Ken Burns and the Problem of Simply Showing What Happened

Jul 5, 2025

At Politico, Nathaniel Moore argues that Ken Burns keeps himself out of the culture-war battlegrounds by effectively making the history he tells very agreeable.^[1] Moore uses Burns's upcoming American Revolution film, which comes out this November, and his own impressions of the film's screenings and its audience, to make his case:

But in the comfort of such charming entertainment lay the trouble: Burns seemed to have gone out of his way to make sure no one could have a problem with him. Indeed, there was little in his movie to challenge anyone’s beliefs, whatever their politics. The film gives reverential treatment to the familiar founding ideals of equality and democracy — values most sides of the culture war can agree on in theory, if not in practice — but maintains neutrality on the question at the heart of the revolution: When, if ever, is it just and necessary to resort to violence in the pursuit of political ideals?

I liked this brief article's consideration of Ken Burns's style and method a lot. So much so that I might assign it to my Historical Research and Writing students this fall. A lot of students come into the classroom thinking about historical research as simply allowing the sources "to speak for themselves."

That's the sort of idea Burns peddles here, in describing the film's approach:

“We wanted to rid ourselves of the fashions of historiography,” Burns summarized at one event, “and make a film that simply shows what happened.”

To the author's enormous credit, he calls bullshit on this:

This line went down well with the crowd but brought the project’s limitations into focus. This kind of “just the facts” claim, while posing as humility, in fact masked Burns’ grandiosity. There is no story of the past that is told without a concept of historiography. Whatever you write, you are taking a stance on your subject and on the practice of history itself. The suggestion that other historians are not also interested in “show[ing] what happened” is, at best, careless.

I would have liked to have see even more development here linking Burns's particular aesthetic and style of historical storytelling back to this 'just the facts' approach and its problems. Moore describes the familiar Burns style as applied to the upcoming film:

To that end, Burns has drawn from his usual toolkit to make The American Revolution. Laura Linney, Morgan Freeman and other famous actors read from contemporaneous letters and journals in voiceover. Professional reenactors, shot always with faces hidden, run with muskets in fields, wash clothes in the river, feed fibers into a spinning wheel. Sometimes, between scenes, an old piece of parchment, written in an old-fashioned hand, is posed on a table under flickering candlelight; other times, paintings from the period, glorifying the war, appear with slow, zooming shots on a face, a man on the barricades, a cannon.

All flaws aside, what makes Burns' films engaging to watch are this particular language he uses, where he sews sources and visuals together to tell a story in a matter that makes them seem naturally coherent and whole. He relies on language pulled directly from sources, which gives the production a shine of authenticity -- and that's justified!

But this approach is problematic insofar as it encourages the viewer to think that Burns is just telling it like it is, that he's making "a film that simply shows what happened" by relying on the sources themselves. It elides the hand that chose those sources and arranged them, that combined them with visuals, that fashioned from them a story.

In the context of the History Wars of our time, Burns's style gives the impression that telling history is unpolitical - just tell what happened! - that we unnecessarily add politics to it. This is what Carly Fiorina says toward the end of the article:

When I interviewed Carly Fiorina, the former Republican presidential candidate and chair of the commission behind the events, she made it plain that she considered it enough to present the history without commentary. “Telling people what lesson to take from history?” she said disparagingly. “That’s playing politics.”

The obvious question to me here is: then when, and how, do we decide what lessons to take from history? ⊕ I wonder about the origins of this idea: when did it develop? How? Why? This is a very common position, something echoed by my students and certainly repeated by politicians: that historical interpretation, and particularly taking lessons from history, is something to be done privately, as though we need to protect ourselves from the undue influence of others. As though historical interpretation and application is fundamentally a personal affair, sacralized as a matter of conscience, like a religious belief. I wonder when and how that belief developed...

Burns is a master at making it look like there is a version of history that can be told without politics, like holding the onions on a sandwich. What takes work, with my students, is getting them to see narrative precisely where it is most invisible. In Burns's films and similar projects, that means pulling back the curtain a bit and encouraging them to think about other ways you might tell this story.

Look for the seams in the project that seem a bit unkempt and unruly, those that are stretching a bit, those that require a bit more strength and effort to hold together whatever it is they are tasked with holding together.

This is one of the things that I try to work through with students again and again in the classroom. Perhaps if I can get them to see the narrative (and the politics!) in a Burns film, they will be better equipped to spot it just about anywhere.