Re: The War - Ken Burns Series on PBS
I'll definitely be watching this.
I think the Civil War and WWII get much more documentary love simply because there is more instantly interesting stuff. Both wars were "about" something (and, at least in the case of the Civil War, about multiple things, giving us the great Shelby Foote-Barbara Fields back and forth in Burns' series), and the actual wars were fairly dynamic.
WWI wasn't really about anything beyond the last lines of dynasties deciding to have a war,* and in the war itself nothing really happened except for people standing in place and dying from either disease or machine gun fire. I mean, John Keegan can't even hold my attention WRT WWI, and he's probably the most accessible military historian of modern times.
* There's probably a lot of interesting things to be said about the effects of that war on discrediting imperial succession and so on, but that seems like a bigger task than a series on WWI can adequately deal with
|