Ken Burns is one of public television’s most celebrated and prolific producers. He has already fashioned a record of 16 major Public Broadcasting System (PBS) specials, addressing a wide range of topics from U.S. history, such as Brooklyn Bridge (1982), The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1985), The Statue of Liberty (1985), Huey Long (1986), Thomas Hart Benton (1989), The Congress (1989), The Civil War (1990), Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (1992), Baseball (1994), The West (1996), Thomas Jefferson (1997), Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery (1997), Frank Lloyd Wright (1998), Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1999), Jazz (2001), and Mark Twain (2002), all of which have won various awards and recognitions from both professional and scholarly organizations and at international film festivals.

Burns is a 1975 graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he studied under the photographers Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes, and received a degree in film studies and design. Upon graduation, he and two of his college friends started Florentine Films and struggled for a number of years doing freelance assignments, finishing a few short documentaries before beginning work in 1977 on a film based on David McCullough’s book, The Great Bridge (1972). Four years later, they completed Brooklyn Bridge, which won several honors, including an Academy Award nomination, thus ushering Burns into the ambit of public television. While editing Brooklyn Bridge in 1979, Burns moved Florentine Films to Walpole, New Hampshire, surviving on as little as “$2,500 one year to stay independent.”

Much about Burns’s career defies conventional wisdom. He operates his own independent company in a small New England village more than four hours north of New York City, hardly a crossroads in the highly competitive and often insular world of corporate-funded, PBS-sponsored productions. His television career is a popular and critical success story, beginning at a time when the historical documentary generally holds little interest for most Americans. His PBS specials so far are also strikingly out of step with the visual pyrotechnics and frenetic pacing of most reality-based TV programming, relying instead on techniques that are literally decades old, although Burns reintegrates these constituent elements into a wholly new and highly complex textual arrangement.

Beginning with Brooklyn Bridge and continuing through Mark Twain, Burns has intricately blended narration with what he calls his “chorus of voices,” meaning readings from personal papers, diaries, and letters; interpretive commentaries from on-screen experts, usually historians; his “rephotographing” technique, which closely examines photographs, paintings, drawings, daguerreotypes, and other artifacts with a movie camera; all backed with a musical track that features period compositions and folk music. The effect of this collage of techniques is to create the illusion that the viewer is being transported back in time, literally finding an emotional connection with the people and events of America’s past.

At first, it may appear that Burns has embraced a wide assortment of subjects—a bridge, a 19th-century religious sect, a statue, a demagogue, a painter, Congress, the Civil War, radio, the national pastime, the United States’ westward expansion, a founding father, two early explorers, an architect, two seminal feminists, a musical genre, and a writer—but several underlying common denominators bind this medley of Americana together. Burns’s body of work casts an image of America that is built on consensus and is celebratory in nature, highlighting the nation’s ideals and achievements. He suggests, moreover, that “television can become a new Homeric mode,” drawing narrative parameters that are epic and heroic in scope. The epic form tends to celebrate a people’s shared tradition in sweeping terms, while recounting the lives of national heroes is the classical way of imparting values by erecting edifying examples for present and future generations.

In this way, Burns’s chronicles are populated with seemingly ordinary men and women who rise up from the ranks of the citizenry to become paragons of national (and occasionally transcendent) achievement, always persisting against great odds. The Brooklyn Bridge, for example, described by the “chorus of voices” in Burns’s first film as “a work of art” and “the greatest feat of civil engineering in the world,” is the “inspiration” of a kind of “Renaissance man,” John A. Roebling, who died as the building of the bridge was beginning, and his son, Washington Roebling, who finished the monument 14 years later through his own dogged perseverance and courage, despite being bedridden in the process.

Along with being an outstanding documentarian and popular historian, Burns, like all important cultural voices, is also a moralist. Taken as a whole, his series of films stand as morality tales, drawing upon epic events, landmarks, and institutions of historical significance. They are populated by heroes and villains who allegorically personify certain virtues and vices in the national character as understood through the popular mythology of modern memory. At the beginning of Empire of the Air, for instance, Jason Robards’s narration explains how Lee DeForest, David Sarnoff, and Edwin H. Armstrong “were driven to create [radio] by ancient qualities, idealism and imagination, greed and envy, ambition and determination, and genius.” Burns himself describes Huey Long as “a tragic, almost Shakespearean story of a man who started off good, went bad, and got killed for it.”

Burns is best known of course, for his 11-hour documentary series The Civil War. The overwhelming popularity of this program, aired in September 1990, made him a household name. Much of the success of the series must be attributed to Burns’s ability to make this 130-year-old conflict immediate and comprehensible to a contemporary audience. He adopted a similar strategy with Baseball. That documentary, he has stated, “is as much about American social history as it is about the game,” as it examines such issues as immigration, assimilation, labor and management conflicts, and, most importantly, race relations. Burns explains that “Jackie Robinson and his story are sort of the center of gravity for the film, the Gettysburg Address and Emancipation Proclamation rolled into one.” This 18.5-hour history of the sport debuted over nine evenings in September 1994, lasting nearly twice as long and costing twice the budget ($7 million) of The Civil War.

Most remarkably, 70 million Americans have now seen The Civil War, while 50 million have watched Baseball; and all of Burns’s other documentaries from the mid-1990s on have averaged an estimated 15 million viewers during their debut telecasts. “I’ve been working in two parallel tracks,” Burns describes, “One has been a trilogy of three major series—The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz—and in a parallel track, I’ve been working on a series of biographical portraits.”

The cumulative popularity of Burns’s biographical or quasi-biographical histories is striking by virtually any measure, and these films have over time redefined the place of documentaries on prime-time television. Jazz, specifically, is fully representative of Burns’s work at midcareer. This ambitious, multipart documentary confirms certain aesthetic and ideological priorities, honed by Burns over a quarter-century of producing and directing television specials for PBS. Approaching 19 hours (and more than 150 years of American history), the miniseries exhibits an epic storyline overflowing with historical people, places, and events.

Nielsen averages put Jazz at a 3.6 household rating and a 6 percent share of the national audience for the run of the ten episodes during four successive weeks in January 2001. These percentages are double the customary public television averages, translating into approximately 23 million viewers when calculated over the entire length of the miniseries. Given the aggregate numbers eventually amassed by both The Civil War and Baseball, Jazz’s U.S. audience is likely to double in the first decade of the 21st century and then expand.

Despite his long-standing and highly successful affiliation with noncommercial television in the United States, Burns still remembers his boyhood dream of becoming the next John Ford. It is likely that no one has ever done a better job of probing and revivifying the past for more Americans through the power and reach of prime-time television than Ken Burns.