Gettysburg College, located adjacent to the momentous Civil War battlefield, recently hosted a festival celebrating the films of documentary historian Ken Burns, whose own 1990 PBS series on the Civil War garnered more than 40 major film and TV awards and remains the highest rated and most celebrated documentary in public television's history.
School President Bob Iuliano introduced Burns by noting "The importance of advancing the unfinished work of our democracy" - another nod to the social justice crowd, which sees the American experiment as having failed its own ideals.
Change - not history or legacy or wisdom or some other concept that would have been more compelling to a conservative audience - seems to have been the buzzword of the event; indeed, it was reportedly a life-changing experience for many of the students who were awed by Burns.
American youth's perspective on much of the sweeping panorama of American history will be Ken Burns' perspective.
Delivering the commencement speech at Stanford University in 2016, Burns devoted an inordinate amount of his talk to the then-candidacy of Donald Trump as the nadir of American presidential election history.
Among Burns' upcoming projects is another slice of Americana: the history of the buffalo in the American West, for which Burns intends to emphasize the "Indigenous" perspective and remove "The perpetual European gaze," as he put it in an interview.
Ken Burns is correct that storytelling is the ultimate tool for defining and shaping the soul of a nation.
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