The Civil War (miniseries)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Civil War documentary miniseries arrived on PBS on the 23rd of September 1990, and for five consecutive nights, it stopped America in its tracks. More than 39 million viewers tuned in to at least one episode. Night after night, an average of more than 14 million people sat with the slow movement of old photographs, the sound of a mournful fiddle, and voices reading letters from the dead. No program had ever drawn that kind of audience on public television. What made a nine-episode film about a war fought more than a century earlier become the most-watched program in PBS history? And what happens when a documentary becomes so powerful that historians worry it has replaced the history it was meant to illuminate?

• 2. The Photographs That Started It

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  Mathew Brady's photographs were the spark. Looking at Brady's images of the dead and the living, the scarred battlefields and the exhausted faces, filmmaker Ken Burns decided he had the raw material for something no one had attempted at this scale. The series ultimately drew on some 16,000 contemporary photographs and paintings, combined with excerpts from letters and journals written by people famous and long forgotten. Production ran five years. The film was co-produced by Ken's brother Ric Burns, written by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ric Burns with Ken Burns, and edited by Paul Barnes. Buddy Squires handled cinematography. The funding came from a coalition of institutions: General Motors, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. What emerged across nine episodes totals more than ten hours and moves through the war's military, social, and political dimensions at once.

• 3. Voices From the Dead

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  David McCullough narrated the series, but the voices inside the film run far deeper than a single narrator. A large cast of actors read correspondence, memoirs, and news articles, standing in for figures including Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Walt Whitman, Stonewall Jackson, and Frederick Douglass. Diaries by Mary Boykin Chesnut, Samuel R. Watkins, Elisha Hunt Rhodes, and George Templeton Strong were all read aloud, threading private voices through the public history. Authors and historians appeared in interview: Shelby Foote, Barbara J. Fields, who was a professor of American history at Columbia University, Stephen B. Oates, Ed Bearss, and others, including poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren and former Congressman James W. Symington. Among the most unusual voices belonged to Daisy Turner, then a 104-year-old daughter of an ex-slave, whose poetry features prominently in the series. Turner died in February 1988, more than two years before the film aired, making her presence in the documentary a kind of time capsule.

• 4. The Sound of Longing

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  Jay Ungar composed "Ashokan Farewell" in 1982, and he described it as coming out of a sense of loss and longing after the annual Ashokan Music and Dance Camps ended. By the time Burns chose it as the documentary's theme, the song was already a decade old. It plays twenty-five times across the nine episodes, and it is the only modern piece of music in the entire film. Listeners found it so perfectly suited to the imagery that many assumed it was an actual Civil War song. That confusion became so widespread it had to be addressed directly. Ungar performed it with his band Fiddle Fever alongside pianist Jacqueline Schwab, who also arranged many of the 19th-century songs used throughout. Musicologist Alexander Klein wrote about Schwab's arrangements in detail, noting that songs like the southern "Bonnie Blue Flag" and the northern "Battle Cry of Freedom" were transformed by her playing from rousing marching tunes into something closer to piano lamentations. "Ashokan Farewell" went on to become the first ever single release for the Elektra Nonesuch label, which also released the full soundtrack album. A major vocal piece in the series is a version of "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder", performed a cappella by Bernice Johnson Reagon, a singer, scholar, and activist; the song appears on Reagon's album River of Life.

• 5. The Technique Becomes a Term

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  The series' slow zooming and panning across still photographs was something Burns had developed as his method, but it was this documentary that made the technique famous enough to earn a name. The phrase "Ken Burns effect" entered the vocabulary of filmmaking and software design alike. When the series was remastered for its 12th anniversary in 2002, editor Paul Barnes reflected on the original production's constraints. He noted that when the film was completed in 1989, the team was working under a very tight schedule and budget, and that he had always wanted to go back and improve the overall quality. The 2002 remaster, released on September 17th of that year by PBS Home Video and Warner Home Video in both VHS and DVD formats, worked from the film's interpositive negatives and included a soundtrack remixed in 5.1 Dolby Digital AC3 surround sound. A short documentary on the DVD explained how a Spirit DataCine was used in the transfer. That remaster remained in standard definition. For the 25th anniversary of the series and the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination, a complete 4K ultra-high-definition digital master was created from the original 16mm camera negatives, preserved at the George Eastman House. The restored version aired on PBS from September 7 to 11, 2015, with Blu-ray and DVD editions following on the 13th of October 2015.

• 6. Honors and Aftershocks

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  The series received more than forty major film and television awards. Among them were two Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, the Producer of the Year Award from the Producers Guild of America, a Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Award, a D.W. Griffith Award, a People's Choice Award, and the US$50,000 Lincoln Prize. Before the broadcast, the Civil War had receded in popular historical consciousness since its 1960s centennial. After the series aired, books and other works about the Civil War surged. The series was rebroadcast in June 1994 as a lead-up to Burns's next series, Baseball. A companion book was released shortly after the original broadcast. In 1996, historian Robert Brent Toplin edited a book called Ken Burns's The Civil War: Historians Respond, which gathered essays from academic historians who felt their subjects were underrepresented, alongside responses from Burns and others on the production team.

• 7. The Criticism That Followed

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  Shelby Foote received more screen time than any other commentator in the series. Foote was a journalist and novelist, not a trained historian. His framing of the war's causes as a "failure to compromise" reflected one view, but academic historians broadly agree the war was fought to preserve slavery. Burns presented Foote's framing without adequately challenging it, critics argued. The fact that Burns and most of his production team were not historians, and that most were also white men, has been cited as a reason the series gave limited coverage to women, Black Americans, and the Reconstruction period that followed the war's end. The series has also been criticized for propagating the Lost Cause ideology, which presents the Confederacy in a romanticized light. Because the documentary became so central to how many Americans understand the Civil War, some critics have argued that its blind spots are not merely academic failures but carry real consequences for public understanding of the conflict's legacy.