Ken Burns' THE WAR

In class this week we are watching some episodes from Ken Burns' The War. The first episode we watched was "FUBAR." This episode detailed several unknown, yet incredible gruesome and disastrous battles and operations from WWII.  Burns seemed to want to present his audience with a specific idea in this episode. His interviewees were all survivors from operations "gone wrong."  While war stories are often told from the perspective of those in charge, political and military leaders, Burns instead wanted to tell the stories of everyday Americans.  He enhanced this goal by focusing in on four American towns and mixing emotional stories from the homefront to brutal images from battle.

On The War's PBS website, there are several videos discussing Burns' and his team's goals in creating this project. In the one below, Burns mentions that they are attempting a great merger between public archives and personal narrative.  I wasn't sure what to expect when viewing his work, but I believe in what I have seen so far that his project holds true to his words.  The film reminded me of typical war documentaries in that it had a narrator, interviews, and images of the war.  However, that Burns is trying to convey a story by focusing in on a single theme in an episode while still telling the larger story is very different from what is typically done in films like these. FUBAR, for example, fulfills its title--the episode is all about the unknown battles, which are unknown because everything about them went wrong.  Further, having interviews of survivors in this particular episode is even more striking because of the nature of these battles. Burns knows how to pull at the heartstrings of his audiences.

http://www.pbs.org/thewar/video_popup_1.htm

Now is this manipulation of sources history?  My first inclination, as a student of history at a major research university, is no.  The information one presents to derive an argument must be factual--correct? However, I think this question begs another important question before it can be answered--who is the audience for this "history?"  For the audience Burns is trying to reach--the every day American who is interested in learning about a major event in their country's history--this is definitely history, because it alerts its audience to the events of the time.  For scholars, however, who can probably point out when Burns fudges his evidence, this is not history, because it lacks accuracy.   I'm not sure if this is a fair way to assess what constitutes history.  But if the goal is to make people learn and understand, then I think Burns is on the right track.