New perspectives on how history is made
The PBS series on Vietnam may have made a big splash. But that doesn’t mean it’s the last word on the subject.
The film is well made, engrossing, and fundamentally wrong in key respects.
It doesn’t deserve an award for its content.
And they’re upset about that.
She won all the prizes for her history of Vietnam, but scholars don’t think much of “Fire in the Lake.”
America lost in Vietnam but won the Cold War beyond it.
These ratings results mean The Vietnam War is the second-highest-rated Burns/Novick film of the past two decades, following The War in 2007.
She generally likes the film but worries that the emphasis on stories may obscure larger meanings.
His documentary on Vietnam mocks the young who fought for social change.
Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s implicit “honor the troops” undertone makes this documentary a platform for the neo-orthodox culture war players.
An Interview with Co-Director Lynn Novick
He says the tapes show Nixon’s Vietnam policy wasn’t solely motivated by his re-election prospects.
There’s one big reason that academic historians turn up their noses at his popular documentaries: sour grapes.
We weren’t and our history of imperialism proves it.
Why the US waged war in Vietnam.
He’s more storyteller than historian and that weakens his series considerably.
The war opened the credibility gap. What we’ve learned since has only widened it.
“So much of what I thought I knew just turned out not to be correct,” says Novick.
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