Ken Burns’s video series The Civil War and
The Game have evidently reignited interest in the film documentary as a genre and turned our history (and the
national pastime of the American people, baseball) into the stuff of public television.
In making these films, he has given the National Endowment for
the Arts something to cheer about (and to support), and PBS stations
have recently had something more substantial to offer than
lavishly decorated British costume dramas and Christiesque mystery shows. An instance of
the new historical documentary is In Search of the Oregon Trail, narrated by Stacy Keach, recently
broadcast by the Long Island PBS station, WLIW.

In producing his television series, Burns assembled a talented crew of filmmakers, and one of them, director Stephen
Ives, has now launched his own production, The West, which was shown on PBS in September.
The West is a set of nine TV programs, totaling
more than twelve and a half hours of video, exploring the American West through diaries, letters, journals of
exploration, newspaper records, government documents, and first-person
accounts of what it was like to venture into, explore, and try to settle the American West.
Not omitted from these programs is the oral testimony of
those Native Americans who were here first and who
tried without success to resist the inundation of white migrants.

“The West” is a flexible notion that has meant different areas at different times in the colonial and federal