Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life

4. Watching The Civil War

4 Watching The Civil War 89 Fig. 25. Videotapes of Ken Burns’s The Civil War film became a best-seller in homes and schools. On the cover of this box for episode one is a photograph from the Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia. ∫ Public Broadcasting Service, 1990. T HE MARRIAGE OF history and popular culture that was evident in San Francisco’s Portolá Festival has existed throughout the twentieth century, and not only in civic celebrations designed to communicate a political message to the public. Rest stops along highways are full of racks brimming with brochures for historical attractions designed primarily to make money, which live or die depending on how many visitors they draw through their gates. My morning newspaper displays ads for television and motion picture productions ‘‘based on a true story,’’ trying to amass enough viewers to make a profit for their sponsoring studios or advertisers. History offers a nearly inexhaustible source of tales that can be reworked to maximize their mass appeal. Wars especially seem to furnish stories that make for popular history. The residents of towns such as Orange encounter reminders of past wars not only in the monuments they have placed in countless memorial parks but also in their local movie theaters and on their television screens. Virtually every American war—the Revolution, the Indian wars, the Alamo, World War II, Vietnam—has been the subject of popular commercial films. Yet perhaps no historical film in recent years has had such impact as a nonfiction documentary created for public television, Ken 90 CHAPTER FOUR Burns’s The Civil War. Burns’s film lies at the intersection of academic and popular history, and, as we will see, personal and public history as well. Through close analysis of the public’s response to the film, we can explore a number of questions about the place of the past in American life, and how the mass media history we encounter diverges from the conventional ways in which we think history is communicated.∞ Popular historical productions such as The Civil War, aimed squarely at attracting the largest possible audience, often make historians uncomfortable . In the division between highbrow and lowbrow, as it emerged in the late nineteenth century, the study and writing of history has always been considered a genteel rather than popular art, the product of educated judgment rather than of mass taste. Since the 1920s and 1930s, folklorists and oral historians have ventured beyond traditional elite or professional histories to consider other images and uses of the past, but these studies have scrupulously avoided mass media histories, preferring instead to focus on the indigenous tales of groups seemingly out of the mainstream, such as Appalachian whites, recent immigrants, or former slaves, and thus free of the corrupting outside influence of commercial popular culture. While American studies scholars in the 1950s and 1960s took historical imagery in commercial popular culture seriously, analyzing dime novels, melodrama, and pulp fiction as evidence of the broadly shared myths that held American society together, today we dismiss these scholars’ works as hopelessly out of date, unable to account for the diversity of a multicultural society in which every group is its own historian. The traditional view among scholars is that mass-produced versions of the past homogenize and destroy an authentic sense of history rather than serve as a means for its communication.≤ Professional historians have been especially hard on popular historical films. Reviews of films in professional journals such as the American Historical Review often take the form of warnings that the public is being deluded by what it sees. As Robert Sklar notes, historians watching films about the past feel most comfortable playing the ‘‘cop’’ role, applying the same historical standards they use for books and articles to judge how badly filmmakers such as Oliver Stone have distorted the historical record. Only occasionally have they gone beyond this role to analyze how a film communicates its message about the past, examining how the film was created, how it embodied themes and values typical of the larger culture, or how it was received by reviewers.≥ WATCHING THE CIVIL WAR 91 But even the most discerning analyses have not examined how the people viewing popular historical films actually interpret what they see and hear. We can assume that people watching a popular historical film, like any other popular culture product, do not all see the...