Ken Burns Documentaries

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SCW

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Prohibition describes how the consumption and effect of alcoholic beverages in the United States were connected to many different cultural forces including immigration, women's suffrage, and the income tax. Eventually the Temperance movement led to the passing of Prohibition, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Widespread defiance of the law, uneven and unpopular enforcement, and violent crime associated with the illegal trade in alcohol caused increasing dissatisfaction with the amendment, eventually leading to its repeal 13 years later.


Decent series to watch if you have the time and interest, yet another example of what happens when women and the government dictate how you should live your life.
 
SCW said:
Prohibition describes how the consumption and effect of alcoholic beverages in the United States were connected to many different cultural forces including immigration, women's suffrage, and the income tax. Eventually the Temperance movement led to the passing of Prohibition, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Widespread defiance of the law, uneven and unpopular enforcement, and violent crime associated with the illegal trade in alcohol caused increasing dissatisfaction with the amendment, eventually leading to its repeal 13 years later.


Decent series to watch if you have the time and interest, yet another example of what happens when women and the government dictate how you should live your life.
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I heard that Lincoln would have pushed for prohibition had he not been killed. I really don't know much about the temperance movement but from my understanding I thought it was largely a Christian movement pushed by women. If so, Christian influence on the law of the land was still dominant in the early 20th century. That would be the equivalent of a mass movement of Christians today who got a Constitution Amendment to ban all online pornography.
 
I may be biased, but I believe alcohol in general and wine in particular are important parts of religion, as well as life in general. Jesus turned water into wine. Benedictine monks cared for vineyards for hundreds of years, keeping notes on which plots produced the best wines. Trappist monks produce beer as part of their work practice, as well as to raise funds for their other works. Distillation of spirits is even a Muslim invention, though consumption of alcohol was forbidden, distillate was used for perfumes.

From what I understand after watching Ken Burns's documentary, the temperance movement came about when consumption shifted from relatively lower alcohol beers/wines to harder spirits, causing a lot of domestic strife. In this case, I understand women needing to come together to protest against their circumstances.

Passing the 18th amendment was a step too far though, and it seems many politicians voting in favor for it believed it would only affect hard liquor, not wine and beer as well. By the time they realised it was too late - the law now made anyone who wanted a drink a criminal. Only after 13 years of speakeasies and organised crime would it finally be repealed, though even today remnants of it still exist, and the liquor industry today is arguably more tightly regulated than ever before.

Alcohol taken in excess is bad. For some, total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation. That should still be a decision every responsible adult makes for themselves.
 
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When I was a child and I first had the flu, I was allowed to stay at home and caught a few episodes of a series about life in the American west. I don't think there were any videos, it was just black and white photos, set to music of the time. There was a narrator and others who read letters and other written documents from the time. All sounded as if they were from the time. It stayed in my mind for a long time, through the years when they only way you could rally hope to see such things again was to catch them on the TV. If you didn't remember the name, that makes things more difficult. As video started being available online, I happened across what I thought was the same documentary - Ken Burns' The West. But later, I realised that series was not made when I watched it. So it must have been The Civil War.

If you long for the good old days of Americana, these are worth a watch. I haven't seen anything that so thoroughly evokes the feel of a past age.

Worth noting is that Ken Burns is a massive TDS lefty. I can't say how much that has effected his work.

 
Cynllo said:
When I was a child and I first had the flu, I was allowed to stay at home and caught a few episodes of a series about life in the American west. I don't think there were any videos, it was just black and white photos, set to music of the time. There was a narrator and others who read letters and other written documents from the time. All sounded as if they were from the time. It stayed in my mind for a long time, through the years when they only way you could rally hope to see such things again was to catch them on the TV. If you didn't remember the name, that makes things more difficult. As video started being available online, I happened across what I thought was the same documentary - Ken Burns' The West. But later, I realised that series was not made when I watched it. So it must have been The Civil War.

If you long for the good old days of Americana, these are worth a watch. I haven't seen anything that so thoroughly evokes the feel of a past age.

Worth noting is that Ken Burns is a massive TDS lefty. I can't say how much that has effected his work.

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Indeed he is a lefty.

It's hard to watch his Jazz series, since every other paragraph is about Racism. And of course it only goes 1 way...

He did have time to celebrate many Jewish Jazz artists....

2 series on the Holocaust alone....
 
Iacobus said:
I enjoyed Burns' Vietnam series although I think editorially he cut US leadership a lot of slack that they don't deserve.
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In that 16 hour series, he went over the Gulf of Tonkin incident for like 3 minutes, in very vague terms. In other words, whitewashing the false flag event. He also did not cover the dirtiest aspects of the war, like the Phoenix Program, which was a large program of targeted assassinations of civic leaders and terror bombings. The same program was also carried over in Iraq and Syria.




His worst and most compromised work was his complete whitewashing of the Central Park Five. This is where he went full on culture war apologist.
 
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