1. variety of individual viewpoints:
   • Mary Chestnut (voice of Julie Harris)
   • Elisha Hunt Rhodes (Chris Murney)
   • Sam Watkins (Charley McDowell)
   • George Strong (George Plimpton)
   • Joshua Chamberlain (Paul Roebling)
   • Walt Whitman (Garrison Keillor)
   • Abe Lincoln (Sam Waterston)
   • Jefferson Davis (Horton Foote)
   • U.S. Grant (Jason Robards)
   • Robert E. Lee (George Black)
   • Fred Douglass (Morgan Freeman)
   • William Sherman (Arthur Miller)
   • Horace Greeley (Philip Bosco)
   • George McClellan (Terry Courier)
   • Stonewall Jackson (Jody Powell)
   • Ben Butler (Studs Terkel)
2. presents Civil War as social history as well as military history
   • battles are only 40% of the 11- hour documentary
   • slaves, freedmen, abolitionists, women, families
   • letter of Sullivan Ballou at end of Episode 1
   • Harriet Beecher Stowe at end of Episode 3
   • Kingdom of Jones in Episode 4
3. heroic interpretation of war as defining moment
   • celebrates conflict, sacrifice, redemption, reconciliation
   • dramatic, tragic events portrayed in photos, music

1. lack of context (photos repeated, misrepresented)
2. neglects beliefs & ideology (southern nationalism, revolution)
3. neglects states, regions, Congress (Republican party)
4. only big battles (not Chattanooga, Tupelo)
5. neglects West (Rafael Chacon, Stand Watie)
6. exaggerates Nathan Bedford Forrest
7. superficial presentation of women (presents prostitutes and nurses, but not Loreta Valazquez who served as "Lt. Henry Buford" or escaped slave Susie King Taylor who taught freedman in Georgia's sea islands, married a black Union soldier, wrote Reminiscences in Boston 1902)

Resources:

• Censer, Jane Turner. "Videobites: Ken Burns's "The Civil War" in the Classroom," American Quarterly 44, June 1992, pp. 244-254.
• Henderson, Brian. "The Civil War" SMPTE Journal, Fall 1991.
• Toplin, Robert Brent. Ken Burns's The Civil War: Historians Respond. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• "The South's Strangest Army: Newt Knight and the Deserters of Jones County, Mississippi" by Christopher Lee Carlson
• Hispanics and Rafael Chacon Were Vital in Glorieta Battle from Albuquerque Journal, March 26, 2000