Rose and Corley - A Trademark Approach to the Past

A Trademark Approach to the Past: Ken Burns, the Historical Profession, and AssessingPopular Presentations of the PastAuthor(s): Vivien Ellen Rose and Julie CorleySource: The Public Historian, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Summer, 2003), pp. 49-59Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3379183Accessed: 05/04/2010 05:49

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A Trademark Approach to the

Past: Ken Burns, the Historical

Profession, and Assessing

Popular Presentations of the

rast

VIVIEN ELLEN ROSE AND JULIE CORLEY

A review of Not for Ourselves Alone, a historical documentary film by Ken Burns about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony's leadership of the nineteenth- century women's rights movement, indicates serious concerns about the impact of historical documentary filmmaking on public understanding of the past. New ways to engage the public in the process of historical analysis and understanding are suggested.

If any profession has a stake in the public understanding of the past, it is the historical profession. As teachers, historians invite students to learn about the large contours of history, elucidating the difference between primazy

VIVIEN ELLEN ROSE is the chief of Visitor Services and Cultural Resources at Women s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York, site of the 1848 First Women's Rights Convention. The views expressed are the author's alone, and do not represent the position of Women's Rights NHP or the National Park Service. JULIE CORLEY, a senior managing consultant at LECG, is a professional historian with a master's degree from Arizona State University's Public History Program. Prior to joining LECG, Corley was the director of research for PHR Environmental Consultants, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in professional historical research.

49

The Public Historiana Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 49-59 (Summer 2003). ISSN: 0272-3433 The Regents of the University of California and the

National Council on Public History acknowledge that this article, which is the work of an employee of the federal government, is in the public domain and cannot be copy- righted. Thus the Regents and the National Council hold no copyright for this article.

Send requests for permission to reprint to Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

50 * THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

and secondary sources, discussing historiographical debates, demonstrating methodologies for understanding the past, and arguing over new historical interpretations. As scholars, they use these same skills to try to place the past within the reach of the present, to understand more fully a bygone historical moment and present it in narrative form. For a historical interpretation of the past to be understood, historians need an audience familiar with the use of evidence, aware of previous historiographical haggling, and cognizant of historical argument. In short, for the historical enterprise to continue, historians need a public versed in history.

Yet the general public relies heavily on film, television, and other visual media for information and entertainment, limiting their exposure to even the most finely crafted historical narrative. Although historians have usually eschewed acquiring the substantial skill and artistic ability associated with successful filmmaking, perhaps they should not willingly continue to del- egate the task of presenting historical narratives in non-print media.

In this article, we look at one particular filmmaker and one particular film. We ask whether or not the historical endeavor is advanced by reliance on artists whose medium allows and encourages the blurring of historical fact to create a film narrative promoted as historical narrative. We do not pretend to be filmmakers, nor do we argue that there is no place for filmmakers in the work of teaching about the past. Instead, we consider whether there are standards that could and should be applied to other media as they are applied to written historical narratives: that sources be cited, that secondary sources be explained, that the new or the different interpretation be singled out for examination. To advance our argument, we attempt to read a film as though it were a written historical narrative.

We are quite sure that one reaction to this approach will be to say that films are not history, which is merely our argument in reverse. If films are not history, what are the costs in viewing them as such? Simply put, how do historians best participate in the preparation and reception of historical documentaries? How do they best teach students to analyze films as history and as media? Can historians harness historical documentaries to create a public versed in history? Considering that many important historical move- ments and events are represented by only a very few films, creating something of an interpretive monopoly, how do historians invite the public to an awareness of other ways to understand the pasts portrayed on film?

Ken Burns is perhaps the best-known historical documentary filmmaker. In his acclaimed series on the Civil War (1990), Burns created a trademark visual, aural, and intellectual approach to historical documentary. He re- fined this style in several later projects, including Baseball ( 1994), Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery ( 1997), andJazz (2001), as well as many episodes of PBS's long-running series, The Amerecan Experience. Burns has a loyal following for his on-site location cinematography, use of historical documents, dubbing of voices and natural sound over representa- tive period theme music, and focus on great achievements of American

TRADEMARK APPROACH TO THE PAST * 51

civilization. Through his films, Burns has begun to shape public understanding, not only of specific historical events, but of what histoIy is, as well. Supported by private foundations and public funds, Burns's company, Florentine Films, has also moved beyond film to soundtracks, spin-off books, study guides, and web-based teaching activities, effectively blurring the line between filmmaking and history teaching.

Burns takes the historical profession to task, and his criticism is severe. He claims that historians' work has become so abstruse and specialized that the general public cannot relate to it, and that scholars have killed the public's appetite for history. Burns chooses to engage his audience by tapping into the emotional feelings that '<seem to emanate from the collision of individuals and events and moments in American history" and trying to translate those feelings for the general public. "I hope that in the process we can begin to rescue history from the academy, which has done a terrific job in the last hundred years of murdering our history.''1 Needless to say, Burns has become a gadfly of the academic establishmentS a role he appears to relish.2

Burns claims that he wants to bring a general audience to historical scholarship. Despite his criticism of the profession, advisory boards of scholars and popular authors both serve as resources and as on-screen experts for his films. His talent pool includes both professional and amateur historians. Burns methodically uses academic and popular historians to put forth a story that he, the artist, wants to tell.3 In his lone foray into women's history, Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1999), Burns consulted advisors, but maintained control of the story line, casting historians as sources shaped to his historical narrative. Originally intended to be a film only about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Not for Ourselves Alone focused on Stanton and Anthony's relationship, ignoring other leaders, simplifying and erasing important debates in the nineteenth-century movement, and endingwith a lingering treatment oftheir deaths. By overstating historical fact to make dramatic points, Burns turned two vital leaders of the nineteenth-century women's movement into cardboard soldiers for equality. Unfortunately, unlike written narratives, of which there are several, veiy few films treat Stanton or Anthony. Hence the general public has only Ken Burns's version of their lives and only his understanding of their historical importance.

Burns's consistent focus in film treatments of heroes whether soldiers, athletes, politicians, or musicians has led him to overlook the significance of individuals on their own terms. This is the case with the Stanton-Anthony film. His narrative, largely untouched by more than twenty years of scholar-

1. Interviews by David Thelen, "The Movie Maker as Historian: Conversations with Ken Burns,"Journal of Amerzean History 81, no. 3 (December 1994): 1032.

2. Thomas Cripps, "Historical Truth: An Interview with Ken Burns," American Historical Review 100, no. 3 (June 1995): 741.

3. Thelen, "Movie Maker," 1031-1050. Cripps, "Historical Truth," 741-64.


ship in the new social history, can only treat women as if they were heroic men. In part, his view that "history ought to be sung. ..[in] the Homeric mode...[with] the epic verses...around this 'electronic campfire' [television]" contributes to the mutilation of fact. But his opinion that myth must be included as well as fact "because myth tells you much more than fact about a people"4 is, or should be, an insult to the past and the general public's intelligence.

Notfor Ourselves Alone follows Burns's signature format. The two- episode series, aired on PBS in November, 1999, tells the stoxy of two nineteenth-century women's rights activists in close-ups of historical photographs and sites, fiddle music, repeated use of leitmotif video clips, voiceovers, and interviews with scholars. Like most Burns productions, it received awards from media groups, which failed to consider accurate use of primary sources or the contribution ofthe historical narrative to the general understanding of the past. The 2000 Christopher Award was for "a long- overdue light on the two women instrumental in giving American women the right to vote." (Christopher Awards, selected by panels of media professionals, are for books, film, or broadcast media that "exhibit excep- tional artistic and technical proficiency and unique vision, [are] significantly positioned to impact the widest possible audience. . .and, above all. . .affirm the highest values of the human spirit.") It also won a 1999 Peabody Award for excellence in cable and broadcast media. The award, given by a board of media producers, communications studies scholars, and media relations experts, praised "an enlightening look at two women whom history books have shortchanged" and "a remarkable job of fleshing out [the] historic collaboration between two otherwise disparate women."5

Although groups consistently praised Burns's film, in this case feminists and scholars familiar with Stanton and Anthony's lifelong friendship and political alliance begged to differ. Linda Brazill objected to Burns's "boringly formulaic" treatment, including "saccharine fiddle music" and "dreamy shots of leaves drifting onto a country railroad track," arguing that these devices made history "pretty" when the nineteenth-centuIy movement was anything but. Reviews in the American Histo7ical Review,Journal of American History, andJournalforMulti-Media History criticized Burns's treatment as "bland: not boring, but lacking controversy," "isolated from the thriving field of women's and gender history," and a "safe and popular stoxy...[that] not only oversimplifies Stanton and Anthony's politics [but] ends up shifting the focus away from them entirely."6

4. Cripps, "Historical Truth," 749. S. Peabody Award Citation, "Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady

Stanton and Susan B. Anthony," www.peabody.uga.edu/recipients/search.asp; Christopher Award Press Release, n.d., www.christophers.orgg00awarpr.html

6. Linda Brazill, "Burns Misses Mark This Time," The [Madison, Wl] Capital Times, 18 November 1999; "Burns Tackles Forgotten Era in U.S. Histow," San Jose Mercury News, 7 November 1999; Gayle V. Fischer, "Film Review," American Historical Review 105, no. 2 (2000): 655, also at www.histoxycoop.orgtjournals/ahr/105.2/mr_l.html; Nancy Isenberg,

TRADEMARK APPROACH TO THE PAST " 53

That Ken Burns's work has become '<boringly formulaic," 'Cbland'' and "safe and popular" while shifting focus entirely away from his protagonists bears investigation, both in terms of visual and aural film elements. One of Burns's cinematographic signatures is a single shot repeated throughout the film. In the Stanton-Anthony piece, the leitmotif is autumn leaves falling onto a railroad track. Because the shot is not associated in the film with any particular event in either Stanton's or Anthony's life, its meaning is ambigu- ous. The red maple leaves are visually striking, but unanchored in the narrative. They may be a stand-in for the relationship between Stanton, Anthony, and their reform vision. Although autumn is the time of harvest, in Burns's narrative, the only harvest of Stanton's and Anthony's efforts was the passage of the l9th Amendment, which they did not live to see. Falling leaves, associatedwith the comingwinter, could also be read as an indicator of the futility of these two reformers' life-long mission to effect change in women's social and legal status. Though pretty and poignant, the image gives no clear message about the meaning of the historical events in which Stanton and Anthony invested their lives. Is it meant to? Or is it a branding device, as repeated images are in other works, used to demonstrate clearly that Ken Burns made this film? Its meaning is unclear.

Similar visual stand-ins shade the line between historical fact and historical fiction. In film treatments, historical periods, regions, buildings, and sources can and are altered or arranged to represent something else. In Not for Ourselves Alone, the 1848 Seneca Falls convention is placed not in the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel where it occurred, but in an unrelated struc- ture preserved in the Genesee Country Village and Museum in nearby Mumford, New York. The Elizabeth Cady Stanton House, fitted with furnishings that were not hers, was used for sequences about Stanton's children. Likewise, although historical photographs are used, they may not be of the historical subject being quoted, or may be of different events or places than those being represented in the film. Here Burns's need to create the past as film, as a "set" where representations are as good as fact, blurs the line between evidence and interpretation.7

Burns is known for choosing signature music to accompany his films, meant to carry the mood ofthe film. In this music, Burns often blurs the line between the past and the present. Viewers do not know whether the music is contemporaneous with the historical period or merely sounds old.

"Movie Review," Journal of American History 87, no. 3 (2000): 1149-51, also at www.historycoop.org/journals/jah/87.3tmr_4.html; Rebecca Edwards, "Film Review," The Jourrlal for Multi-Media History 3 (only available on-line) at www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol3/ ourselves_alone/ourselves-alone .html.

7. Mary Kay Glazer, "Not For Themselves Alone: Ken Burns, the Nation's Leading Storyteller, Focuses on the Birth of Women's Rights" at http://www.seawaytrail.com/99AR- CHIVES/article_womensrights.asp describes Burns's use of the Stanton House, and an- nounces his acceptance as honorary chairperson for fundraising for the Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester, N.Y. Forthe filmmakers' description of use of stills, see alsowww.pbs.org/ stantonanthony/filmmers/interview.html.


"Ashokan Farewell," the fiddle music that began and ended every segment of the "Civil War" series, which was mistaken by many listeners as a period piece, was composed by t-wentieth-century folk musician Jay Ungar. Ungar and Molly Mason provide the music for Notfor Ourselves Alone as well, and again, contemporary and historical settings are mixed throughout.8

This might have been avoided had the musicians had more time for research and for matching scenes to music. The musical record from the 1840s through the 1920s includes many forceful, bright, and lively pieces which might have been used to good effect, including waltzes, polkas, and mazurkas dedicated to the reform costume, the Bloomer Dress, revisions of Iyrics of well-known hymns to support civil and working women's rights, and marches and operas supporting women's suffrage. Music from the nineteenth-century women's movement, which might have reinforced points about the women's rights movement in general and Stanton's and Anthony's strategies and struggles in particular, is missing from this film. It is arguable whether music that one reviewer said "readily and wonderfully. . . fades into the background" accurately represents the vital, energetic, and influential Stanton and Anthony.9

Burns would not have been able to make this film without decades of work by Ann Gordon, Ellen DuBois, Judith Wellman, and others who have painstakingly gathered documents, edited and annotated letters, and written biographies or topical monographs that reconsidered previous scholarship. But his narrative is marred by a failure to understand the field or the various analytical perspectives that have been brought to bear on the nineteenth-centuIy women's rights movement. It focuses on biography to the exclusion of historical understanding, casting Stanton and Anthony as heroes among a field of coworkers, and failing to take into account emerging scholarship contesting Stanton and Anthony's sole leadership of the nineteenth-centuIy women's movement.l° In addition, Burns actively shapes interviews with his on-film experts, cutting off statements that do not fit his narrative line and losing rich analytical and descriptive opportunities. Ex- planatory voiceovers and on-camera interviews are selected as much for

8. See, for example, The Civil War: Traditional American Songs and Instrumental Music Featured in the Film By Ken Burns: Original Soundtrack Recording, Nonesuch, 1990; and Not For Ourselves Alone: Soundtrack, Warner Recordings, l999.

9. Jimmy Smith, "Soundtrack Review," PopMattersInc., 1999, also at www.popmatters .com/music/reviews/soundtracks/soundtrack-notforourselvesalone.html.

10. Ann Gordon (ed.), Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Papers: In the School of Anti-Slaver (Vol. 1) (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, l999); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America,- 1848-1869 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978); Ellen Carol DuBois (ed.), Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (Chicago: Northeastern University Press, 1992); Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Judith M. Wellman, "The Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks" Jou1nal of Women's History 3 (Spring, 1991): 9-37; and Judith M. Wellman, The Roatl to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Wornan's Rights Convention (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, forthcom- ing).

TRADEMARK APPROACH TO THE PAST a 55

dramatic appeal as for their contribution to the narrative. One historian featured in Not for Ourselves Alone remarked that Burns worked from scripted questions and that "he lets you know his expectations right off the bat. He wants sentence answers, and he cuts you off if the answers go into the tpical professorial paragraphs or even pages.'2ll

Burns's manipulation of evidence, his mistakes (such as photographs of individuals or places that do not match the text), and his omission of issues that do not fit his stoty line, grate on many historians.l2 These are attributed to artistic license, and perhaps Burns expects his scholarly advisors to evaluate histotiographical arguments and nascent scholarship for him. Yet Not for Ourselves Alone does not appear to have incorporated recent scholarship that challenges the idea presented in his film that Stanton and Anthony were the only, or even the most important, leaders of the nineteenth-century women's rights movement. He overstates his evidence with the use of one on-film expert's statement that "there would be no women's histoiy" without Stanton and Anthony. He ascribes successful annual na- tionalwomen's rights conventions between 1850 and 1860 solelyto Susan B. Anthony. He ignores the critical postbellum Kansas campaign and gives short shrift to Stanton and Anthony's newspaper, The Revolution. He might have explored Stanton and Anthony's political and strategic differences and their mutual and separate achievementsn rather than simply retracing the well-trodden triumphal march to the passage of the Nineteenth Amend- ment after their deaths. Stanton and Anthony's stoiy suffers not only from the film and music setting into which it is forced, but also from Burns's unwillingness to engage histoly.l3

11. Sally Roesch Wagner, "New Women's History Videos," NWSA Journal 12, no. 2 (July 31, 2000): 181.

12. See, for instance, Catherine Clinton, "Noble Women as Well," 6140; Eric Foner, "Ken Burns and the Romance of Reunion" 101-18; Gary W. Gallagher, "How Familiarity Bred Success: Militaty Campaigns and Leaders," 3749; Leon Litwack, "Telling the Story: The Historian, the Filmmaker, and the Civil War," 11940, in Robert Brent Toplin (ed.), Ken Burns's The Civil War: Historians Respond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); A. Cash Koeniger, "Ken Burns's The Civil War: Triumph or Travesty?" The Journal of Military History, 55 (April 1991): 225-33; and Jeffrey St. Clair, "Now That's Not Jazz," Michigan Chronicle 64, no. 32 (May 8, 2001): D2.

13. Nancy Isenberg made some of these criticisms in her review of the film for the Journal of American History (cited above.) Scholarshxp available to Burns, which might have brought interesting interpretive focus to the film, include Blanche Glassman Hersch, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionism in America, 1830-1860 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York City, 1789-1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986); Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Sylvia D. Hoffert, When Hens Crow: The Woman's Rights Movement in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana UniversitPress, 1995); Julie RoyJeffrey, The Great SilentArmy of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in theAntislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: UniversityofNori Carolina Press, 1998); Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebell7wmAmerica, (Chapel Hill: Universila,7 of North Carolina Press, 1998); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women and the Strugglefor the Vote (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).


Yet this film also illustrates that documentary film treatment may not be able to do historical justice to all historical themes. If the frame in which a historical argument is presented teaches as much about the past as the argument itself, viewers of Burns's films learn a metanarrative of U.S. history focused on great people and events, a blurred distinction between fact and illustrative fiction, and a past filled not with people but with things: old documents, old pictures, old places, old things. The stories he tells are not necessarily those of the historians he consults with, but rather are the "vision of the artist.''l4 As Burns himself readily admits, "I'm interested in telling stories, anecdotes''l5 and seeking an "emotional consensus" with the audience by "lifting up the rug of history and sweeping out some ofthat dirt.''l6

There is great value in storytelling; there is even a place for myth when presenting the past and, certainly, Burns is entitled to put forth a stoIy from his point of view. But if we historians are to participate with Burns, or with other members of the media, we need to understand how the filmmaking process works. Burns closely controls the artistic content of his productions, and a small group of people (co-producers and writers) do the majority of the historical research on his projects.l7 Such a dependence on amateur and/ or in-house historians affects the outcome of research findings and ulti- mately, the story presented to the general public. His understanding of the past actively interferes with and undermines the work of scholarship, which is to understand historical events in their own context, to evaluate sources carefully, and to use things as evidence of actual people and events. Burns's formulaic cinematography and musical treatments, while artistic, detract from the historical endeavor by confusing past and present. Reducing complex historical topics to simplistic stories may be entertainment, but if Burns's intention is to bring history to a general audience, he has done histoxy and the public a disservice.

These are not mere quibbles. They expose the dangers of letting filmmakers like Ken Burns shape the popular historical vision. How is the profession, let alone the nation, served by students and a general public that has learned to equate histoIy with bland films that are isolated from scholarship? If media producers are unable to evaluate historical analysis with scholarly credibility, to whom do they turn for legitimization? What particular historical vision is presented to general audiences? More to the point, what is the general public learning about histoxy, and what impact does this learning have on the field itselfT'

Were Burns introducing the general public to serious scholarship, as he claims is his intention, perhaps these questions would be moot. But his cottage industry of accompanying study guides, on-line teaching tools, and

14. Thelen, "Movie Malcer," 1034. 15. Thelen, "Movie Maker," 1035. 16. Cripps, "Historical Truth," 747. 17. Thelen, "Movie Maker," 1036.


popular press books insure that few will move beyond his conception of the past. For Notfor Ourselves Alone, General Motors funded a high-school study guide, PBS created web-based curriculum supports, and scriptwriter and contract historian Geoffrey C. Ward published a companion volume of script rehashes and essays. The latter received critical reviews from Kirkus and Library JcBrnal, as well as becoming one reader's primary source of choice: Barnes and Nobles' website posted a reader's review: "Buy it. It's great for a research paper." Burns's film is cited, along with the standard monographs, in Kathi Kern's Mrs. Stanton's Bible. That Burns products are treated seriously as sources for research and are cited in scholarly monographs gives us pause. Burns is replacing scholars as consultants on curriculum-building exercises and as a source of scholarly analysis. In addition, he is replacing historians with the local audiences of nationally significant places. For example, Burns signed copies of the Ward volume at the film premiere in Seneca Falls, rather than staging signings for books by his professional and on-camera experts. There are few historians with Burns's star power, but rather than introducing the public to scholarship, he focuses on himself and materials created by his stable of authors.l8

Not content to move into markets formerly held by historians, Burns competes successfully at the local and state level for educational and tourism dollars, promoting his films both as good educational products and as ways to increase tourist visitation to fuel flagging local economies. It is worthwhile to consider, again, what public monies from local and state education and tourism funds could achieve if given to the historical profession in the form of grants to work with local communities and teachers to showcase historical research skills and the history of the local area. Credits for Notfor Ourselves Alone indicate that Burns garnered major funding from local schools and from New York State's Of fice of Tourism, in addition to foundation grants. A glance at the credits of his more recent films confirms that this pattern continues. Burns profited by the legitimation provided by the scholars who graced this film.l9

Quite apart from whether Burns's filmmaking process, consultation with scholars, and creation of cottage industIy scholarship present general audiences with skewed understandings of the past, with Notfor Ourselves Alone Burns also supplanted historians in the fields of local development and preservation. Local boosters were thrilled to host Burns: 'Xle thank Ken Burns. . .for focusing the world's attention on our community and welcome the many visitors who will come to see the historic sites," Seneca Falls, New

18. http://shopaol.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry; Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton's Bible (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 226; for Ken Burns's responses to historical questions from PBS viewers, see www.pbs.org/stantonanthony/filmmakers/ filmmakers_forum/forum .html.

19. In addition to other funding, Burns received a $200,000 grant from New York State to produce the Stanton-Anthony treatment. See www.nylovesbiz.com/Press/1999/burnsrel.htm for the rationale for providing state revenues to boost local economies.


York luminaries stated. Because he is so well known, his agreement to serve as honorary chairperson of a fund-raising campaign for the Susan B. An- thony House in Rochester, New York, raised needed dollars for a matching historic preservation grant.20

If professional historians are irked at Burns's successful film treatments of the events they have struggled to understand and portray using professional historical standards, it might be time to exercise new options in shaping public understandings of the past. Historians can learn to represent historical scholarship more effectively in public speaking and on camera; we can engage in film criticism in our local and regional media outlets; we can insist on historical expertise on evaluation boards for media awards; we can work through our professional associations to publicize media awards given by the profession via national media outlets; and we can consider training ourselves and our students to analyze media for historical soundness or to create media that represents the past accurately and interestingly.

Few academics have learned how to communicate effectively within Burns's and other documentary producers' world that is, to give speeches and on-camera interviews that tell historical stories in concise, compelling ways. Remaining on message, or returning quickly to one's main point in front of a camera or microphone, is a skill that requires training and practice. Commentators should be able to distill the essence of a historical argument and place it in terms that reach a general audience. Although providing such on-camera presence would not provide control over the historical narrative in film or television, at least our contributions might be more often used and, thus, support more accurate history. Furthermore, our understandings of sources and events might be presented as we understood them, rather than as minor elements of the filmmakers script.

Historians could begin, through film reviews or short op-ed pieces, to expose the shortcomings inherentin mediapresentations ofthe past. Media analysis pieces in local papers could help readers analyze film as well as other kinds of visual or narrative presentations, by illustrating how sources have been used or misused and directing them to more reliable sources. Indeed, historical documentaries could be used as discussion points for libraries, schools, Rotary, and Chambers of Commerce, with historians seiving as guides to what has been left out and what stoxies still need to be told.

When giving awards that honor the historical contribution of a particular film, historians could make the evaluation process count toward educating the public not only about facts but about the process of history. Through their professional associations, historians could insist that media awards

20. "Two women who changed history to be honored in village where it began," Seneca Falls, N.Y. ReveiUe/Between the Lakes, 23 September 1999; www.susanbanthonyhouse.org/ news/burns.html for Ken Burns's press event announcing his support of the Susan B. Anthony fundraising campaign.


groups include historical expertise on the judging boards of their annual, extremely well-publicized award presentations. Perhaps an agreement could be reached to publicize the awards given by historical associations for historical documentary films at the same time. Historical associations could also nominate and advocate for films that accurately portrayed the past.

Another option is to teach students how to read historical documentaries for evidence of the tools of history: for use of sources, for narratives that mismatch or misrepresent the accompanying visuals or that inadequately illustrate historiographical debates about the meaning of the event being presented, for narrative-structures that support historical inquiry. And historians might choose to learn how to do the work themselves. If the consensus history of the past was, as Leon Litwack points out, "not so much an absence of sources as a failure of historical imagination and commit- ment,''2l then perhaps we historians of the "new history" should ask ourselves if we are again failing to use our imagination in ways that can engage the general public. Whether or not one believes that Burns's trademark approach connects with audiences or teaches them anything about the past, his is not the only treatment option. Web, video, radio, film, and television all need trained historians to evaluate and present information; this is even more important when the topic involves historical analysis. Although history and media programs are beginning to appear, undergraduate and graduate history programs ought to consider ways to give students the opportunity to produce web, video, radio, film, or local access television presentations about historical topics, and academically-based historians might be given credit toward tenure and release time for such efforts.

In our opinion, it is more than time for historians to learn the languages of the marketers of the past, and to use these languages to expand their own audiences. This is important not only because Ken Burns has created his own historical industiy that encourages a public retreat toward a "consensus" histoxy of heroes and great men and women, but because histoxians cannot continue to fail to engage the public if they wish to have any ability to shape an understanding, not only of the past, but of the process of doing history.

21. Leon Litwack, "Telling the Stoxy: The Historian, the Filmmaker, and the Civil War," in Robert Brent Toplin (ed.), Ken Burns's The Civil War: Historians Respond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 124.

Documents

Rose and Corley - A Trademark Approach to the Past