I've been meaning to get through the Ken Burns. What's been holding me back is a lot of the scholarship since has been about what a terribly romantic notion we have about the South, how a lot of that is because of Shelby Foote, and how heavily Ken Burns leans on Shelby Foote. So long as you're doing that, I wholeheartedly recommend W.E.B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction in America. It is breathtaking. It is extraordinarily difficult (at least as a white dude). And it is a towering achievement in literature. I've basically been letting Kamil Galeev push me around lately. Wallerstein came from this thread:
Yea I read Volume 1 of Shelby Foote's "The Civil War" based on how much Ken Burns leaned on him in the documentary (this was years ago, when I first watched it). Like him or not, Foote's anecdotes and insights in the documentary added much to its success, he romanticized the conflict from a mostly Southern perspective, delivered with a whiskey sipping drawl. He had charm. Upon reflection after the fact however, his lingering praise for Nathan Bedford Forrest felt odd. At one point he mentioned that Lincoln and Forrest were the two geniuses to be revealed from the war... hmm. Ta-Nehisi Coates probably summed it up best: Its well worth watching, but with clear eyes.I'm looking forward to finishing Foote's trilogy. It really is an engaging read. And yet here is the bit of sadness: He gave twenty years of his life, and three volumes of important and significant words to the Civil War, but he he could never see himself in the slave. He could not get that the promise of free bread can not cope with the promise of free hands. Shelby Foote wrote The Civil War, but he never understood it. Understanding the Civil War was a luxury his whiteness could ill-afford.