![]() ![]() His remarkable, heartfelt words did the impossible – they took a boring page from history and made it more emotional than any Hollywood movie. It was written to Ballou’s wife a week before being mortally wounded at the first battle of Bull Run. Most famous is actor Paul Roebling’s reading of an obscure letter from a Union officer named Sullivan Ballou. Not everyone watched it from top to bottom, but there are parts everyone remembers. In the ensuing years I’ve found that many in my peer group have had similar repeat encounters with the show. “Yes, I’ll go to bed soon, but just after I hear the reading of the Gettysburg address.” (A technique he did not invent, but was later dubbed by Apple editing software as the Ken Burns effect.) The Civil War always seemed to be on just when you needed it, like a lazy summer Sunday afternoon that turned into night and continued straight on to the wee hours. Some of my most comforting memories are being on my friend’s parents’ couch, nodding off to soothing fiddle music as narrator David McCullough rattles off facts about Pickett’s Charge, Burns’s camera floating over haunting photographs. (We were lucky, or perhaps cursed, to live in an area that would get New York, Philadelphia and the rarely watched New Jersey public stations, so this meant triple the Civil War ubiquity.)ĭespite the deep subject matter, I find The Civil War incredibly relaxing. ![]() Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, you could always count on Burns to come back with The Civil War during a pledge drive. But PBS was OK because they’d show Monty Python reruns and concerts. During my late teen years I fell in with a group of snobs, and we prided ourselves on only using our televisions when we’d rent indie, foreign, classic or underground films on VHS. What I didn’t realise then was how this 11-and-a-half-hour documentary would have a hold on me for the rest of my adult life. While I was definitely more inclined to opt in to a public television historical program, film-maker Ken Burns’s nine-night masterpiece managed to engage and enrich everyone. We weren’t covering the civil war yet in history (we were still at 1066) but an executive decision was made for us to skip ahead a little bit. It was 1990 and everybody was buzzing about the battles of Shiloh, first and second Manassas, Antietam and Gettysburg.
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