Series · PBS · 1990
Pass it on
The Civil War
76Worth an evening.
A republic, a horror, and the letters home. The one a house should sit through once.
The review
The photographs hold still, and the letters do the moral work. Men write home about mud, fear, and what they think the fight is for. The series does not treat the war as a mood or a pageant. Slavery is the fact at the center, and the series says so. It also stays with the particular dead, which keeps the fact from becoming only a thesis.
A teenager can watch it with you, in pieces. It is long because the war was long. Do not put on a drama about the same years until you have sat with this. The letters are the stewardship: a people telling itself what it did, in the words of the people who did it.
Folio
Keep The Civil War in the record.
No house has filed a sentence for this yet.
Live Historic number 76. Yours can differ.
The glance
Industry is the thin one.
Does anyone here do a real job, and does that job matter?
This phone is set for a grown person, just me. Change the ages.
The eight
- 6Industry
Soldiering, nursing, governing. The labor is in the letters.
- 7Household
The letters are from households. The war is what happened to them.
- 6Piety
Providence is in the mouths of the people who were there, not pasted on by the film.
- 8Courage
The courage is specific and terrible, and not only on one side.
- 9Republic
The subject is whether the Union and the promise in its founding could be kept.
- 7Temperance
The horror is the record. It is not staged for a thrill.
- 9Truth
Letters and photographs are allowed to contradict the easy story.
- 9Stewardship
It hands a house the dead by name, which is the beginning of honesty.
Where to watch
Finding the page.
Live Historic · The Civil War · 76IMDb
