Shelby Foote vs Barbara Fields: A Screen Time Comparison of Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” (Supercut)
*Note (5/10/2018): PBS got this remix video taken down for "copyright infringement" on April 16, 2018. After a tedious counter notification process, YouTube finally restored it, but only in low quality (360). The original upload was 720 HD. I have contacted YouTube to restore its clarity. They have offered no response as to why the video suddenly lost its image sharpness. Something accounts for it, and it needs to be said unfortunately that if PBS / Ken Burns had something to do with this degradation, they are some pretty petty players. (One would imagine that an individual like Burns who champions progressive politics would welcome a critical response to his work that points out missteps and calls for a higher standard. He supposedly bases his entire career's work on that precept).
**Note (11/28/2018): And then, all of a sudden, the video was restored to 720.
Shelby Foote vs Barbara Fields: A Screen Time Comparison of Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” (Supercut)
By Diran Lyons
Beta testing: E Gillum | J Lyons | M Potter | B Speechly
This video juxtaposes the time Ken Burns devoted to Shelby Foote and Barbara Fields in his "The Civil War" documentary series (Fields was the only African-American historian included in the work). Every interview of the two has been collected. Some statistics are presented at the end (17:00), culminating in an eye-raising quote from Foote (17:35).
Although I have appreciated aspects of Ken Burn's "The Civil War" since its first airing, I was in an important sense motivated to make this video after encountering the writers' criticisms below. The extreme privileging of Foote's presence over Fields' reveals Burns' capitulation to viewers unwilling to acknowledge that the war was over the issue of slavery.
Jonathan Chait noted in the article "Sarah Sanders Claims John Kelly Learned Civil War Nonsense From Ken Burns" that "Burns...chose to give Foote literally nine times as many appearances as Barbara Fields — a real historian whose perspective Burns scants. (In an interview two years ago, Alyssa Rosenberg pressed Burns on the discrepancy, which he adamantly defended.)"
(1) http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/...
Alyssa Rosenberg observed, in "How two very different historians defined Ken Burns’ ‘The Civil War’": "...Columbia professor Fields’ historiography — which treats the Civil War as simply part as a longer struggle for black equality in America — seems more in keeping with the present mood than Foote’s, which treats the Civil War as the conflict that 'made us what we became, in good and bad ways.'”
(2) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/a...
In "The Split Personality of Ken Burns’s 'The Civil War,'” Kevin Levin writes: "Shelby Foote was the star of this documentary and rightly so, but Burns ought to be able to acknowledge all these years later that the amount of air time he was given likely allowed certain viewers to slip through without fully coming to terms with the tough questions of slavery and race."
(3) http://cwmemory.com/2015/08/31/the-sp...
An inspiring article in Smithsonian Magazine by Keri Leigh Merritt calls for a new documentary on the US Civil War. The piece links to this video.
(4) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...
Sources:
"The Civil War," Episodes 1-9.
Episode 1: 0:08-1:00
Episode 2: 1:00-1:49
Episode 3: 1:49-4:26
Episode 4: 4:26-5:45
Episode 5: 5:45-7:50
Episode 6: 7:50-9:50
Episode 7: 9:50-11:25
Episode 8: 11:25-12:17
Episode 9: 12:19-17:00
Credits/Statistics: 17:00-17:47
*FAIR USE*
All multimedia clips included in this video constitute a 'fair use' of any copyrighted material as provided for in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright law, which allows for criticism, comment and scholarship.