Biography of america annenberg




A Biography of America on TV

DURING THE FALL OF 1997, our production team at WGBH-TV, Boston’s Public Broadcasting System domicile began developing a television attempt that would capture the fly of American history with, incredulity hoped, real rigor and play. We knew we wanted justify merge the art of maven teaching with television’s powerful ocular and narrative techniques, but renounce was as far as after everything else planning had gone—when I on the hop recalled the image of a- man and a moment.

Probity man was a hard-edged characteristics professor, unsmiling but not unhumorous, ferociously intimidating to us freshmen. He would unfailingly begin top classes with a ritual. Penurious a word, he’d approach representation desk at the front a mixture of the room, unbutton his undone shirtsleeve, unbuckle the worn break band of his watch, favour prop the watch on depiction desk.

He would re-button his sleeve, sit down, and fold realm hands.

His gray eyes would squint into the room, ahead he’d break the silence. Set your mind at rest would be brought to look after by the precision and awkward drama of these movements, pregnant the power of the indication behind them.

I never missed top class, but I was intensely tempted one beautiful May gift. Freshmen libidos were running disgorge, and the life of significance mind was simply not collective that compelling.

The topic of focus day’s lecture was World Battle II.

The professor entered prestige room and went through realm ritual, but with one incongruity. He didn’t sit behind circlet desk. He sat on lecturer front corner and leaned inspiration the room. “Ladies and aristocracy, today we will think reflect on war. We will think on every side one war. We will contemplate about what it was just about to oppose that war like that which there was every reason elect support it.” He made trig sharp intake of breath innermost squeezed the bridge of realm nose.

“I am a Trembler. And I was a pacifistic during World War II. Start was the most awful interval of my life, and in the air is what it was like.” The May morning dropped away.

A man and a memory. Ethics personal infused with the omnipresent, by a master teacher. Natty moment of illumination for a-ok group of college students.

Could that kind of experience be captured on video for college category as well as for on the rocks wider television audience?

And could it be done not equitable for one program—one class—but lend a hand two full semesters? That was our challenge in developing unacceptable ultimately producing a series fair-haired 26 half-hour videos covering excellence full arc of the Land story and supported by glory World Wide Web and print.

WGBH-TV received funding for this pile from the Washington-based Annenberg/CPB, adroit partnership between the Annenberg Set off and the Corporation for Get around Broadcasting.

We all shared calligraphic vision: to assemble a “dream team” made up of high-mindedness Library of Congress, the Governmental Archives, a major textbook firm, and prominent historians from put into words the country.

We believed there was a real need. “It’s day to tell the whole Indweller story in a new spread, to bring traditional themes unification with new scholarship,” Michele Korf, the executive producer and supervisor of educational programming at WGBH, insisted.

We knew, too, that present-day were intellectual land mines every place.

The study of American scenery had been under siege unjustifiable years. The pendulum had swung from the right to glory left- from a narrative immersed in by dead white males just now multicultural, gendersensitive social histories—and surprise were somewhat heartened by distinction general sense that it was now hovering somewhere near decency middle.

But we weren’t complex for a homogenized consensus; what we envisioned involved risks.

The suit production team came together fuzz WGBH under their vice top banana Brigid Sullivan: As senior creator and project director, I would work with the producer-director Fred Barzyk, a legendary veteran sentence public television circles.

We collective a brigade of staffers, researchers, graphic artists, mapmakers, editors, nearby Website designers.

What we needed say to was the master teacher, righteousness person who would give grandeur series intellectual direction and befriend as its prominent on-camera a celebrity. So Central Casting would hold to meet Academe. Our boon scholar would have to bait a compelling presence on-screen nevertheless also a historian of strong rank, a team leader, see a breeze to work with.

We couldn’t have hoped for work up than what Professor Donald Moth of Lafayette College brought become us.

One of his colleagues put it this way: “Miller is an intellectual force, clever gifted writer, a generous fellow-worker, and a great storyteller. Professor you’ll love the way recognized looks in a black turtleneck.”

Don delivered on every point—and repair. The first instinct of queen sometimes fierce mind was wander the series be a chronicle.

A Biography of America, he called it, and become absent-minded became the series name. All over the place was that memory, storytelling, sit imagination are essential to greatness imparting of history, and consequently to the series. He in agreement with us that no creep voice could begin to mention the whole tale.

So incredulity set out to create excellent supporting cast of historians: Essential Casting Meets Academe, Part II.

After viewing hundreds of tapes, we made our draft picks. Pauline Maier, of MIT, was one of our first, talented most reluctant, recruits. I declare to being initially cowed mass the elegance of her evoke and her bearing, but expect the end it was protected almost unhinged laugh that crash into us all at ease.

Saint became our early-American specialist. Lou Masur came to us deprive the City College of Another York, and he is at times bit the New Yorker. Her majesty passion for the New Royalty Yankees rivals (almost) his fervour for another Yankee, Ralph Waldo Emerson—and that he is wristwatch ease with the American conte is suggested by the further popular title of his scope “United States History": “From Mather to Rather.” Waldo Martin, plant the University of California, Bishop, is the quietly forceful adjacency who grounded us in depiction notion that ours is out story of struggle, with winners and losers equally illuminating honourableness national character.

Virginia Scharff appeal to the University of New Mexico “pinchhits all over the place,” as Don has said. Colony is our Western and women’s history scholar; she was further a closet novelist—until her get back blew and her mystery Brown Eyed Girl appeared this arise to terrific reviews.

Douglas Brinkley is our presidential and 20th-century scholar.

Doug brought to rectitude project his intelligence, his fervent love for the American road, and his friends and colleagues—namely, the composer David Amram (The Manchurian Candidate, Splendor in dignity Grass, and more) and Author Ambrose, as guest historian.

I had the chance to hot air with Don Miller and Doug Brinkley this past spring immobilize breakfast at the Organization have a high opinion of American Historians convention in Colliery.

Louis. We talked in suite overlooking the Mississippi River, entice a point near where contact Biography of America begins, the magnificent site of Cahokia, the capital of a wonderful river civilization that flourished—and died—long before Columbus set foot boast the Americas.

It seems minor obvious question, Don, but effort all the time we’ve diseased on this project, I’ve not ever asked you why you believe this kind of survey array is so important when near are many wonderful historical documentaries already.

Miller: I think we for to have a sense in this area the whole, of the absolute living drama of American account, if only to get decoration bearings, to get a doctrine of how we got connected with, to the year 2000.

Snowball also to understand who miracle are. To a large capacity, we are what we receive been. We’re products of cobble together history, and to know themselves we need to know flux history.

But we knew from rendering outset that you can’t refer to the entire American story play a part 26 half-hours …

Miller: No, nevertheless you can deal in heavy depth with some of loftiness great shaping forces, the tilt that made us what awe are, different from—not better than- any other people on clean.

That’s what we set hearten to do.

And that meant amazement had to be ruthlessly discerning. Just as history is excellent crippled discipline, in that plan can’t ever get at leadership real truth, so television assessment a crippled medium, in prowl it has so many keep on tenterhooks, time constraints being just ventilate of them.

As I pick up the team, we’d just be endowed with to deal with these leash and do our best, significant that whatever we did we’d get creamed by some critics.

It was my biggest worry: we would identify those process forces.

Miller: I don’t think low-class one of us is entirely happy with all the decisions we made.

But we blunt decide on several master themes. We would try to position how America became a republican nation; a capitalist nation; straight technological nation—the world’s preeminent backup singers of machine makers and builders; a multicultural nation; a improvement of improvers and reformers; primate well as a country accustomed the world over for loom over frontier-style violence- and, most inspiring to me, history’s most dissolute experiment in sexual, racial, unthinkable ethnic relations.

Back in the ordinal century, the French writer Crèvecoeur asked What is the English, this new man?

And increase did he, and she, burst into tears to be? Well, we strive, and I emphasize try, take over answer that question in A Biography of America.

I can’t imagine a question where hither would be less consensus.

Miller: Surprise argued all the time, simple to the end. At wooly very first meeting with Lou Masur, I emphasized the rate advantage of concision, and Lou at one completely.

Then I said, bit an example, that we could do American history without business with the Great Awakening. Convulsion, Lou almost jumped out break on his chair. “I’m out line of attack this thing,” he said, “if we exclude the Great Quickening. You can’t hope to see nineteenth-century America without dealing accommodate the Great Awakening.”

The process good deal creating A Biography of America had commenced.

And Lou didn’t quit…

Brinkley: He ended up convincing scale of us that the State Awakening deserved feature treatment.

Doug, what was it like for restore confidence to be part of that team?

Brinkley: I felt we were like the Apollo astronauts ideal for Mission PBS.

The final time we got together was at a kind of retirement at Longfellow’s historic Wayside We got to know command other, experience each !other’s wits of humor, and learn pout our ideological differences and similarities. Don was our foreman. Good taste made the work collaborative, ride quickly an extraordinary harmony formulated among us.

We’ve all suit personal friends. That’s one forged the great outcomes of riot of this.

How did your deprive experiences writing biography translate change grafting a biography of ethics country?

Brinkley: I think it’s rousing to call this series A Biography of America. Clothe oneself wrote a biography of Author Mumford, but really his City of the Century, look at Chicago, was also a memoirs.

It’s an interesting way pick up approach history.

At its best, narrative uses a main character make somebody's day go off on tangents give it some thought allow the writer and justness reader to explore the enhanced society in which that character’s life was played out. Make it to example, in my biography simulated Rosa Parks I examine honesty history of lynching and primacy Ku Klux Klan that panicky her as a young mademoiselle.

In A Biography not later than America, we’re exploring history tenuous much the same way.

Miller: That’s right. Our story centers dispense people, because focusing on critical personalities allowed us to accompany to life the major hostile forces of the American story: antebellum Southern culture versus Yankee industrial culture; the counterculture invoke the 1960s versus the cautious backlash of the 1970s boss 1980s; and so on.

But that series is biographical in neat more fundamental way.

Good chronicle is highly selective. It deals with the principal shaping buttressing of a subject’s life. Observe a way, it’s a combined metaphor for that life, wail a birth-todeath chronicle. I sought A Biography of America to be the same breakdown, with the country itself orang-utan the character.

But you both were equally drawn to history sort storytelling.

Miller: It’s built in glory bones, this human proclivity yen for the story.

It started lead to the caves. Historians are story-tellers, just like novelists. The questions we ask are the same: Who am I? Who percentage we? We’re also both false the business of hunting explanations.

A little while ago, I came across a published piece fail to see one of my former genre in which he says give it some thought I tricked the class devour learning by telling stories.

They’d listen to the story, filth said, and, all of sloppy, it would occur to them that they were learning cape important.

Brinkley: I think what’s vital about this series is put off all the historians involved hassle the project believe in myth. In the academic world, historians are trained to focus cessation analysis so heavily that get going some scholarly circles the be dispensed with to really put down spiffy tidy up historian is to sniff, “Oh, God, he’s a storyteller.”

Yes, there’s the concern about losing translation design when you do narrative history.

Miller: Narrative history, storytelling, doesn’t scheme to lose conceptual rigor omission analytical depth—but that’s damn dense to do.

By the mould, I think that’s a distinct thing about this series. Honourableness tales our historians tell soubriquet you along, but they hold a critical edge, a holder of view. They get your mind moving.

Brinkley: Right. Storytelling hawthorn not be fashionable in representation academy, but I still permit with something I remember indication as a boy in Perrysburg, Ohio, next to the hamlet of Clyde, which was Playwright Anderson’s fictional Winesburg.

In tiara autobiography, Storyteller’s Life, Contralto wrote that to become well-organized good storyteller is to convention the highest of all literate art forms.

It’s one thing do good to write a story, but order about historians were trying to transcribe a collaborative story. When amazement put together this team, awe were interested in historians who didn’t agree on everything, nevertheless this could have been neat disaster.

Miller: Yes, and I was a little surprised the all-inclusive project didn’t blow up improvement our faces.

But from map out earliest discussions, I saw roam our team, every one celebrate us a prickly character, seemed to relish argument and crisis. Sometimes things got hot.

For exemplification, my view of the at formation of the American badge is vastly different from Missioner Maier’s. She sees the colonists—even as they prepared for revolution—as essentially British in ideas tube outlook.

But I see clever distinctly American character emerging whereas early as the 172Os. Phenomenon fought and fought over that issue and never resolved it.

It’s a credit, Christine, to order around television people that you didn’t try to homogenize things doubtful the interest of creating top-hole counterfeit consensus.

You saw delay all this contention would false the series better. Remember, that isn’t The Biography of Land . It’s A History of America.

When your lecture texts were all in and amazement production people started to look into for images to dramatize them, we found we were superficial at images of de Soto’s war dogs chewing the sucker off Native Americans, of slaves on the whipping post, move Northern and Southern soldiers mow down each other.

It’s a attractive violent drama.

Brinkley: William James aforementioned, “History is a bath sponsor blood.” But when you site at it, A Account of America is not increase in value the bloody stomp of Americans through the continent. That’s dash of the story, but it’s also about what’s right strain America. There’s a great benevolence to the American people prowl I think is historically extraordinary.

Miller: Finley Peter Dunne’s famous employee philosopher, Mr.

Dooley, said spur I’ve always agreed with: Historians write post-mortems - tell prickly what a country died compensation. But I’d like to fracture what it lived of.

Don, prickly said from the beginning desert one of our greatest challenges was to re-create a scrupulous time and place.

Miller: I required to give viewers the complex that they were living integrity moment described, as if over were present.

That makes representation exciting, but I was afterward something else.

I wanted to conglomerate to craft narratives that explained what happened at a repel when all the possibilities salary the moment, all the preserve options, were in front take off the people making the decisions. This allows you to grasp the roads not taken, put forward history acquires a measure infer suspense, even though we recognize the outcome.

It is story without the distortion of hindsight.

Don, the final program in character series was your idea. you discuss the relentless human being urge to tell stories consider a group of prominent novelists- Charles Johnson, Arthur Golden, charge Esmeralda Santiago. Why do tell what to do end the series on that note?

Miller: Well, as I whispered earlier, I think novelists abide narrative historians have a publication of things in common.

They tell stories, use character wish power them, and deal extra memory and the way reminiscence shapes and haunts their characters.

But, as professional storytellers, novelists possess a better appreciation of rendering redemptive power of the insight and the power of imaginary to reshape the world. Set of history can learn splendid lot from them.

Brinkley: It’s affection the poet William Carlos Playwright wrote in In picture American Grain, “History must exceptional open, it is all humanity.” A good historian is encyclopaedia artist who embraces what William James called “wild facts penniless stall or pigeonhole.”

Miller: Human beings are big-brained creatures, and their enormous cerebral capacity makes them memory-haunted creatures as well.

Pivotal because we remember the ex-, we’re influenced by it; bon gr we choose to admit instant or not, it’s always presentday, working on us.

To me narration is this: It is possibly manlike beings and their culture combination the environment and the existence shaping them. It is even-handed memory of that culture ramble makes us human.

Brinkley: And honourableness kind of history you’re dance about, Don, is often surpass written by nonhistorians—another reason equal pay attention to novelists take precedence poets.

A hundred years break now, when people want face capture the feeling and illustriousness flavor of our time, they’re not going to go merriment the academic historians. They’re mug to go back, time take again, to something like Tomcat Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, about the Mercury astronauts, allow James Baldwin’s The Fanaticism Next Time, on civil rights.

Now that your part in tap is finished, how does justness completed series compare with your original vision for it?

Miller: Hysterical started out doubting our power to pull this thing cause a rift, and I became even work up pessimistic when we went reach work on it.

There was so much dissonance about what we ought to cover increase in intensity how we ought to outflow it.

And the technical part tablets the challenge was awful: fatiguing to do World War II in 24 minutes—3500 words.

Brinkley: Misinformation yourself lucky, Don. I think I speak more slowly elude you: I only had 2900 words to do FDR take up the Depression!

The demands of rendering medium made concision a exorbitant issue.

Miller: Our approach to oration program on the 1920s levelheaded a good case in standardize.

It’s a very crowded decade: the Lindbergh flight, the Schoolteacher trial, the stock market rumble, the Harlem Renaissance, and like this on. I could have proven to compress the highlights prick 25 minutes. Instead, I drained to identify two leading rumour of the decade that confidential a deep, long-term impact canon the American character: the maximum success of Henry Ford’s Invent T and modern mass drive, and the rise of dignity world’s first automobile city, Los Angeles.

That’s it: two brief, interwoven stories.

Over and over, phenomenon found ourselves being brought standoff to these hard choices.

Miller: Nicely, there were a thousand explication it all seemed impossible disagree one point. But, as array turned out, it was convincing like cities. The messier they are, the more vital courier interesting they are.

Out confiscate the dissonance started to make not, God forbid, consensus however a set of organizing ideas.

But things didn’t really begin get tangled fall in shape until amazement stopped talking and arguing be proof against went our separate ways, save write the texts of blur own programs. When these in progress to come in, I could see we had that chronicle of America I was superior for.

At that point, all arousal needed was hundreds of noon of dedicated labor from paying attention and Fred Barzyk and your team of production people.

So what are you waiting for?

Rattan back to Boston and stop the thing!