Given what we know about the lies that led up to the war
No. False dichotomy. We don’t have to choose between highly specialized academic history written for other historians on the one hand, and Ken Burns on the other. The fact that most history is not written for a broad public is not a reason to be uncritical of tedious sentimental Ken Burns.
Historians aren’t very happy with Ken Burns. He’s a simplifier; we complicate. He makes myths; we bust them. And he celebrates the nation, while we critique it.
That’s the party line, anyway, among my fellow academics. And while I agree with some of their attacks on the recently concluded TV series about the Vietnam War that Burns co-created and co-edited with Lynn Novick, there’s something else at work here.
It’s called sour grapes. Put simply, Burns has managed to engage a huge public audience. And that makes him suspect among members of our guild, who write almost entirely for each other.
The criticisms are so vituperative and dismissive that they need an explanation beyond the substantive objections, Jonathan Zimmerman says.
Several scholars praised Burns for including multiple voices — especially Vietnamese ones — in his interviews. But most historians in the blogosphere took him to task for distorting the conflict, especially with regard to his quest for a shared national narrative that can bind Americans together.
That’s been Burns’s key theme since his blockbuster 1990 series on the Civil War. And yes, it can lead him astray. As many historians observed, his Civil War series seriously underplayed the ways that the postwar “reconciliation” reinforced white supremacy.
Well, that’s a big problem, isn’t it – all the more so because he’s so popular. Popularizing a sentimentalized and distorted version of the Civil War and its aftermath is a big deal. Americans seem to love to embrace a sentimental dishonest version of our history, and we see the unhappy results all around us.
And we see the same flaw in his portrayal of the Vietnam War, “begun in good faith, by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings,” the narrator declares.
That probably wouldn’t pass muster around a university seminar table, given what we know about the lies that led up to the war. So what? Surely, these documentaries have engaged millions of Americans in dialogues about their past. And isn’t that what history is supposed to do?
So what? So what? So spreading sentimental bullshit about the Vietnam War is exactly that, that’s so what.
The problem, Zimmerman repeats, is the shortage of good history for the general public.
“I believe you have failed and lost touch absolutely in the communication of history to the public and that it has fallen to the amateur historians, if you will, to try to rescue that history,” Ken Burns told the Journal of American History — the flagship publication in our field — in 1994. “I would hope that the academy could change course and join a swelling chorus of interest in history for everyone.”
That never happened. To be sure, a small number of academic historians — think Eric Foner, or Jill Lepore — have published books that attract wide readerships. And many others have entered the public sphere via blogs and social media, as the reaction to the Vietnam series illustrates.
I did think Eric Foner, also David Oshinsky, David Brion Davis, Gordon Wood, Henry Mayer…It’s really not that hard to find accessible history by going to a library or a large bookstore.
But I agree with him that historians shouldn’t be rebuked or penalized for writing non-specialist history.
At almost every institution, however, historians are still evaluated and promoted based on their peer-reviewed scholarship rather than by their public engagement. If anything, writing for lay audiences counts against them. When I was a junior professor, a senior colleague advised me to stop publishing op-ed columns. They marked me as a glib and unserious scholar, she said, or even — gasp! — as a journalist.
Until our academic reward system changes, Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and their fellow popularizers will dominate the history that Americans actually consume. That makes historians jealous, and — even worse — it makes us irrelevant. Our research won’t matter until it becomes common knowledge. And the history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world.
But Ken Burns does television. Eric Foner and Jill Lepore do books; Ken Burns does television. Maybe the solution here isn’t to stop criticizing Ken Burns, but rather to get people who work in public tv to get together with Eric Foner or Jill Lepore to do good documentaries. By “good” I do not mean ones in which we’re expected to stare at still photographs for a long long time while somebody drones sonorously on the soundtrack.
There’s a hilarious comment by H.C. Carey that I have to share:
Oh for crying out loud. I’m an academic historian. I do the kind of dry academic work that people like Burns use to make more popular narratives. It’s somewhat like the relationship between architects and builders. The work I do is fundamentally necessary to people like Burns. But i frequently get asked “you’re a historian, what do you think of Burns,” and my answer is he’s a great documentarian and compelling but as a historian I see this and this.” People almost invariably respond by telling me that most people don’t know history and he’s making it accessible yadda yadda. Right, we both know this already! You asked my opinion as a historian!!! What other opinion am I supposed to give! People asked me my opinion of Hamilton, the musical “as a historian.” I gave it, and they typically told me “well you know it’s not really academic history.” You’re kidding, I had no idea. What did you want me to say? That by buying tickets to Hamilton you accomplished the equivalent of decades of study?
Do Doctors have to put up with this? Where someone says “Hey I was watching this doctor show and this happened, waddya think? and the doctor says “well actually that’s not true.” Is the response “you’re a jealous snob?”
There is value in what we do and there is value in what he does. IT’S NOT THE SAME VALUE. This is not hard to understand. But beating up professors for not being entertainers is always fun. Oh those dry academics!
Do scientists get this? “Oh professor you need to make your work in particle physics more accessible!” They probably do get it, and they are probably asked their opinion and required to explain that since you asked no Dyson is not really giving a very good or accurate account of particle physics. And then they get attacked, like in this article, for explaining what they are asked to explain.
Hey, rowboat! Why aren’t you a sailboat? You should be a sailboat. People love sailboats.
My guess is “yes,” provided that the “doctor show” in question is “Dr. Oz,” or some natural medicine proponent, as opposed to fictional dramas like “ER” or “House” or “Grey’s Anatomy.”
Although the response then is probably not so much “jealous snob” as it is “snob who is in the pocket of Big Pharma.” (“Jealous” would mean recognizing how much money alt-med types make off their shtick, which their fans don’t like to think about because then they’d have to apply their own “follow the money” logic to their gurus.)
So eloquent and amusing and so so correct.
People especially love red sailboats.
As a scientist, I can say yes, we get it in spades. As someone who is also a playwright, I frequently hear that it doesn’t matter if it is accurate as long as the story works and it is entertaining. In fact, when someone does get the science right, they are often dissed because audiences “feel dumb”. If they would engage with the work, they might not feel so dumb if they learn something.
In short, facts are often sacrificed in the interest of a “compelling” story, which means something that fits with what they already believe (which is why scientists are so often depicted in lab coats no matter what kind of science they do). There is a lot of laziness in that; instead of taking an ordinary looking person and do what it takes to convince people he/she is a scientist, just make sure they look like Einstein. Then the writer, the actor, the director, and the audience are saved fromthe work of actually finding out how science is done. They just plug intheir stereotype and voila! Instant science, no work required.
@3, shame I’m just a battered up row boat of indeterminate provenance.
Sure, for those that have an interest in both history and reading, a trip to the library will be very rewarding. Which means TV remains a necessary outlet.
In short, the problem isn’t just the people like Ken Burns do simplistic sentimentalized history. The problem is also that this is the kind of history most people want. They want consumption to be easy, to be fun, and to support what they already believe.
This is often encouraged in our schools, where teachers will show videos and sometimes even fictionalized movies in order to “engage” students, rather than trying to meet them where they are with real, interesting, engaging history.
I spent a large portion of my MFA looking at science onstage (scary), and during that, I also read about science in the movies. The things that stuck out at me were the early years of TV, where both TV producers and scientists thought it might be a great idea to get science on TV. But scientists are…well, not actors…so they brought in people to “pep up” the show, which led in the end to poor science in the interests of keeping ratings up. Scientists shrugged their shoulders and gave up. Now, entertainment media control the history, the science, and the news that are consumed by the vast majority of people. And our actual knowledge retreats past the line of the lowest common denominator.