Ken Burns' "The Civil War", and the Assassination of Collective Memory by the Coward Trickle Down History; or BBC's "Wolf Hall" and 'Historical Accuracy', Master of Phantoms (and White Supremacy)

Last year I started watching Ken Burns’ The Civil War on account of the Civil War (as in, the actual war) being kind of in vogue right now. I only ended up watching the first two episodes, but from just the first one it was pretty apparent that…while it’s definitely not in Lost Cause territory, the series is remarkably romantic towards and even nostalgic for the Confederate-era South (minus slavery). Many great scholars have already said this at length, including way back in the show's response/companion book I did end up reading in full, but I always have to remind myself that the U.S. is a chronically low information environment so good points bear repeating even poorly...

Although the book in question, Ken Burns's The Civil War: Historians Respond, has several excellent, critical essays - the late Dr. Leon Litwack's comparison of the documentary to The Birth of a Nation is especially apt considering how influential it had already been by the time of publication (and it doesn't help that the fact it's straight up called "The Civil War" makes it hard to displace) - as a whole, the collection leans in favor of the documentary, and the historians mostly come to bury Ken Burns, not to praise him [Mark Antony/Shakespeare was being ironic so it means the opposite, he actually came to praise Caesar and incite an insurrection against Caesar's political foes]. In fact, one of the writers and Ken Burns himself each have their own entries at the end and get pretty defensive and bring up their rings, and tell Litwack and Barbara Fields et. al. to Google them Chuck...but while posterity has explicitly and implicitly proven Dr. Fields and company correct that this film failed to emphasize slavery and racism as the drivers of the war, propelling reconciliation over reconstruction, I think there's an even more fundamental problem with the "historical" film/TV genre that calls for a reckoning of its own.

The thing is, one common point raised by both supporters and critics among the historians in the book is that the documentary, and historical TV/films more generally, are a tremendous boon for historians and the discipline of History because they get people interested in their subjects, and the knock on effect of their boosting sales of related books - and by extension the public consciousness - makes them a net, if not overwhelming, positive for society.

But are they really…?

Notwithstanding that the principal author this documentary benefited must certainly be Shelby Foote, whose talking heads tellingly credit him as a writer rather than an historian and whose southern debonair folksiness ain’t cute anymore in 2026, I think the self-hating historians (and I weep for the professional self-image issues this country has induced in them) were all of them deceived…cause doesn’t that positive externality, multiplier effect deal sound a little like trickle down economics...?

Surely we're not getting ahead with a percentage of historicity while Foote and Burns etc.'s narrative is being made free to watch on PBS' YouTube channel this very year (the first episode at least, I noticed it up the other week).

But that's using an example of a film that, aside from its thematic flaws, also had quite a few factual liberties taken, as well as plain factual inaccuracies; some examples from the response book are pictures of different subjects being shown onscreen from what's actually being discussed - which I'd agree was a basically reasonable practice given the state of photography at the time, though people should be made aware going into documentary films that they fundamentally are narratives rather than straight or objective records of facts and that little liberties like this aren't uncommon - and the date of Lincoln's death being misstated (FDR's was given instead). What about a historical production that's super "historically accurate", utterly authentic to the period it depicts?    

Wolf Hall is a fantastic show about Henry VIII’s Tudor England (I still haven’t gotten around to watching the last season, though I read the third book when it came out and it was super compelling). Everything is top notch - acting, cinematography, set design, the beautiful natural lighting and Debbie Wiseman score (and period music selections arranged by Claire van Kampen). And of course, the writing - dramatically speaking that is, because the story is revisionist as hell.

It seemingly causes Tudor historian Dr. Estelle Paranque physical pain to witness, basically swapping the historical Thomas Cromwell - villainous reputation - with Thomas More - literal Saint - by casting Mark Rylance as the former and Maester Qyburn as the latter. Even if you were to read Hillary Mantel's page-turners on which the show is based, you would still be getting Thomas Cromwell's perspective (as Dr. Paranque reminds, and also notes that the historical Cromwell is actually kind of obscure). And as much as I've enjoyed David Crowther's The History of England Podcast, or Claire Ridgway's The Anne Boleyn Files, or Dr. Paranque's YouTube Channel that I just recently found out about and her book Thorns, Lust, and Glory: The Betrayal of Anne Boleyn that I just started, it certainly feels like historians are desperately playing catch up to Hollywood and even historical fiction books.

In fact…in a certain sense, Showtime’s The Tudors is actually the more authentic show. Spiritually. No, seriously. I’ve only seen the first season, or maybe the second too (it was a long time ago) because I just didn't find it very compelling on the dramatic merits, never mind the rampant ahistoricity, but as Dr. Paranque points out it does a fantastic job of capturing the toxicity of Henry VIII; Damian Lewis may be the spitting image, but Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ Entourage f***boy turn is such a powerful analogue and does a much better job, as Dr. Paranque often speaks about, of capturing the humanity of these people who really existed in our world at one time...and since those people didn't just disappear overnight before we fell out of a coconut tree, so to speak, viewing "historical figures" through a human lens, as basically similar to ourselves, can give us a better idea of why things are the way they are today - exemplified in the shift to, "it was wrong then and it's wrong now", as opposed to the familiar line of eschewing transposing so-called 21st Century values onto history, when dealing with racism and stereotypes (hm hm...).

And perversely, a more obviously loosely historical show like The Tudors, sexed up as it is for cable and launching a thousand hot takes, does not feed into the misleading standard of historical accuracy the way Wolf Hall does - because point of view aside, top-notch attention to historical detail aside, Wolf Hall is a TV show and can never be more than a tangential glance at the past, not in anywise a clear picture of it. And it sure seems like the greatest (meaning large or immense) effect of the expectation that an historical show can be that "historically accurate" has been to keep Hollywood, broadly conceived, white...I'm sorry, but hopefully the example of Wolf Hall shows why it's hypocritical and absurd to focus so much on, say, the casting of a Black woman, Jodie Turner-Smith, as Anne Boleyn in the eponymous 2021 show when, as again Dr. Paranque would tell you, there are among everything all these very essential things not historically true about Wolf Hall's depiction of Anne Boleyn that I highly doubt most of the viewers who've made that show a classic know and/or much care about, and that certainly didn't generate the same kind of reactions to Claire Foy.

Another example - the Odyssey racist controversy we just had. And I hope to Yah nobody takes The Odyssey as history but you know people do...

[Note - I honestly haven't heard, organically speaking, any furor over The Mirror and the Light's integration of its cast, but I don't look at like, forums and stuff, so don't take that to the bank...but oh my Yogg, the House of the Dragon backlash...]

And to consider historical productions more holistically, as a genre; recently I read most of historian Dr. Alex von Tunzelmann’s "Reel History" Guardian columns (I will return for the rest). And it’s telling that her overall outlook is very forgiving of historical inaccuracies in favor of making good movies; these historical productions, as an institution, are fundamentally not “historically accurate” in any meaningful sense. Selma, the gold standard for a historical film, is very much the exception rather than the rule, and even there it has to be understood that any art necessarily departs from the historical record/reality to some extent, which is why Selma complements and even incorporates, rather than replaces, the historical footage we have of the events depicted.

What (a)historical films and shows are though is incredibly influential - The Tudors, Gladiator, Titanic, 300 (really hard to miss the white supremacist subtext/overtones in 2026 - the “Persians” are literally just Black people), The Social Network (basically a morality play dressed in names from real life), Braveheart (or The Passion or any Mel Gibson “historical” movie except apparently Gallipoli), Walk the Line (apologies to Joaquin Phoenix making his second appearance here, he does phenomenal work, haven't seen Napoleon, but Johnny Cash really comes off as a deadbeat stalker scumbag and also everyone's white), The White Queen etc., Ray, Downton Abbey, Django Unchained (I hypothesize that Quentin Tarantino, through the power of mass media, has done more to propagate the n-word than anyone/thing else in history), True Grit, The King's Speech…I feel like just these works from my lifetime, to say nothing of the countless golden age Westerns or war movies or Gone With the Wind that preceded them, have drastically and indelibly warped most Americans’ (the "moviegoing public") conceptions of the past, and therefore the present and future. Cause to get to the heart of a story, you need to go back to the beginning (again, see The Birth of a Nation)...

And yeah, #OscarsSoWhite. Again, not saying anything new or better than its been said before, but these things clearly bear repeating.

So is there hope? Necessarily, as James Baldwin said. Rebellions are built on hope. I mean, my friend didn't even know about The Civil War (the Ken Burns show) when I brought it up last year. And Sinners was a critical and commercial megahit, full of both history and truth. I've heard The Gilded Age is pretty good too. So let's all try to keep living with great intention, and I'll just leave off with this meme I found on the Crusader Kings II Steam community hub...