If the ITForum was like the old "Point--Counterpoint" section of the "60 Minutes" television show, I'd start off this note with something akin to "Lloyd, you ignorant misguided fool." Of course, this isn't "60 Minutes," and Lloyd Rieber is certainly neither ignorant nor a fool--he just seems a little misguided about history. (Isn't it interesting that we both used to teach history to grade school kids!!)
[quoting Rieber, 21 Jan 95] No, I'm still reasonably certain that Ken Burns was trying to present balanced views, he just lost his sense of perspective now and then.
Lloyd persists in thinking that Ken Burns was trying to present a balanced or correct view of the history of baseball. This, of course, assumes that a balanced or correct view is possible about baseball, the bombing of Hiroshima, or anything else reported as history. Whereas I think that history (and all of social science by the way) is warped! As John Steinbeck wrote: "....all knowledge patterns are warped, first by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities" (Sea of Cortez: A leisurely journal of travel and research, by John Steinbeck, 1941, New York: Viking Press).
The Smithsonian Institution's attempt to exhibit the Enola Gay (the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) is a perfect example of that warp. The original script for the exhibit was written by contemporary historians who included in it the politically correct view of the 1990's that "the American dropping of the bomb was an act of racism against a people who were defending their unique culture." When I visited Hiroshima a few years ago and saw the artifacts from the horrible event, I felt inclined to view the bombing in that way. Mine was largely an emotional response. I felt different emotions this morning when I listened to an elderly veteran of the Bataan Death March tearfully describe his reactions to the Smithsonian exhibit on the CNN news. His views (and that of most other veterans' groups who are demanding the resignation of the director of the Smithsonian and the closing of the exhibit) are very different from that of the historians who wrote the exhibit script (which by the way includes many interactive multimedia components). Who is correct? No one! What is balanced? Nothing!
The bottom line, as far as I'm concerned, is that we each construct our own views of history, and we tell it as best we can. There is no such thing as a balanced view. There is just a view. (Ironically, there can be an unbalanced view, but that judgment is certainly dependent upon individual and group constructions of meaning.)
Ironically, there was another story in the news recently that relates to the warp of history. Newt Gingrich (the new Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives) let go the Democratic historian of the House and hired a Republican historian, Dr. Christina Jeffrey, from a small Georgia College. She lost her $85,000 a year job less than a week later when it was revealed that in 1986 she had advised the Republican-led Department of Education that a proposal for a new eighth grade history curriculum should be rejected because (her words) "The program gives no evidence of balance or objectivity. The Nazi point of view, however unpopular, is still a point of view and is not represented, not is that of the Ku Klux Klan." (Gingrich, recognizing a political disaster, fired her immediately, although his spokesman stated that "He still holds her in high esteem.")
There is remarkable similarity between what Dr. Jeffrey wrote in 1986 and what Lloyd is writing today, albeit about very different topics. They are both making the mistake of demanding a balanced view. But this just isn't possible. Ken Burns doesn't "goof now and then," Lloyd, he just tells HIS-STORY as best he can, warped as it is by his experience, time, place, gender, etc. That's what history (and all the other social sciences) is all about--presenting views.
P.S. I am not a Yankee fan--I detest them!