Yesterday my Civil War classes watched a bit more of Ken Burns’s
The Civil War. We’ve been talking quite a bit about the
evolution from Limited to Hard or Total War so I decided to show
them Episode 8 which focuses on “Sherman’s March to the Sea.” In
fact, their final exam – scheduled for next Wednesday – will
explore just this issue. We had a very interesting discussion
about how Burns interprets the event through images, sound, and
narrative as opposed to the treatment in our text by Brooks
Simpson. A few of the students were struck by the differences in
their respective approaches. At least one student suggested that
Simpson was minimizing Sherman’s destructiveness and the sheer
brutality of his operation against the civilians. In addressing
the issue I asked the students to consider how both Burns and
Simpson approach the subject. To make a long story short, by the
end of the class we were discussing the role of empathy and
emotion in documentary and the more detached perspective that
historians are expec