostrow
Like many other Americans, I will be watching closely to see if The U.S. and the Holocaust honestly portrays the responsibility of American leaders, or fails to confront the difficult truths that need to be faced.
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SOURCE: Jerusalem Post
9/13/2022
Ken Burns's Holocaust History Has a Palestine Problem
by Rafael Medoff and Monty Noam Penkower
Although there was no sovereign government in Palestine between 1933 and 1945, British authorities there admitted a quarter million Jewish refugees. The filmmaker's focus on "sovereign" countries' record admitting refugees burnishes the Roosevelt administration's record.
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
4/20/2022
The Unbearable Whiteness of Ken Burns
by Timothy Messer-Kruse
In the context of today's battles over teaching the history of racism in America, the new Franklin documentary unfortunately uses its subject to spin a narrative of national self-correction that ignores historians' attention to conflict and struggle.
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SOURCE: Jacobin
4/4/2022
Ken Burns on the Revolutionary Ben Franklin
"If you find out that, very early on, there’s somebody advocating emancipation, it just makes the narrative a little bit messier."
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SOURCE: Hollywood Reporter
12/5/2021
Ken Burns "In Tears" at Posthumous Hall of Fame Induction of Negro League Star Buck O'Neil
Buck O'Neil's recollections of the Negro Leagues were a key part of Burns's 1994 documentary series "Baseball." O'Neil was a tireless champion of the history of Black baseball who pushed the sport's establishment to recognize that part of its history.
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SOURCE: New York Times
9/27/2021
Ken Burns's Documentary Shows We Can't Quit Ali
by Jay Caspian Kang
"The odd thing about American sainthood is that we seem to prefer those who, like Ali and Jackie Robinson, did not engage directly in the dirty world of politics, but rather stood as trailblazers or icons in sports or Hollywood."
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SOURCE: AV Club
9/13/2021
Ken Burns's "Muhammad Ali" Well-Crafted, But Not Groundbreaking
Ken Burns has an irresistable subject for his latest project. The problem isn't the quality of his film, but that so many others have gotten there first.
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SOURCE: New York Times
8/2/2021
Ken Burns Argues He's not "Taking Up Too Much Space"
The documentarian joins Kara Swisher's "Sway" podcast, focusing on how digital technology is changing the practice of reconstructing the past and whether Burns's films are taking too much airtime as PBS seeks to diversify its stable of producers.
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SOURCE: New York Times
4/2/2021
Review: ‘Hemingway’ Is a Big Two-Hearted Reconsideration
“Can you separate the art from the artist?” is a heated and dogmatic argument these days. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick force the viewer to consider if that separation is possible or desirable.
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SOURCE: New York Times
3/12/2021
Ken Burns Still Has Faith in a Shared American Story
"The most important thing about me talking about race now is to say that I am in a position where I have to be quiet. You have to be quiet. There are other voices that need to speak. The dismantling of white supremacy is not just white people continually talking about the dismantling of white supremacy. You have to shut up and listen."
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SOURCE: CBS News
11/8/2020
Ken Burns on America, Selling His First Film, PBS's Long Deadlines and More
"I have had the privilege of spending my entire life making films about the U.S., capital U, capital S. But I've also had the privilege of making films about 'us,' the two-letter, lowercase, plural pronoun, that has a kind of intimacy and warmth to it."
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SOURCE: Washington Post
9/26/2020
Re-Watching ‘The Civil War’ During the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd Protests
by Gillian Brockell
Ken Burns's Civil War documentary series sparked tremendous interest in history, but the series has a big Shelby Foote problem.
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12/8/19
The Problem with Ken Burns' Country Music
by Peter LaChapelle
What would a Country Music that deals with country music’s complicated and often problematic political history look like?
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SOURCE: The Boston Globe
6/6/2019
Boston couple donates $15 million to ‘help create the next Ken Burns’
“I’d like to see there be not another Ken Burns but maybe 10 other Ken Burnses."
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SOURCE: Smithsonian Magazine
Why We Need a New Civil War Documentary
by Keri Leigh Merritt
The success and brilliance of the new PBS series on Reconstruction is a reminder of the missed opportunity facing the nation.
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SOURCE: Huffington Post
9-25-18
Ken Burns Isn’t Mad
The “far, far left,” “far, far right” and “third- and fourth-rate academics” are all wrong about America’s most famous documentary filmmaker. Just ask him.
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SOURCE: The Denver Post
9-14-18
Patty Limerick says Ken Burns has done more than anybody else to teach Americans about their history
by Patty Limerick
“There is a great deal for all citizens to learn from Burns: how to speak as a whole-hearted patriot while offering a forthright critique of the nation’s failures."