Person

Ken Burns

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Title card for Burns and Novick's Vietnam War documentary.

‘The Vietnam War’: Past All Reason

The new series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick is mesmerizing. But it doesn’t answer key questions about the Vietnam War.
Napalm explosion in Vietnam.

Episode-by-Episode Reviews: "The Vietnam War"

Watching Ken Burns' latest epic with a historian who has written extensively about the war.
Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, and fliers advertising jazz performances.

Jazz Off the Record

In the late 1960s, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, jazz legends were playing the best music you’ve never heard.
Soldiers sing at the end of the day in Vietnam, January 1968.
partner

The Soundtrack to Vietnam War History Isn’t Quite Historically Accurate

Why rock overtook every other genre to define our understanding of America at war.
Phil Little Thunder, a great-great-grandchild of the Lakota chief whose village was attacked in 1855.

How Recovering the History of a Little-Known Lakota Massacre Could Heal Generational Pain

The unraveling of this long-buried atrocity is forging a path toward reconciliation.
Shelby Foote with a drawing of a Civil War battle superimposed over him.

The South’s Jewish Proust

Shelby Foote, failed novelist and closeted member of the Tribe, turned the Civil War into a masterpiece of American literature.
Route of Horatio Jackson's and Sewall Crocker's coast-to-coast road trip in 1903.

The Coast-to-Coast Road Trip is 120 Years Old

In 1903, a doctor bet $50 that he could cross America by car. The first coast-to-coast road trip in history took 63 days and cost $8,000.
Ken Burns speaking into a microphone.

Shaming Americans

Ken Burns’s "The U.S. and the Holocaust" distorts the historical record in service of a political message.
Jackie Robinson wearing his baseball uniform.

Revisiting the Legacy of Jackie Robinson

The Christian, the athlete, and the activist.
The Almanac Singers playing various instruments, including guitars, a banjo, and an accordion.

"Which Side Are You On, Boys..."

Watching the Ken Burns series on the U.S. and the Holocaust and thinking about American folk music.
Black and white photo of children holding signs about remembrance, at a depot in New York City to greet their parents after a mass strike parade in 1911.

The Building Blocks of History

A lively defense of narrative history and the lived experience that informs historical writing.
Carrie Nation

Carrie Nation Spent the Last Decade of Her Life Violently Destroying Bars. She Had Her Reasons. 

Nobody was listening, so she brought some rocks.

The Forever War Over War Literature

A post-9/11 veteran novelist explores a post-Vietnam literary soiree gone bad, and finds timeless lessons about a contentious and still-evolving genre.
6 Black Americans celebrating Juneteenth in 1900.

Reunion, Juneteenth and the Meaning of the Civil War

What would it mean to define the Civil War as a necessary and crucial final step in the long, even more tragic history of slavery in America?
African Americans gather near a Confederate monument.

The Confederacy’s Long Shadow

Why did a predominantly black district have streets named after Southern generals? In Hollywood, Florida, one man thought it was time for change.
Picture of DeFord Bailey holding a harmonica amplified by a gourd.

The Unsung Black Musician Who Changed Country Music

From the moment DeFord Bailey stepped onto a stage in Nashville, country music would never be the same. Decades after his death he finally got his due.

An Unfinished Revolution

A new three-part PBS documentary explores the failure of Reconstruction and the Redemption of the South.

Why Trump Could Pardon Jack Johnson When Obama Wouldn’t

On the white privilege of being able to ignore the racial context of Johnson's Jim Crow-era conviction.
The April 1966 cover of “Ramparts," featuring a caricature of Madame Nhu dressed as a Michigan State University cheerleader

The University That Launched a CIA Front Operation in Vietnam

A Vietnamese politician and an American academic led Michigan State University into a nation-building experiment and pulled America deeper into war.

What the Press and 'The Post' Missed

Leslie Gelb supervised the team that compiled the Pentagon Papers. He explains what Steven Spielberg's new film gets wrong.