This wasn’t the first time I doubted Ken Burns could make a subject interesting. The first time was when a friend urged me to watch the documentarian’s 1994 series Baseball. Though I took a mild, short-lived interest in the game after watching some of the series’ eighteen and a half hours, what kept me watching was the realization that Baseball isn’t really about baseball. No, what made the film engaging was the way it aligned the story of baseball with a grander story of the country: the changing relationship between labor and management; the cultural upheavals of the twentieth century; the struggle to dismantle our racial caste system. Don’t tug on Superman’s cape; don’t doubt Burns’s gift of committing great history to film.I sometimes must…
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