‘Our America’: An Epic Told in Moments

In an era in which people rely so much on visual and digital tools for information, there is arguably no chronicler of American history more important than Ken Burns. For close to five decades, the Walpole, New Hampshire-based documentary-filmmaker has examined past life in the United States in lengthy, deeply researched films that have earned significant acclaim, and audiences.

Burns’s documentaries, which take years to produce, combine grainy old film sequences, letters, other documents, first-person testimonies, period photographs and anything else that brings life and immediacy to his subjects. His topics range from baseball to the Civil War to race relations to jazz to, most recently, what the United States did and didn’t do in response to the Holocaust before and during the Second World War. [MORE]