Ken Burns’s America is the first book-length study to comprehensively examine this innovative filmmaker as a television auteur, a pivotal programming influence within the industry, and a popular historian who portrays a uniquely singular and compelling version of the country’s past. 

This volume’s three-fold agenda, first, delineates his personal influences, his distinctive and well-recognizable style, and the development and maturation of his ideological outlook, identifying those features that make him one of the most significant cultural voices on TV today.  Burns is next viewed as the owner and executive producer of his own independent production company operating on the periphery of public television’s institutional framework.  And, lastly, he is analyzed as a popular historian who reevaluates the nation’s historical legacy from a new generational perspective.

Ken Burns’s America.  New York: Palgrave for St. Martin’s Press, 2001. (*Second Place in the 2008 John G. Cawelti Book Award).