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Most of the interviewees talk in the lugubrious tones of the defeated. We all know the story ends badly. But when it’s over, we aren’t told why we lost. The music is more memorable than the pictures, and the pictures are more compelling than the narration. We are deluged by sights and sounds but not enlightened as to cause and effect. The film casts the antiwar movement in a moderately favorable light. Are the protesters the real heroes here? What about the valiant US soldiers, 75 percent of whom were volunteers?

Leftist slant but informative. We had our opportunities with Ho Chi Min but it would have meant quitting on the French. Russian/Chinese expansion as well as the development of nuclear weapons may have handcuffed us. Dividing the country was was made to look like Korea redux-probably true. A complete misunderstanding of what's going on in other cultures. 57k lost lives later we haven't learned our lesson in the mid-east. Ken Burns gave us the 'well intended' bone.

In the ongoing debate about Confederate monuments, Slate has republished a 2011 article by professor James M. Lundberg attacking Ken Burns’ monumental “Civil War” documentary. Although he concludes with an appreciation of Burns’ achievement, he disapprovingly notes the series’ sentimental tone and points to problems such as its “tidy vision of national consensus,” being “deeply misleading and reductive,” and its “careful 15 minute portrait of slavery’s role in the coming of the war” being nearly negated by Shelby Foote’s 15-second anecdote about a “ragged Confederate who obviously didn’t own any slaves” telling his inquiring Union captors that he’s fighting “because...

It's interesting, but last night there was a 1982 western on TV ("The Shadow Riders"-with Sam Elliot and Tom Selleck) and I'm pretty sure it looked like Ken Burns stole his 'Civil War' (1990) 'style' from the 'Shadow Riders' introduction. Can someone check that out and let me know if my take on that isn't too wild?

PBS is planning to run a new documentary series this September on the Vietnam War, produced and written by Ken Burns. Burns is a left-wing "historian" and documentary film producer with a history of having his politics shape the narrative of the story he is telling, with a number of resulting inaccuracies. Ken Burns correctly identifies the Vietnam War as being the point at which our society split into two diametrically opposed camps. He is also correct in identifying a need for us to discuss this aspect of our history in a civil and reflective manner. The problem is that...

Ken Burns claims, “For nearly forty years now, I have diligently practiced a conscious neutrality in my work.” This “neutrality” includes the following: In 2008, the Democratic National Committee chose Burns to produce the introductory video for Senator Edward Kennedy’s Democratic National Convention speech, which, according to Politico, presented Kennedy as “the modern Ulysses bringing his party home to port.” When Burns endorsed Barack Obama for the U.S. presidency in December 2007, he compared Obama to Abraham Lincoln. In 2012, Burns wrote, “Like FDR, Obama has walked us back from the brink. He averted a depression, ended one war and...

Ken Burns has finally emerged following Donald Trump's election victory. It took over a month for that to happen since as Burns described, he "needed some time in the fetal position." Well now that the shock is starting to wear off, an interesting phenomenon has taken place which was noted by Dilbert cartoon creator, Scott Adams: the rapid evaporation of hallucinations of Trump as Hitler previously held by Burns and others. 

Few celebs have been more rabidly anti-Trump than Ken Burns of PBS documentary fame. If you had seen his Stanford commencement speech which was in reality an anti-Trump speech earlier this year, you would know what I mean. The way he sounded is that it would mark the end of the Republic if Trump were elected. Therefore right after the election I kept looking for what I thought would be the inevitable Ken Burns anti-Trump rant. It did not come. It is as if Ken Burns was so shaken up by the election result that he was paralyzed and unable...

Josh Feldman at Mediaite pointed out that star PBS filmmaker Ken Burns is out on cable television ranting the liberal line again. The program was Amanpour on CNN International after the debate on Thursday. Christiane Amanpour, his fellow Obama enthusiast, was interviewing him about his latest PBS documentary on saving Jews from the Nazis, which they both naturally thought offered Republican parallels. First, they freaked out about Trump refusing to concede defeat 20 days before the voting ends and before anyone knows who won: AMANPOUR: What do you make first and foremost of the major Republican candidate refusing to accept...

Charlie Adler was watching a Ken Burns documentary the other night about an American couple who went to Europe during the 1930s and ‘40s to help save Jews from the Nazis. It got him thinking about presidential candidate Donald Trump and the upcoming election. Not that the liberal Attleboro activist is comparing Trump to Hitler, but he said he is concerned about what could happen to America if Trump is elected.

Ken Burns still can't get over his obsession over Donald Trump. Last June, in his Stanford commencement speech, the documentary filmmaker with the outdated Beatle haircut went all drama queen over the candidacy of Donald Trump. Well, he still can't get Trump out of his mind even if he is unable to speak his name.In an interview with Carl Quintanilla, host of CNBC's BINGE, Burns takes us on a troubled trip deep into the heart of liberal darkness. His obsession is mostly amusing but he still continues to pretend that he is "nonpartisan" which is an easily disprovable lie. The...

If Donald Trump wins the presidency this November it appears documentary filmmaker Ken Burns might need to be fitted out for a straitjacket. If you have any doubt of this, then take a look below at the unhinged rant Burns performed during his commencement speech at Stanford University yesterday. Rather than ditching outright partisanship for the day out of respect for the victims of the tragic terrorist attack in Orlando, Burns decided to stick with his prepared speech to declare his crazed obsession about Trump. The self-proclaimed "yellow dog Democrat" just couldn't give politics a rest yesterday of all days....

Sullivan Ballou Letter July 14, 1861 Maj. Sullivan Ballou The following is a letter written by Maj. Sullivan Ballou to his wife Sarah (née Shumway) at home in Rhode Island. Ballou died a week later, at the First Battle of Bull Run. He was 32. BallouPortraitCamp Clark, Washington My very dear Sarah: The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days - perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more. Our movement may be...

Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns told host John Dickerson he believes America is still a racist nation, and those who have questioned the legitimacy of President Obama’s birth certificate, namely, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, have done so as an alternative to using the N-word.

“Today, there’s nothing new under the sun,” intoned hallowed PBS filmmaker Ken Burns as he lamented the persistence of racial inequality in the United States in a commencement address at Washington University in St. Louis. So reported USA Today College. Recalling the lofty text of the Declaration of Independence, Burns reminded his audience that Jefferson, the declaration’s author, owned more than 100 slaves. Jefferson’s hypocrisy is alive and well today, opined Burns, in the form of “color-blindness” that he believes ignores the reality of structural racism. Burns -- a dogmatic liberal who made a shameless Ted Kennedy-boosting Democratic convention film...

My seventh-grade son recently wrote a U.S. History paper extolling the virtues of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. “It ended the Great Depression,” he wrote with great certainty. He’s only 12 and parroting what the history texts and his teachers told him. That’s his excuse. What’s Ken Burns’? Mr. Burns’ docudrama on the Roosevelts — for those who weren’t bored to tears — repeats nearly all the worn-out fairy tales of the FDR presidency, including what I call the most enduring myth of the 20th century, which is that FDR’s avalanche of alphabet-soup government programs ended the Great Depression. Shouldn’t...

Let’s start with the end. When it’s over — when you make it through the marathon that is Ken Burns’s beautiful, seven-part documentary “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,” which begins Sunday night on PBS — you may find yourself with a lingering, nebulous grief. You’re sorry it’s over. You’re sorry they’re over. You’re sorry a certain expression of American ideals is, or often appears to be, completely over. My study habits haven’t improved since college; like an idiot, I put off watching all 14 hours of “The Roosevelts” until I absolutely had to watch them on a deadline binge this...

Tomorrow evening begins the first of Ken Burns' 14 hour documentary on PBS, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. The good news about this documentary is that we can be sure it will be free of any political advocacy since Burns has no bias and..... Huh? Am I kidding? Of course I am. The fact is despite Burns' laughable denials, he is a bitterly partisan Democrat to the extent that he gave a speech  in 1998 in which he declared himself to be a "Yellow Dog Democrat." The speech was also chock full of scathing attacks upon Republicans which makes his...

The film-maker's 14-hour marathon has a psychological subtlety and depth unprecedented on television. ... It's Ken Burns's documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, a masterpiece even by his standards. The Civil War (1990) was hailed as the best series of its kind since The World at War. In a way, it was even more impressive since the absence of moving images meant that Burns had to rely entirely on photographs – an inventive necessity that has become one of his trademarks.

Twenty-five years ago, Trisha Meili—“the Central Park jogger”—was a 28 year-old employee for a prestigious Manhattan investment banker when she was mercilessly beaten, raped, and left for dead by thugs. Meili lost approximately 80 percent of her blood. Her skull was fractured to the point that her one eye had popped out of its socket. On the scale of 3 to 15 that neurologists use to gauge brain functioning, Meili’s was assigned a rating of 4. She spent nearly the next two weeks in a coma, with experts expecting her to die. This crime became a racially explosive issue,...