Ken Burns

Shelby Foote, failed novelist and closeted member of the Tribe, turned the Civil War into a masterpiece of American literature.

In 1903, a doctor bet $50 that he could cross America by car. The first coast-to-coast road trip in history took 63 days and cost $8,000.

Ken Burns’s "The U.S. and the Holocaust" distorts the historical record in service of a political message.

The Christian, the athlete, and the activist.

Watching the Ken Burns series on the U.S. and the Holocaust and thinking about American folk music.

A lively defense of narrative history and the lived experience that informs historical writing.

Nobody was listening, so she brought some rocks.

A post-9/11 veteran novelist explores a post-Vietnam literary soiree gone bad, and finds timeless lessons about a contentious and still-evolving genre.

What would it mean to define the Civil War as a necessary and crucial final step in the long, even more tragic history of slavery in America?

Why did a predominantly black district have streets named after Southern generals? In Hollywood, Florida, one man thought it was time for change.

From the moment DeFord Bailey stepped onto a stage in Nashville, country music would never be the same. Decades after his death he finally got his due.

A new three-part PBS documentary explores the failure of Reconstruction and the Redemption of the South.

On the white privilege of being able to ignore the racial context of Johnson's Jim Crow-era conviction.

A Vietnamese politician and an American academic led Michigan State University into a nation-building experiment and pulled America deeper into war.

Leslie Gelb supervised the team that compiled the Pentagon Papers. He explains what Steven Spielberg's new film gets wrong.

John Kelly's statement about the Civil War is not surprising, but they are a reminder that we should still be worrying about the Civil War.

There can be no "compromise" with the false view of America's past from Trumpists and pop historians alike.

Not only can we not shake the memories of Vietnam, but they still shape our foreign policy debates.

The PBS documentary on America’s most futile conflict is missing one explosive document. Every president should absorb its chilling lessons.