Ken Burn's new doc - AmRev

[scuzzy]

Please see Matt Walsh's review of Burns new documentary. Looking at who funded it should give you some clues.

It's full of lies and pure fantasy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMsJGnn-h_4

[ShooterMagoo]

We should keep some time-honored traditions on the books for revisionist history.

[P7]

I have only watched a small portion of it so far, but didn't see anything I would have reacted to quite so strongly.  Any specific examples?  So far I thought it was much better than the Kelsey Grammar special on Lexington and Concord.  That one was filled with errors and omissions.

I'll be interested to see what that YouTube video has to say, and will watch the rest of the Ken Burns series with a critical eye when I get around to it.  I never seem to want to sit down and watch TV.

[Rangerat67]

In my opinion, the documentary is worth watching and so is Matt Walsh's commentary. After the first few minutes, my expectations were very low, but overall, I would give it an 8 out of 10. Ken Burns makes choices as to what to include and what to leave out of his documentaries. He has a history of including details that fits the current cultural narratives and leaving details that oppose current cultural narratives. Matt Walsh summarizes these better in the video link above better than I can. On the positive side, the documentary covers many issues well; the divided country, key people and places, being a soldier, military strategy, key battles, the hardships of war, etc.

I expect the documentary will increase interest in the Revolutionary War, which is a good thing. Appleseed Instructors should watch it as students may be asking questions during events. Could it have been better, yes. It also could have been a lot worse! 

Rangerat67
Rick

[ShooterMagoo]

That thing is poised to teach the next two generations that the idea for a constitutional republic was stolen from Indians.

Burns took an opportunity to produce an authoritative labor of love for our country, to express gratitude to the men who fought and died so that we could have it, and instead he used it to put out a hit piece that doesn't string two positive sentences together without a third one framing them as greedy capitalist slave owners. It's just infuriating to me, in no small part because I had high hopes that he'd keep his spin out of it, and I feel dumb now to have had those hopes.

Anywho, rant mode is now powering down.

[Fulcrum]

I watched the Ken Burns documentary, and I liked it. I thought it was well done, and I would recommend it. I learned a lot.

I watched 16 minutes of the Matt Walsh video and had to turn it off at the point where he was complaining that Burns failed to point out that slaves in America had been enslaved by other Africans in Africa before being sold in America and arguing that Philis Wheatley was better off as a slave in Boston than she would have been if she had remained a slave in Africa. It's true that African slaves were captured and sold into slavery by Africans, but it's not relevant to the role that slavery played in the American Revolution, and I don't think leaving that fact out means that the documentary is "propaganda" as Walsh says. I thought the parts of the documentary about how the interests of slaves, slaveholders, and Indians influenced whether they took a side in the war and what side they took. And it also influenced the strategies of both the American and British leaders during the war. These were important factors that I don't really remember being taught when I studied U.S. history many years ago. This is something I learned from watching the documentary.