The widespread positive reaction to The Civil War was generally lavish and unprecedented. Film and television critics from across the country were equally attentive and admiring. Newsweek called the program “a documentary masterpiece”; Time, “eloquen[t] . . . a pensive epic”; and U.S. News and World Report, “the best Civil War film ever made.” David Thomson in American Film declared that The Civil War “is a film Walt Whitman might have dreamed.” And political pundit George Will wrote: “Our Iliad has found its Homer . . . if better use has ever been made of television, I have not seen it.”

Between 1990 and 1992, accolades for producer Ken Burns and the series took on institutional proportions. He won Producer of the Year from the Producers Guild of America; two Emmys (for Outstanding Information Series and Outstanding Writing Achievement); a Peabody; a DuPont-Columbia Award; a Golden Globe; a D.W. Griffith Award; two Grammys; a People’s Choice Award for Best Television Mini-Series; and eight honorary doctorates from various U.S. colleges and universities, along with literally dozens of other recognitions.

The Civil War also became a phenomenon of popular culture. The series was mentioned on episodes of Twin Peaks, thirtysomething, and Saturday Night Live during the 1990–91 television season. Ken Burns appeared on The Tonight Show, and he was selected by the editors of People magazine as one of their “25 most intriguing people of 1990.” The series, moreover, developed into a marketing sensation. The companion volume, published by Knopf, The Civil War: An Illustrated History, became a runaway best-seller; as did the nine-episode videotaped version from Time-Life and the Warner soundtrack, featuring the bittersweet anthem “Ashokan Farewell” by Jay Ungar.

Several interlocking factors evidently contributed to this extraordinary level of interest, including the documentary’s accompanying promotional campaign, the momentum of scheduling Sunday through Thursday, the synergetic merchandising of its ancillary products, and, of course, the quality of production itself. Most significantly, though, the series examined the United States’ great civil conflict from a distinct perspective. A new generation of historians had already begun addressing the war from the so-called bottom-up point of view, underscoring the role of African Americans, women, immigrants, workers, farmers, and common soldiers in the conflict. This fresh emphasis on social and cultural history had revitalized the Civil War as a subject, adding a more inclusive and human dimension to the traditional preoccupations with ”great men,” transcendent ideals, and battle strategies and statistics. The time was again propitious for creating a filmed version of the war between the states that included the accessibility of the newer approach. In Ken Burns’s own words, “I don’t think the story of the Civil War can be told too often. I think it surely ought to be retold for every generation.”

Much of the success of Ken Burns’s The Civil War must be attributed to the ways in which his account made the 19th-century conflict immediate and comprehensible to viewers in the 1990s. The great questions of race and continuing discrimination, of the changing roles of women and men in society, of big government versus local control, and of the individual struggle for meaning and conviction in modern life all form essential parts of Burns’s version of the war. In this way, The Civil War serves as an artistic attempt to better understand these enduring public issues and form a new consensus around them, functioning also as a validation for the members of its principal audience (which was older, white, male, and upscale in the ratings) of the importance of their past in an era of unprecedented multicultural redefinition. In Ken Burns’s own words, “I realized the power that the war still exerted over us.”

To define and present that power on television, Burns employed 24 prominent historians as consultants on the project. He melded together approximately 300 expert commentaries and another 900 first-person quotations from Civil War–era letters, diaries, and memoirs. Excerpts from these source materials were read by a wide assortment of distinguished performers, such as Sam Waterston, Jason Robards, Julie Harris, and Morgan Freeman, among many others.

Often these remarkable voices were attached to specific historical characters—foot soldiers from both armies, wives or mothers left behind, slaves who escaped to fight on behalf of their own freedom. One of Burns’s extraordinary techniques was to follow some of these individuals through long periods of time, using their own words to chronicle the devastating sense of battle weariness, the loneliness of divided families, and both the pain and joy of specific moments in personal histories.

Just as significantly, he attached pictures to these words. Using a vast collection of archival images, some rarely seen, the primary visual production technique was the slow movement of the camera over the surfaces of still photographs. Audiences were allowed to move in for close-ups of faces and eyes, to survey spaces captured in more panoramic photos, and to see some individuals at different stages of their war experiences. The visual component of The Civil War also compared historical photographs of places with contemporary filmed shots of the same locations. The “reality” of bluffs over Vicksburg, a Chancellorsville battlefield, or the Appomattox Courthouse was established by these multiple pictorial representations.

All these visual and aural techniques combined in a special sort of opportunity for the audience. The series invited one into a meditation more than an analysis, an intimate personal consideration of massive conflict, social upheaval, and cultural devastation.

Ken Burns, a hands-on and versatile producer, was personally involved in researching, fund-raising for, co-writing, shooting, directing, editing, scoring, and even promoting The Civil War. The series, a production of Burns’s Florentine Films in association with WETA-TV in Washington, D.C., also boasted contributions by many of the filmmaker’s usual collaborators, including his brother and coproducer, Ric Burns, writer Geoffrey C. Ward, and narrator David McCullough. Writer, historian, and master raconteur Shelby Foote emerged as the on-screen star of The Civil War, peppering the series with entertaining anecdotes during 89 separate appearances.

The Civil War took an estimated five years to complete and cost nearly $3.5 million, garnered largely from support by General Motors, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. By any standard that has gone before, The Civil War is a masterful historical documentary. Through reruns and home videos, more than 70 million Americans have now seen the program. International audiences have also numbered in the tens of millions.

Burns now laughs about the apprehension he felt on the evening The Civil War premiered on prime-time television and changed his life forever. He remembers thinking long and hard about the remarks of several reviewers who predicted that the series would be “eaten alive,” going head-to-head with network programming. He recalls being “completely unprepared for what was going to happen” next, as the series averaged a 9.0 rating, an exceptional performance for public television. Ken Burns admits, “I was flabbergasted! I still sort of pinch myself about it. It’s one of those rare instances in which something helped stitch the country together, however briefly, and the fact that I had a part in that is just tremendously satisfying.”