AHR Forum
Schama’s Britannia
LINDA LEVY PECK
ON JUNE 29, 1604, WILLIAM CAMDEN presented a paper entitled “Of the Diversity of
Names of This Island” to a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries in London.1 Together with his colleagues, the author of Britannia addressed the historical roots of
the names of Britain, Albion, and England, just as the House of Commons debated
King James’s proposal for the Union of England and Scotland and began the process
that created a unified state and a United Kingdom. Flash-forward four hundred
years. Simon Schama’s A History of Britain, the most ambitious treatment of British
history ever created for television, aired on British and North American television
between 2000 and 2002. Conceived and written in the late 1990s with devolution in
the air and European Union legislation overriding English law, it presented the
growth of the unitary British state even as that very construct was being deconstructed.
Schama, a brilliantly direct narrator, vividly evokes personalities, analyzes complex issues, and makes immovables—stately homes, landscapes, and stones—speak.
He embeds his narrative with anecdote and microhistory that add texture, interest,
and often novelty. In this he combines the skills of the narrative historian with the
new historicist. Schama’s A History of Britain, in fifteen hour-long TV episodes and
the books based on them, has enjoyed significant popularity, bridging academic and
popular history with easy mastery. The audience for Schama’s series is broad, from
students who love British history to a general public of all ages eager to learn more
about the past—their own and others’.
Schama’s A History of Britain poses several questions. The first, why a narrative
of British history, and why now, can be answered in part by the BBC’s desire to tell
the story of one history that in some ways was coming to an end. But as historians,
we are equally interested in asking other questions. How British is Schama’s Britain,
and whose Britain is it? What are the benefits and limitations of the all-knowing
narrator on television? Does television as a medium offer only simplification for the
discussion of history, or does it also offer amplification, the possibility of using sight
and sound to explore further than the written word? Schama’s treatment of the period 1500–1750 can be used to consider some of these questions.
I wish to thank Barbara J. Harris, Stanley L. Engerman, and the anonymous readers for the journal who
read earlier drafts of this essay.
1 Thomas Hearne, A Collection of Curious Discourses Written by Eminent Antiquaries upon Several
Heads in Our English Antiquities, 2 vols. (London, 1771), 1: 90–100.
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FIGURE 1: The title page of William Camden’s Britannia, published in 1607 during the Union debates, presents
a map of England and Scotland flanked by Neptune and Ceres. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 4508, Copy
2. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Schama aims to look not only at the history of England but at the history of
Britain, conceived as England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and later the British
Empire. In the wake of the loss of that empire, the realignment of Commonwealth
countries such as Australia and New Zealand with the Pacific Rim, and the movement for devolution—the self-governing of each of the entities making up the United
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Kingdom—and away from English hegemony, historians since the 1970s have focused on Britain and Britons, and in particular the multiple kingdoms of early modern Britain. J. G. A. Pocock has argued for the study of British political thought.
Conrad Russell and John Morrill have focused on the British context of the English
Civil War.2 Most recently, Tim Harris has argued that the multiple kingdoms must
be dealt with together if we are to understand the Restoration and the Glorious
Revolution.3 Of course, such naming and renaming is fraught with cultural and political implications. Nicholas Canny, for example, argues that early modern Ireland
should be understood in a European as well as a British context.4
Naming may also be merely a matter of changing political fashion. Thus John
Clapham’s The Historie of England, published first in 1602, was quickly renamed and
republished as the first part of The Historie of Great Britannie after the accession of
James VI of Scotland to the English throne.5 Similarly, while Schama is eager to
incorporate the Scots into his history and calls attention to Scottish and Irish archaeology, the Queen of Scots, and heroic highlanders, he rarely discusses in detail
the differing social structures and practices, culture, and law in the multiple kingdoms. Peoples and communities play a lesser role than the creation of institutions
and the state in Schama’s A History of Britain.
Nevertheless, Schama’s images are arresting and his argument is occasionally
offbeat, designed to make us rethink the narrative with which we are familiar and
to pose different questions. Beginning with archaeological finds in the Orkney Islands, Schama dramatically retells the story of Britain from the Neolithic Age to the
present. While his focus is state and empire building, he shows us changing aspects
of Britain through material culture, landscape, paintings, books, prints, and film.
Schama’s writing, combined with his interest in the visual, makes this one of the most
exciting television series since Sir Kenneth Clark’s pathbreaking BBC series Civilisation, broadcast originally in 1969. Indeed, A History of Britain shares certain similarities with Civilisation: an emphatic narrator and a focus on the triumph of the
West.
SCHAMA’S UNDERTAKING WAS NOT, of course, new. History came early to TV, and it
has taken the form of historical documentaries, historical reenactments, docudra2 J. G. A. Pocock, “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975):
601–621; Conrad Russell, “The British Problem and the English Civil War,” History 72 (1986): 395– 415;
Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991); John Morrill, “The Britishness
of the English Revolution,” in Ronald G. Asch, ed., Three Nations—a Common History? England, Scotland, Ireland, and British History, c.1600–1920 (Bochum, 1993), 83–115; Brendan Bradshaw and John
Morrill, eds., The British Problem, c.1534 –1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke,
1996).
3 Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London, 2005).
4 Nicholas Canny, “The Intersections between Irish and British Political Thought of the Early Modern Centuries,” in David Armitage, ed., British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, 1500–
1800 (Cambridge, 2006).
5 John Clapham, The Historie of England: The First Booke Declaring the Estate of the Ile of Britannie
under the Roman Empire (London, 1602); Clapham, The Historie of Great Britannie Declaring the Successe
of Times and Affaires in That Iland, from the Romans First Entrance, Untill the Raigne of Egbert, the
West-Saxon Prince; Who Reduced the Severall Principalities of the Saxons and English, into a Monarchie,
and Changed the Name of Britannie into England (London, 1606).
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mas, and historical fiction. In 1952–1953, Victory at Sea documented World War II
in the Pacific with extraordinary visual newsreel footage of planes and ships accompanied by an unseen narrator and a famous score composed by Richard Rodgers and
Robert Russell Bennett. It set the fashion for military history, which remains one
of the most popular forms of historical narrative on television. Historical reenactments, based on widely read books of historical fiction, memoir, journalism, and
history, have been popular, including Alex Haley’s Roots in 1977, David McCulloch’s
John Adams in 2007, and the HBO docudrama Recount in 2008. Television programs
and stations devoted to historical documentaries, such as American Experience,
Frontline, and the History Channel, as well as Masterpiece Theatre, show that there
is a significant audience for historical problems and historical fiction as well.
English and Irish history, especially the Tudors, have often provided popular
subject matter for historical documentaries. David Starkey’s series Henry VIII, Elizabeth, and The Six Wives of Henry VIII created a vivid portrait of the Tudor court,
while more recently his Monarchy traced the personal lives of English kings and
queens in the rich settings of court collections. Robert Kee presented Ireland: A
History in thirteen episodes in 1980. With its focus on modern Ireland and the divide
of Irish politics, Kee evoked the glory of Irish monasticism but spent only one episode
on the history of Ireland to the end of Elizabeth’s reign in 1603. But Schama’s A
History of Britain, the most ambitious of these series, has made dynamic use of the
visual possibilities of television and its immediacy to create argument through images, material culture, and original documents.
TV as a medium is visual, aural, and direct, and shapes its story in a way different
from the printed word. Moreover, the development of music videos and thirty-second advertisements has affected all productions on TV, including history. As a result,
quick cutting in the editing of the story is meant to surprise and engage the viewer.
The simultaneous combination and overlap of the word, the visual, and the aural in
a TV program offers texture and depth that in a book the historian can only hope
to offer through “thick description.”
Yet visual images do not tell the stories by themselves. The historian still shapes
the account, whether in a book or on TV. While the choice of words may make the
argument directly, the choice of images makes the argument indirectly. Take this
example: In one episode, “The British Wars,” Schama, who is always shown in the
credits walking on a shoreline—which evokes the island nation—opens with a portrait of James VI and I; quickly turns to John Speed’s collection of maps titled The
Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, published in 1611; zooms in on Edgehill on
Speed’s map; and immediately connects us with the Battle of Edgehill, where Charles
I raised his standard against the parliamentary forces in 1642. James I, whose aim
was to keep the peace and who did so for almost two decades, is then forgotten, and
the audience is asked to focus on Charles I and the Civil War, the first in a series
of wars, along with the Glorious Revolution and the wars between England, Scotland, and Ireland between the 1640s and 1745 that created the modern British state.
This is Schama’s choice as narrator and historian. But had he juxtaposed a different
set of images, we might have an alternative story. Imagine: Schama is seen walking
down the Strand in London’s West End; cut to the sculpture of James I in the courtyard of the Bodleian Library “seated under a canopy of state on which is carved the
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words ‘BEATI PACIFI’ (Blessed are the peacemakers).”6 Schama, now standing in
front of the Royal Exchange in the City, reads the shop inventory of one of the
Exchange’s retailers, while John White’s pictures of Virginia, title pages of tracts on
silk, tobacco, coffee, rice, and sugar, and images of coffee drinkers flash on the
screen. Sir Thomas Roe’s published speech to the House of Commons in 1641 on
behalf of the East India Company claims that Indian goods were not foreign but
became naturalized upon entering Britain.7 William Petty, the father of economics,
calls for a skilled labor force in 1648 based on his tract on education, and Samuel
Hartlib proselytizes for improvement in agriculture and manufacturing in the 1650s.8
Pages of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions from the 1660s publish claims
for the secret of making porcelain and the history of trades. This set of visual images
would tell a different story, one of the development of London, retail shopping,
increasing international trade, diversifying the economy, education, and improvement. We would have an alternative story of the seventeenth century, one that would
require rethinking “The British Wars.”
What story the historian tells then can be debated. How the historian tells the
story can take different forms. Most often it has taken the form of the narrative.
When Lawrence Stone predicted the return of narrative history in 1979, he might
well have been describing Schama’s A History of Britain: “the organization of material
in a chronologically sequential order and the focusing of the content into a single
coherent story, albeit with sub-plots . . . its arrangement is descriptive rather than
analytical and . . . its central focus is on man not circumstances . . . Directed by some
‘pregnant principle,’ ” Stone suggests that it “possesses a theme and an argument . . .
No narrative historians, as I have defined them, avoid analysis altogether, but this
is not the skeletal framework around which their work is constructed . . . they are
deeply concerned with the rhetorical aspects of their presentation. Whether successful or not . . . they certainly aspire to stylistic elegance, wit and aphorism.”9
ELEGANT AND WITTY, SCHAMA’S NARRATIVE tells the story of Britain’s state building
and its material culture. In the period 1500–1776, his Britons are primarily kings,
courtiers, nobility, and gentry. Schama constructs the history of the early modern
period with episodes titled “Burning Convictions,” on the impact of the Reformation; “The Queen’s Body,” on the battle between Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen
of Scots; and “The British Wars,” “Revolutions,” and “Britannia Incorporated,”
which provide a robust Whig narrative from 1603 to 1776 describing the growth of
Geoffrey Tyack, The Bodleian Library, Oxford: A Guide (Oxford, 2000).
Sir Thomas Roe His Speech in Parliament Wherein He Sheweth the Cause of the Decay of Coyne and
Trade in This Land, Especially of Merchants Trade: And Also Propoundeth a Way to the House, How They
May Be Increased (London, 1641).
8 The Advice of W.P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib: For the Advancement of Some Particular Parts of Learning
(London, 1648); Samuel Hartlib, A Discours of Husbandrie Used in Brabant and Flanders; Shewing the
Wonderfull Improvement of Land There; And Serving as a Pattern for Our Practice in This Common-Wealth
(London, 1650); Hartlib, The Reformed Common-Wealth of Bees . . . Containing Many Excellent and
Choice Secrets, Experiments, and Discoveries for Attaining of National and Private Profits and Riches (London, 1655).
9 Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past and Present
85 (1979): 3–24.
6
7
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FIGURE 2: Wenceslaus Hollar, The Royall Exchange of London (1644). The Royal Exchange, founded by Sir
Thomas Gresham in the City of London in 1565, was a meeting place for international merchants. The arcade
above contained retail shops. Folger Shakespeare Library, ART Vol. d86, no. 1. Used by permission of the
Folger Shakespeare Library.
English institutions and British expansion through the wars of the multiple kingdoms. Turning to Britain’s global reach in the eighteenth century, Schama ends not
with the American Revolution but with the Scottish Enlightenment and the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.
Schama shapes his narrative with striking juxtapositions of anecdote and material
culture, light and indirect comments on historiography, and insightful connections.
For the early modern period, he focuses more on the country and the landed, less
on towns and on London. When he does focus on London, it tends to be on Wren’s
St. Paul’s and, later, Hogarth’s Gin Lane rather than the City and the development
of the West End. One touching exception is his discussion of Thomas Coram’s London Foundling Hospital, where he stops the narration to look at the tiny objects given
by mothers to children they were giving up.
Schama gains the viewers’ attention by making striking choices. Thus, in his episode on the Reformation, instead of focusing on the break with Rome or the emergence of Protestantism, he asks what happened to Roman Catholicism. He reminds
us that many Roman Catholic churches had been vandalized in a generation. In
particular, he uses computer graphics to great effect by virtually rebuilding the magnificent Holy Trinity Church at Long Melford, replacing the stained glass windows,
painted ceiling, and altar cross that were destroyed by Protestant iconoclasts. In
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FIGURE 3: Tobacco, coffee, chocolate, and tea were exotic imports in early modern England. A Broad-Side
against Coffee; or, The Marriage of the Turk (1672) presents a Turk and two Englishmen drinking coffee and
smoking tobacco while being served by an African. Folger Shakespeare Library, J147, p. 63. Used by permission
of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
saying that students of his age “grew up with the idea that the Reformation was
inevitable,” Schama refers indirectly to the historiographical debate between A. G.
Dickens, J. J. Scarisbrick, Christopher Haigh, and Eamon Duffy on the nature of late
medieval Roman Catholicism in England.10 He points out that on the eve of the
Reformation, Roman Catholicism was popular and the Tudor monarchs were pilgrims. Indeed, Henry VIII had walked barefoot to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.
Distancing himself ironically from those he calls “serious historians” who focus
10 See, for instance, A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 2nd ed. (London, 1989); J. J. Scarisbrick,
The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984); Christopher Haigh, ed., The English Reformation
Revised (Cambridge, 1987); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England,
c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven, Conn., 1992).
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on the social and political origins of the Reformation or “The Tudor Revolution in
Government”—the latter, of course, a reference to Geoffrey Elton’s work on Henry’s imperium—Schama proclaims, “We come back to Anne: historical prime cause
number one.” Identifying himself with those who see the break with Rome as coming
from the top, he points out that Anne developed a group of clerics to gather material
on the royal supremacy, and that Henry began to use the term “imperial” from about
1530, gained the Submission of the Clergy in 1532, and crowned Anne in 1533. That,
of course, did not make England Protestant, as many historians have pointed out.
Schama follows a conventional narrative of Henry’s reign, Henry’s conservative turn,
Edward’s Protestant church, and Mary Tudor’s return to Roman Catholicism.
Schama’s brilliance with anecdote and material culture is further demonstrated
with “The Queen’s Body,” a title that evokes both abstract political theory and specific body parts. He makes use of Elizabeth’s ring finger and Mary’s scalp to examine
two queens, “one a politician, the other a mother.” Opening with the two tombs in
Westminster Abbey commissioned by James VI and I when he became king of England, Schama gives equal time to Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. He concludes
in a terrific ending that it took them both to produce Great Britain. Together, he
suggests, they did have a baby: Magnum Britannia. In between, Schama details the
problems and interactions of the two monarchs.
Schama substitutes biography for analysis. His is not an analytical history of multiple kingdoms. The series tells us little about Scotland in the late sixteenth century,
the development of the kirk, feuding aristocratic factions, and changing land usage
that prompted Scottish migration to Ireland. If I were choosing a television program
on Elizabeth, I would choose the BBC’s Elizabeth R , in which Glenda Jackson gives
a wonderful performance, or HBO’s Elizabeth I, in which Helen Mirren’s reenactment of the speech at Tilbury is superb. But if Schama’s “The Queen’s Body” shortchanges the Elizabethan regime, which began before Mary fled to England and continued after her execution, this segment of A History of Britain challenges the
traditional anglophile focus of most English historians.
As Schama used the funeral monuments of Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots
to frame “The Queen’s Body,” he anchors “The British Wars” with the Banqueting
House. Built by King James and crowned by Charles I with the wonderful Rubens
ceiling apotheosizing his father, the Banqueting House ultimately became the backdrop for Charles’s own execution. Schama provocatively argues that the dream of
Britain and a united kingdom killed England in the seventeenth century. Rejecting
Conrad Russell’s suggestion that the Civil War was “like a road accident,” he suggests that it was “a war of ideas about liberty and obedience.” Indeed, in “Revolutions,” Schama places Hobbes’s Leviathan center stage along with the issues of
sovereignty and de facto kingship. Cromwell, too, wanted union, but Schama argues
a union of republics, not kingdoms. Like the Stuarts, Cromwell subdued both Scotland and Ireland, wrestled with parliaments, and repeatedly sought a solution to the
problem of rule and succession. At the same time, Schama argues, Cromwell’s Protectorate did create a model of the modern British constitution, a chief executive
answerable to Parliament.
The restoration of Charles II, Schama emphasizes, brought the return of the
visual. While he mentions the telescope and microscope, he spends little time on the
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Royal Society, suggesting that science could do nothing about the Plague of 1665 and
the Great Fire of 1666. The fire, however, did offer the opportunity to rebuild London, an opportunity that the Royal Society and its members took up with alacrity.
Christopher Wren intended to rebuild London as a great Roman city.11 Schama
argues that the government created in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution was
actually a reasonable version of the Protectorate.
In “Britannia Incorporated,” which covers the years from ca. 1690 to ca. 1750,
Schama addresses the issues of the successful achievement of union and the growth
of the British state and its economy. To begin, he contrasts the clocklike work of
English government and finance with the traditional time of the Scottish highland
clan leaders who supported James II. Drawing on John Brewer’s Sinews of Power,
he describes how the English bureaucracy grew in support of its war machine, and
how the Bank of England and the National Debt created government finance that
the Stuarts would have envied. In England, as the rage of party receded, Schama
suggests that the great landowners, consolidating their landed estates, now “stopped
shouting and started building.” (Had they ever stopped?) Robert Walpole proved
a masterful manipulator of the House of Commons, and MPs who had fought for
parliamentary privilege now fought over the spoils. Union with Scotland was
achieved in 1707 through a financial and trade deal, in exchange for which Scots
agreed to accept seats at Westminster and give up their parliament. Efforts to restore
the Stuarts failed in 1715 and again in 1745, when the highlanders were finally defeated. By 1765, however, Scotland was flourishing, and the leaders of the Scottish
Enlightenment, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith, described the
stages of development through which human beings had achieved progress. It was
through their analysis, Schama argues, that Scotland showed the future of Britain.
DESPITE THIS STIRRING CONCLUSION to Schama’s discussion of early modern Britain,
it is still necessary to draw attention to some striking omissions in his treatment of
the period. History on television offers important advantages and disadvantages. It
allows for striking visual and aural connections, while at the same time it may require
compression. Surprisingly, Schama omits discussion of the godly and puritanism in
the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He does not discuss the Marian exiles
and the Elizabethan settlement. This is especially surprising given the attention to
the issues of liberty and religion to which he turns when he discusses the English Civil
War. Schama omits Mary’s nemeses John Knox and George Buchanan. Knox had
attacked women rulers in his book The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of Women.12 Having alienated Elizabeth, he was not welcome in
England and made his way to Scotland, where he shaped the Scottish Kirk and helped
to undermine the rule of Mary Queen of Scots. Buchanan became James VI’s tutor
and taught him Calvinist resistance theory, against which the young king rebelled,
11 James I, too, had expressed his desire to make London the New Rome in his many proclamations
regulating London building. See Thomas G. Barnes, “The Prerogative and Environmental Control of
London Building in the Early Seventeenth Century: The Lost Opportunity,” California Law Review 58
(1970): 1332–1363.
12 John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of Women (Geneva,
1558).
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FIGURE 4: John Speed’s Map of England also maps social status. Figures of nobles, gentry, citizens, and countrymen and -women wear clothing and accessories illustrating their rank. From Speed, Theatre of the Empire
of Great Britain (1616). Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 23044. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare
Library.
penning his own high views of kingship in the Trew Law of Free Monarchies. Furthermore, Schama leaves out the debate between the Presbyterian Thomas Cartwright and John Whitgift over the nature of the English Church, and the important
work of Richard Hooker. He settles for calling the English Church a middle way,
omitting the historiographical debate between Nicholas Tyacke and Peter White
over whether it was a Calvinist church, albeit of the most moderate kind, an issue
that is key to discussions of tensions leading to the Civil War.13
Schama rarely includes women in his sequences on early modern England except
for royal biographies of Anne Boleyn, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, and Mary Queen
of Scots. While he does include Leveller women who petitioned for the release of
the four Leveller leaders in 1649, he omits discussion of the “Agreement of the
People,” the Putney and Whitehall debates, Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence
of 1672, and Parliament’s response with the Test Act in 1673. Because he includes
so little discussion of social history, he has little discussion of gender.
Furthermore, with the reign of James I omitted in the TV series, we lose key
British issues such as the Plantation of Ulster, the Plantation of Virginia, and the
early development of the East India Company; and constitutional issues such as the
13 See, for instance, Nicholas Tyacke, “The Rise of Arminianism Reconsidered,” Past and Present
115 (1987): 201–216; and Peter White, “A Rejoinder,” ibid., 217–229.
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FIGURE 5: Men and women play cards and dine in an inn, early seventeenth century. Folger Shakespeare
Library, ART Vol. c91, no. 8d. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
revival of impeachment after 150 years, a sword for the House of Commons, and a
legacy to the United States Constitution. The King James Bible is omitted in favor
of John Speed’s mapmaking. The omission of the Gunpowder Plot means that antiCatholicism, a long-running theme in British history, is omitted, which seems odd
given that the fate of Roman Catholicism is the theme of Schama’s treatment of the
Reformation and, later, the Restoration.
In contrast to the television program, however, the book by Schama that accompanies the series fleshes out his argument. James I finds his appropriate place
in the first chapter. To make his argument that “Britain destroyed England,” Schama
emphasizes King James’s designs to bring union to the multiple kingdoms. He focuses on the subduing of the Western Isles in 1608 as the precursor to English colonial rule around the globe rather than the more prominent plantation system in
Ulster. Other than this strong emphasis on the problems of the multiple kingdom,
Schama follows the conventional narrative of James’s reign, from the Hampton
Court conference, to the Overbury murder scandal, to the Spanish match. He does
make striking use of David Underdown’s Fire from Heaven to discuss the impact of
the godly when they held power at the local level, as they did in Dorchester.14 Yet
the book, too, finds little place for the differing social, economic, and legal histories
of the multiple kingdoms. The differences between the book and the television program make clear the important advantages and disadvantages of the two genres.
14 David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New
Haven, Conn., 1992).
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SIMON SCHAMA’S A HISTORY OF BRITAIN is a striking achievement. It tells one story of
nation and empire building. Other such histories might take other forms, address
other subjects, and include other views. For in “doing history” on TV, narration is
certainly not the only way to tell a dramatic story. Ken Burns has systematically
chosen to use primary sources, still photographs, the spoken word, and historians of
different views to create a rich texture for his documentaries on American life and
culture. From Brooklyn Bridge in 1981 to The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, and The War,
Burns has presented the story of American society in a strikingly different way. Especially in The Civil War, he replaced the single all-knowing narrator with the many
voices of letter writers, newspapers, and speakers, both men and women, many littleknown, some famous. Burns describes his procedure this way: “the careful use of
archival photographs, live modern cinematography, music, narration, and a chorus
of first-person voices that together did more than merely recount a historical story.
It was something that also became a kind of ‘emotional archaeology,’ trying to unearth the very heart of the American experience.”15 While American historians have
disagreed with Burns’s historical analysis, and he has been criticized as well for under-representing African Americans, American Indians, and Latinos, his approach
to doing history on television has been pathbreaking. While some narrative structure
is provided by the counterpoint of historians such as Shelby Foote and Barbara J.
Field, the effect is more like that of an orchestra with many different instruments
playing rather than a conductor giving a lecture on what the music is about. More
recently, Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts looked at the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, combining a variety of interviews, voices, pictures,
and music mapping a natural disaster, political mistakes, and personal survival.
Other histories of aspects of Britain might look at the diversity of its peoples, communities, societies, cultures, and gender, as well as its politics and institutions. And
we can find additional ways to tell their stories. Such histories, moving beyond the
all-knowing narrator telling one narrative, should include multiple voices, multiple
viewpoints, and conflicting evidence. Such histories quite directly demonstrate the
practice of history as well as the performance.
15
Ken Burns describes his method in a statement on the PBS website: http://www.pbs.org/civilwar/
film.
Linda Levy Peck is Columbian Professor of History at George Washington University, where she has taught since 1998. She is the author of Northampton:
Patronage and Policy at the Court of James I (Routledge, 1982), the award-winning Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Routledge, 1990),
and Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth Century England
(Cambridge, 2005), and editor of The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991). She is currently working on a study of money, mobility, and marriage in England between 1600 and 1730.
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