This class will be a continuation from fall 2024.  During the first two-hour class session we will have a discussion of evolving understandings of the nature of history and popular rationales for its usefulness.  We will contrast “public history” and history as a scientific/scholarly discipline and the tensions between the two.  Finally, we will address, how professional historians’ understanding of the American experience evolved in our lifetimes, explore how revisionist understandings of our past that first appeared circa 1965 to1980 dramatically challenged more traditional understanding of our national experience and discuss how this has trickled down to curious non-scholars via various aspects of American popular culture.  We will conclude with a Burns “short” that offers a clearly controversial take on our “foundational saga.” This revisionist-informed take on the encounter between Native Americans and European newcomers will illustrate how and why Burns’ documentaries earn both acclaim and criticism.

For each of the remaining class sessions, we will watch clips of at least an hour from five Burns documentaries.  At the beginning of each class session, a brief review of how historians’ views on these topics have evolved will be presented.  At the end of each session, we will conclude with a brief discussion of how Burns addresses these topics and why some more traditional-minded Americans decry his attention to “divisive concepts.”