History That Doesn't Suck - 144: A Conversation with Ken Burns - Storytelling and the American Buffalo

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Professor Greg Jackson sits down with legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns about his latest film The American Buffalo which has a two-part premiere in the US on PBS beginning Monday, Oct. 16, 2023.   Some refer to Ken Burns as a historian, but he would be quick to tell you that he considers himself a storyteller. His latest documentary The American Buffalo is a sort of biography of the American bison, or the buffalo as they are more commonly known. The fact is, we would only know of buffaloes from history books if it weren’t for a collective effort to save this species from the brink of extinction in the late 19th century. It’s a remarkable story of how conservationists and hunters alike pulled together to repair some of what had been pulled apart by unchecked slaughter and displacement of wildlife and indigenous peoples.  HTDS listeners will recognize some of the historical context surrounding this tale from our episodes on the Indian Wars, the Transcontinental Railroad and Teddy Roosevelt. ____ Connect with us on HTDSpodcast.com and go deep into episode bibliographies and book recommendations join discussions in our Facebook community get news and discounts from The HTDS Gazette  come see a live show get HTDS merch or become an HTDS premium member for bonus episodes and other perks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. I'm Tracy.

And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. What did it take to survive an ancient siege? Why was the cult of Dionysus behind so many slave revolts in ancient Rome? What's the tragic history and mythology behind Japan's most haunted ancient forest? We're Jen and Jenny from Ancient History Fangirl. Join us to explore ancient history and mythology from a fun, sometimes tipsy perspective.

Find us at ancienthistoryfangirl.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, my friends. This is Professor Greg Jackson, and welcome to a special episode of History That Doesn't Suck. We're going to return to our narrative episodes slogging through the trenches of World War I in a couple of weeks, in time for the 105th anniversary of the Armistice and Treaty of Versailles. But today, I'm thrilled to share with you my conversation with legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns about his latest film, The American Buffalo, which has a two-part premiere in the U.S. on PBS beginning Monday, October 16, 2023. Some refer to Ken Burns as a historian, but he would be quick to tell you that he considers himself a storyteller. The late historian Stephen Ambrose once said of Ken Burns' films that, quote, more Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source, close quote. I'm not exactly sure how to quantify a statement like that, but it's certainly fair to say that Ken's films are an indelible part of American history telling. We do know that his 1990 The Civil War

was the highest rated series in the history of American public television and attracted an audience of 40 million during its premiere. I was only seven years old when that nine-part series premiered in September of 1990. And now, today, I count this and many of Ken's later films as important influences on my own journey to becoming a history scholar and storyteller. His latest documentary, The American Buffalo, is a sort of biography of the American bison, or the buffalo as they are more commonly known. The fact is, we would only know of buffalos from history books if it weren't for a collective effort to save this species from the brink of

extinction around the turn of the 20th century. It's a remarkable story of how conservationists, industrialists, and hunters alike pulled together to repair some of what had been pulled apart by unchecked slaughter and displacement of wildlife and indigenous peoples. As you listen to Ken and I chat, I'm sure you'll recognize some of the historical context surrounding this tale from our episodes on the Indian Wars, the Transcontinental Railroad, and of course, Theodore Roosevelt. And one last thing before we get to the interview. I want to remind everyone that I'm currently on tour with the live show. I wrote the show specifically for the stage. It's titled The Unlikely Union. Think of it as the first 100 years of American history told in 100 minutes, with all the history telling and sound design you love about the podcast, plus lights, video, live musicians, and me on stage. So head over to

htdspodcast.com slash tour for cities and dates, including two shows in my home state of Utah on Veterans Day weekend. That again is htdspodcast.com slash tour. And I hope to see you out on the road. All right, without further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome Ken Burns to History That Doesn't Suck. Ken Burns, so pleased to have you with me here today. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you, Greg. It's a pleasure. You've made so many iconic films, films I grew up watching,

still enjoy very much with my own kids, from the Civil War to the Brooklyn Bridge, the Roosevelts, and now it's the American Buffalo. I'd love to just hear why the American Buffalo. What's taking you in this direction for this one? Well, it's the American buffalo. I'd love to just hear why the American buffalo. What's taking you in this direction for this one? Well, it's interesting. We've been thinking about this for literally decades. In fact, the other day after we locked the picture, we were hunting through the archives

and came across, stumbled across an old, very well-developed proposal from the mid-90s about doing a standalone story of the buffalo, kind of first biography amidst, you know, a couple dozen biographies that are in our portfolio, the first biography of an animal. We touched on it in our mid-90s series on the history of the West. Obviously, the buffalo figured prominently on the observations of Lewis and Clark in that 1997 film in our history of the national parks. It was an even bigger role, including some scenes that we've sort of resurrected to play in this new one. We wanted to tell the story of an animal because we knew that it would bring with it the story of the people who for 10 to 12,000 years are intimately connected with the life of the buffalo, that

is to say indigenous people, Native Americans. And also in the last couple hundred years, the white Europeans and then later the Americans who overspread the continent without a regard for those people and with the idea of decimating the buffalo, obviously following sort of market demands, but knowing that there was another added benefit, I say that in quotes, in that if you destroy the buffalo, you destroy the Indian, and that you made it more easier to sort of put them onto reservations and make them docile and to take over the land, which had been theirs for 600 generations, and the relationship with the buffalo for 600 generations. And it's really

then becomes many more substories. It's, of course, in a positive sense, a parable of de-extinction. That's a good story. The buffalo is not extinct. There were 30, 35 million at the beginning of the 19th century in 1800. And by 1885, there were fewer than a thousand. Nobody could find any wild and free outside of Yellowstone. And by 1885, there were fewer than a thousand. Nobody could find any wild and free outside of Yellowstone. And maybe there were two dozen there. We don't know. And the rest were in zoos or in private collections. And so this was a really perilous moment, but we brought it back from that. This is also, it connects us to all the various corners of American history, particularly the most pernicious myths that we

suffer from, the superficial ones about manifest destiny without ever considering the consequences. You know, it's the Marlboro man dying of cancer. It's a very complex story. And I think it's also raises real questions about what the relationship, what our relationship is to the natural world. Do we wish to be utter tyrannical masters, as has been our want for the last few generations, or do we wish to have a more symbiotic relationship? And we kind of think that these two parts are the first two acts of a third act play that will be written by the rest of us. Having saved the buffalo, do we have the courage to create ecosystems large enough that they roam wild and free? So there's sort of tossing it ahead, I think,

in the way that all good history does, is it describes a moment in the past, but it's speaking because human nature doesn't change, to the present, and also perhaps describes the possibilities of a future. And this is all without any kind of didacticism. It's baked into the how we like to tell stories. So I think it's a perfect project. And I have to say, Greg, finally, that I'm so glad I waited more than three decades to do it because I hope our chops as filmmakers, as storytellers got better. But I also know that rather than with a kind of noblesse oblige or with a certain perhaps paternalism or even patronizing, we let other ideas in. In this case, we have the courage and the ability to just seed other ways of thinking about everything. I mean, there's a moment when

George Horsecapture Jr., a member of a small tribe in north central Montana on the Fort Belknap Reservation, the Ana'i people, says, my cattle, my land. And all of a sudden you realize the centuries of this momentum, the inertia of movement of the idea of property ownership gets called into question by native peoples who don't have exactly that point of view. And it's so interesting to have your molecules rearranged or at least challenged for a time. And that, of course, is another element of good storytelling, we hope. Yeah. A number of things,

said a lot of things there that take my mind several different directions at once to kind of go back to the very start of this most recent film that you've made. It was really powerful to me, the juxtaposition that you throw out to the audience right out the gate where you're talking about the innumerable herds of buffalo when Lewis and Clark are making their ways across the continent. And then you jump forward just in a sentence a century later and describe an expedition that... Can't find any. Right, they can't find any. Three months they search and they cannot find a single buffalo. I think that really is a very powerful way to illustrate the very point that you just made here.

Well, let me put a finer point. That's part of our prologue and it's deliberately designed to say, here are Americans, the first white Americans going into this unknown territory, which is not unknown to other people. There are at least 30 to 40 nations in their route forwards and back that see, as you say, countless numbers of perhaps 30 to 35 million bison. We have no idea how many, of course, but certainly those are all reasonable numbers and maybe conservative. But let's just put a finer point on it, which is this is the largest slaughter of wildlife in the history of the world, period. Right? I mean, this is not just the buffalo. The buffalo are the main victims, but we're talking about elk and grizzly and wolves and coyotes and other sort of, as the biologists say, megafauna.

And what was our American Serengeti, a loud, chattering set of animals and plants in great diversity, is a kind of silent monoculture now. And so what happens in the 19th century, first with the market pressures, we want their tongues. Oh, no, we want their hides to create leather to drive the belts of the Industrial Revolution. Oh, we're running out of buffaloes, cut their head off and put them in saloons or in my trophy room. Oh, let's just take the bones, clean up the crime scene, as one of our historians says on camera, and make the most money that anybody made in the chemical industry. In fact, the largest industry in Michigan was the Detroit Carbon Works, grinding up the bones to use in various concoctions. And so you just kind of shake

your head as if the hide hunters would just strip the hide off and leave 800 pounds of meat when native peoples had used everything from the tail to the snout in every aspect of their lives. It's a great complex story with lots of figures who suddenly have hitting on the idea that the buffalo and the Native American are now our totemic symbols. We're fetishizing and romanticizing something that we've spent the last century trying to annihilate. And so there's complicated dynamics and undertow to the layers of the story, almost like a grand canyon of contradictions in the story of the buffalo that helps us, I believe, understand ourselves more clearly. Well, I've always appreciated the complexities that you get into when you tell stories and

kind of the duality that's always a presence. In American history and frankly, human history, that is who we are as a species, right? We are always every generation individual. We are capable of such goodness, generosity, and abject evil, frankly. Yeah. And good history is always going to face that painful reality. My listeners are fairly familiar with Theodore Roosevelt and his conservation efforts. They had a whole episode on that. Let's go ahead and get into some of that duality and dive a

little bit deeper into the conservation aspect. What would you say within the emergence of conservation that starts really at the presidential level with Theodore Roosevelt and starts to move forward? What do you think are the big things someone should have in mind as they think about the buffalo? So what happens is the conservation movement, I think it's difficult for people now, 100 years beyond it, more than 100 years beyond it, is really born from hunters, people who want to kill buffalo like Theodore Roosevelt and can't find enough to kill. And they merge with more thoughtful people like George Byrd Grinnell, who keeps by the way a naturalist, George Byrd Grinnell, and writer, keeps a buffalo skull on his desk. Whereas Theodore Roosevelt displays the trophy heads at Sagamore Head.

That's a big distinction. And so together they form the Boone and Crockett Club with the idea that there could be something called sustainable hunting. And that's the beginnings of it. And it's okay. That's the way it is. And then, of course, the conservation movement grows and morphs into many different things, not just saving spectacular landscapes and big wildlife, but understanding historical and cultural things for their historical and scientific values. And then ecosystems, the Everglades looks like a nothing thing, but it's one of the most diverse habitats on earth that could easily be

endless strip malls and golf courses and resorts right now. Sure. Apparently, TR's fifth cousin, Franklin Roosevelt's famous song was Home on the Range, so we're always looking for a place where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play. Well, you know, it's funny that you mentioned that lyric because that does kind of speak to that fascinating two-sided nature, again, that we have here in the United States, where, yes, there's this idealized image of the home on the plains, this very rugged experience, and yet you also talk about the strip malls plains, this very rugged experience. And yet you also talk about the strip malls that could easily be there today. We like to say, you know, if there

were no national parks, then Zion and Yosemite would be gated communities. The Grand Canyon would just be lined with mansions. It would be really hard. Maybe there'd be a public access view. Yellowstone would be an old and down on its luck place called Geyser World. And I've already described the fate of the stuff. There's an interesting thing, Home on the Rains is a really amazing piece of writing because there's got a last verse that I was trying to look up that I love because it speaks to that duality, Greg, that I think you're trying to understand. So we want to give us a home. We're already romanticizing a frontier that Frederick Jackson Turner has told us is closed. But the narrator, the speaker says,

how often at night when the heavens are bright with the light from the glittering stars, have I stood there amazed and asked as I gazed if their glory exceeds that of ours. So here you have human beings once again, and in this case, American human beings, believing that their point of view is the center of the universe, that how could the stars possibly have it as good as we have it here? In a place in which we've actually, for the most part, denuded it of its flora, made it a monoculture, as I said, have murdered most of its animals and taken its indigenous people away and isolated them in things we call reservations. And then even after giving them relatively a large amount of

land, we then further through the Dawes Allotment Act, take that away too and open that up for white settlement, usually because there might be an underlying interest in what's underground, oil or gas or gold or whatever it might be. But whatever it is, the native people have no voice in this, none whatsoever. And so 300 separate nations that occupy what is the continental United States just get sort of brutally pushed aside. And if they push back, then the brutality becomes even more severe. You know, we've done a few episodes on Indian wars. My listeners are very familiar with that history, Frederick Jackson Turner, Wounded Knee. But as you're talking, something that comes to mind for me is thinking about reservations in the present.

I realize this is taking us perhaps a little bit outside of the American buffalo, as you conceived of the film. But as you did this, and I know I saw you did an excellent job of bringing in a lot of indigenous voices, particularly when we compare it to what we're perhaps used to seeing in a documentary. What experiences did you have either engaging with indigenous communities or getting to know perhaps a little bit of life on reservations that you think would be a value for the average listener to hear and think about? Yeah, I just think we have to understand how much more dimensional they are than whatever our conventional wisdom is. I don't know what everybody's thinking in their hearts of what they think about an Indian reservation. A lot of it has to do with sort of wrecked cars next to a trailer with alcoholism and crime and whatever, and a kind of funny, difficult relationship with white people that surround them and weird governance and stuff like that. We can just change a little bit about that. There are more Native Americans now than at the time of Columbus. The tribes are incredibly organized in many cases. Those problematic things like alcoholism and drug abuse and poverty do exist and are persistent and at

unacceptable levels. The Vietnam War was subject of a film I made. The percentage of Native Americans who served is higher than any other group, so that these are loyal and patriotic Americans who you could give a pass, given our treatment of them, to that, but have been hugely important in all of our wars. And so you get a chance to understand that a native population is not frozen in whatever superficial view we might have of them, but a much more complex and organic set of cultures, sets of language,

sets of tradition that we are duty-bound with our better selves to honor. We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, Ken and I talk about the art of storytelling. It's a master class you will want to hear. When Johann Rall received the letter on Christmas Day 1776, he put it away to read later. Maybe he thought it was a season's greeting and wanted to save it for the fireside. But what it actually was, was a warning, delivered to the Hessian colonel, letting him know that General George Washington was crossing the Delaware and would soon attack his forces.

The next day, when Rall lost the Battle of Trenton and died from two colonial Boxing Day musket balls, the letter was found, unopened in his vest pocket. As someone with 15,000 unread emails in his inbox, I feel like there's a lesson there. Oh well, this is The Constant, a history of getting things wrong. I'm Mark Chrysler. Every episode, we look at the bad ideas, mistakes, and accidents that misshaped our world. Find us at ConstantPodcast.com or wherever you get your podcasts. From the creators of the popular science show with millions of YouTube subscribers comes the MinuteEarth podcast.

Every episode of the show dives deep into a science question you might not even know you had, but once you hear the answer, you'll want to share it with everyone you know. Why do rivers curve? Why did the T-Rex have such tiny arms? And why do so many more kids need glasses now than they used to? Spoiler alert, it isn't screen time. Our team of scientists digs into the research and breaks it down into a short, entertaining explanation jam-packed with science facts and terrible puns. Subscribe to MinuteEarth wherever you like to listen. Fantastic answer. Thank you. Can we talk a little bit about storytelling itself? Sure. So, I believe firmly that history, as complex and difficult as it can be, and sometimes does not give itself to a single narrative. In fact, often does not give itself to a single narrative.

Right. Yet, history is best told when it retains that human element, when it- That's right. When we tell a story. Stays a story. Yeah. So, history is mostly made up of the word story plus high, which is a good way to begin a story. Sure. I do understand that there was a kind of bankruptcy to old narrative, which is entirely top-down. The United States was just a series of presidential administrations punctuated by wars. It's seen by the time of the

end of the Second World War bankrupt in an extreme, and you found the historical community, the academic historical community, understandably sort of being seized by particular forms of historiographies. I think first Freudian was a good late 40s, early 50s attempt to filter through a Freudian analysis. Then later Marxist and economic determinists. You've had symbolism and symbiotics and queer studies. You've had Afrocentrism and whatever it might be. There's been lots of ways to sort of look at it. possible, in fact, in that old-fashioned narrative, to include all those different points of view. And so we've sort of adhered to the idea that we're our storytellers, but uninterested merely in that top-down. We wish to have a bottom-up that is not unforgivingly revisionist, that it throws out any of the top-down stuff, and at the same time is very much aware of the conflicts that you suggested that exist not only between people in human nature, but within people in human nature. And so we're reveling in the greed and the generosity that you find not just between different manifestations of people, but within manifestations of a single person. The same thing with Puritanism and purience and virtue and

vice. All of these things are paired together. In our jazz series, Wynton Marsalis said to me something on camera that just stuck with me for decades, which he said, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. Yeah, that's powerful. Yeah, it's really powerful. And I put up in our editing room a neon sign in cursive, lowercase cursive, that said, it's complicated. And there's not a filmmaker, it's really powerful. And I put up in our editing room a neon sign in cursive, lowercase cursive, that said, it's complicated. And there's not a filmmaker on earth that when you've got a good scene that's working, you don't want to touch it. And all I've done most of my professional career, my professional life, is to touch those things that seem untouchable because we've learned new and potentially contradictory information. It just makes it interesting. We're working on a history of the American Revolution after the glorious victory. At Yorktown, George Washington points to these regiments and said, okay, you guys go there and round up the black Americans who have fled to the British lines, promise freedom, and send them back to their plantations. You know, that sign you have in and of itself kind

of captures that whole point. I mean, it's a contraction, so we'll call it three words, but it's complicated. It's such a simple sign and it conveys that whole messy point. With the American buffalo, making the buffalo itself the protagonist, what unique challenges did that present in terms of having those complications and yet trying to get yourself to a streamline where you can tell a narrative and a story that has this main character? Yeah, I think every film has a unique set of challenges. Interestingly enough, I think focusing on the buffalo was liberating in some ways. It got us to de-center everything else, right? And in the de-centering, it allows you to kind of reset or recalibrate a relationship to, say, a dominant

white American culture, or even to privilege in some sort of reverse thing, kind of a just knee-jerk revisionism, native culture. So it permitted through the act of seeing it through the eyes of the buffalo. I don't know if you've ever been in proximity of a buffalo. I have, and it was majestic. Yeah. And their eyes have seen everything. It's sort of like, you know, when we were working on the national parks, you always felt like the sequoias of the Redwoods had just witnessed centuries of stuff. And our lives just blipped by. And yet there's a kind of silent witness to them. The buffalo seem in that way kind of witnesses to all the pain and tragedy, but all the promise of what's been going on.

So in some ways, it was liberating. As you know, every attempt at storytelling is really, really difficult. And it's particularly true when it's based in fact, where it's history or documentary films, because you can't make stuff up. You can't conflate characters or change countries or nationalities or divide characters into more than one or condense more than one character into one. So how do you edit a human experience which seems wild and chaotic and try to put a shape around it while keeping a kind of moral compass and an accuracy, keeping these old 19th century things about virtue and honor intact in the storytelling? And it's, of course, incredibly difficult. And that's

why we have the sign, it's complicated. Now, as you mentioned, looking into the eyes of the buffalo, seeing the sorrow, seeing the promise, what would you say after making this film? What's the promise that you see as you do try to... Obviously, we're talking about a historical film, but as you said at the beginning of this interview, you mentioned the way that this does kind of look forward as well. What would the promise be in your mind? I think the promise would be that, you know, at the beginning of our second episode where we've watched The Descent, I mean, it is really Dante's Inferno. And the second episode is not Paradiso, but it's beginning to rise out of the inferno towards, as I said, the good news.

The buffalo is saved. It's not going extinct. And in a time of climate change, when we will begin to see many large mammals go extinct, and we'll go, wait a second, I really like that animal. And it's going to be, sorry, bub, it's just gone now. The buffalo offers a sense that human beings could do something. At the opening of that second episode, Wallace Stegner, quoting him, the buffalo offers a sense that human beings could do something. At the opening of that second episode, Wallace Stegner, quoting him, the great writer about the West, said,

you know, human beings are the most dangerous species on the planet. And every other species, including the planet itself, has reason to fear us. But we're also the only species that when we want to can save another. And that I think is embodied in it. This is like Lincoln's first inaugural when he's trying to appeal to the better angels of our nature. It didn't work. The worst side of us obtained for the next four years. But I think we all know that there's this other thing, this prick of conscience. In fact, in 1913, we come out with an Indian head nickel. An Indian we know who was modeled on and a buffalo on the back. We know which animal was modeled on and who was sent

immediately to the meatpacking district in Manhattan and carved up, right? But it shows that we're beginning to fetishize and beginning to romanticize and beginning to center these two forces that we spent, as I said, a century trying to get rid of. And George Horsecapture Jr. again comes in and just says, you know, makes me wonder, why do you destroy the things you love? I think that is a very human complication in and of itself. We do that all the time, even in our personal lives, don't we? In our personal, of course we do. And that's why his thing, it feels like it comes from God, like he's a holy man who's just dispensed some indispensable wisdom, almost like Wynton saying, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. Well, and I'll say, Ken, storytelling in and of itself, that's part of how we build a relationship with whatever, whether it's an object or a species or people. I think about Victor Hugo, it's a work of fiction, but his

Notre Dame de Paris, that he was highlighting a forgotten, forsaken, overlooked cathedral that most of us in the 21st century and in my childhood in the 20th, we couldn't fathom Paris without it. And the whole world mourned when the cathedral caught fire a few years back. Your work on the Brooklyn Bridge, it personified this bridge. It made it come to life. And it makes it a more real and tangible thing as we hear the stories of the Roeblings and those surrounding the bridge. And I'm absolutely confident that American buffalo, it's likewise. Well, getting that story in front of a larger populace, it's just going to make the buffalo, again, in a personified sort of way, become something that we think more about and are more concerned about. Two little stories from my childhood that may be germane.

I'm the son of an anthropologist, and I grew up with, as many kids did in the 50s and 60s, with a map of the United States. My map had the political divisions of the states, but no states. It had only the list of native tribes. And I can remember as a boy seeing the first buffalo in a zoo and just being so amazed and drawn to it. The second story is from high school when I, at Ann Arbor, Michigan Pioneer High School, in 11th grade, I took a course in Russian history by a guy named Randy Peacock. And he really, it goes back to the beginning of our conversation, he just lit this class on fire. He said, we're going to cover, you know, from 1861 when the Tsar freed the serfs to 1917, the beginning of the Russian Revolution. But today, I want to get your attention by telling you how Rasputin was murdered. And they're usually in a high school class in the mid-1960s. There are the people in

the back drawing pictures of horses' heads in their notebook and people who are not paying any attention and maybe passing notes or whatever. Within about five minutes, everybody was listening and had their mouths open. Because he took a story in which, as you probably know, Rasputin was poisoned, he was stabbed, he was shot, and he was still dumped in the Neva River and still trying to get up out of it before he actually perished. And, you know, I was there. He had me at hello, but everybody else was like, what?

Sure, sure. I thought history was boring. I thought I had to take this course in order to, you know, get out of here. Right. Instead, he... Instead, truth is stranger than fiction. Yeah. And well, that's exactly right. And I think that's the important thing is that people have presumed as a documentary filmmaker through most of my professional life that this

was somehow some lower rung on a career ladder that would eventually lead to making a feature films. And I don't feel like it. I think that there, you know, you can't make some of the stuff up just in the story of the Brooklyn Bridge or, you know, as Shelby Foote wrote to me, he said, as we were working on the Civil War and struggling in editing, he said, you know, God's the greatest dramatist. And I said, Shelby, what do you mean? And he basically was telling me it's in then and then and then. So people get their knickers all tied up and not over Vicksburg versus Gettysburg. But Vicksburg first is fall.

But actually how it happens is you start with Vicksburg one, you do Gettysburg. And when that's over, Vicksburg two. And that's just in then and then and then. God's the greatest dramatist. But he then said, you know, think about it. You win the war on Friday, and then early the next week, you figure out you have enough time to go to the theater. Yeah, that's a pretty powerful way to put it.

Ken, I want to thank you so very much. It's my pleasure and honor to be able to speak to you. I've been watching your movies since I was a kid. You're part of what's taken me down the path that I'm on. So thank you very much for your time today. It's been wonderful. It's great to have a real conversation about history. I really enjoyed this. Sometimes the thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. It's complicated. And that's why we tell stories. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did.

Ken Burns' latest documentary, The American Buffalo, premieres on October 16th on PBS here in the United States. And I'll be back in two weeks to tell you a story. History That Doesn't Suck is created and hosted by me, Greg Jackson.

Special thanks to today's guest, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. Episode produced and edited by Dawson McCraw. Production by Airship. Sound design by Molly Bach. Theme music composed by Greg Jackson. Arrangement and additional composition by Lindsey Graham of Airship. Home on the Range, licensed via Pond5. For a bibliography of all primary and secondary sources

consulted in writing this episode, please visit htbspodcast.com. HTDS is supported by premium membership fans. You can join by clicking the link in the episode description. My gratitude to Kind Souls providing additional funding to help us keep going. And a special thanks to our members, whose monthly gift puts them at producer status. Ellen Stewart, Bernie Lowe, George Sherwood, Gurwith Griffin, Henry Brunges, Jake Gilbreth, James G. Bledsoe, Janie McCreary, Jeff Marks, Jennifer Moods, Jennifer Magnolia, Jeremy Wells,

Jessica Poppock, Joe Dobis, John Frugal-Dougal, John Boovey, John Keller, John Oliveros, John Radlavich, John Schaefer, John Sheff, Jordan Corbett, Joshua Steiner, Justin M. Spriggs, Justin May, Kristen Pratt, Karen Bartholomew, Cassie Conecco, Kim R., Kyle Decker, Lawrence Neubauer, Linda Cunningham, Mark Ellis, Matthew Mitchell, Matthew Simmons, Melanie Jan, The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic

characters in modern history. Look for The Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.