Civil War for the week

Rico says you can watch Civil War-related shows on television this week:

History Detectives
Pawn Stars
American Pickers 

and Neil Genszlinger has an article in The New York Times on the subject:

The big names— Fort Sumter, Gettysburg, Lee, Grant— are getting much of the focus during television’s Civil War spring and summer, as they always do when this pivotal conflict comes up. But to mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the war, the programming that resumes with a burst this weekend, and continues over the next several months, also has much smaller things on its mind: a child’s doll, an aging tintype, a faded letter. It is those things, nineteenth-century artifacts elevated to new prominence by a twenty-first-century television trend, that provide some of the clearest reminders of what the war was really about and how it remains with us today.
Finding new ways to look at the war is, of course, a sort of 'Ken Burns effect'— an effort to clear the bar that Mr. Burns set so high in 1990 with his mini-series The Civil War. Mr. Burns, for one, doesn’t think the form is dead. “I think there are still stories to be told,” he said. “The Civil War is such a watershed moment, the watershed moment in the childhood of our country.” Yes, there are limits on such documentaries— there’s only so much you can do with still photographs and diaries— but that doesn’t mean there can’t be innovation. “It just forces us into new relationships with photographs, new relationships with voice, new relationships with narrative,” Mr. Burns said.
Several shows last month marked the anniversary of the shelling of Fort Sumter, which began the war in 1861. But the History channel has two big-ticket specials timed to Memorial Day: Gettysburg, which relates the story of that battle by telling, in graphic detail, the stories of eight participants, and Lee & Grant, which sticks with the familiar template to illuminate the decisions of those two generals, who— evidence of the hazards of working this oft-visited territory— were recently given the same treatment by PBS’s American Experience series. But both the History Channel and PBS have also found a different path into the Civil War, via series they already had up and running.
It’s a genre that might be called detritus history: programs like History Detectives, American Pickers, and Pawn Stars that focus on individual artifacts and their tales. This week, the History Channel is showing episodes of American Pickers and “Pawn Stars that concentrate on Civil War paraphernalia and, over the next several months, History Detectives, an addictive series now in its ninth season, will offer several segments with Civil War roots. These programs often do a better job of remembering what the war was really about and pinpointing why it is still relevant than more scholarly specials full of maps and timelines and earnest experts.
“A lot of people say Americans don’t like history, they don’t know anything about their history,” said Wes Cowan, one of the five “history detectives” (he is president of Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati) who hunt down the stories behind artifacts brought forward by viewers. “I would argue vehemently that that is not the case. They may not know the kind of college history that you and I got in our survey classes; the kind of broad-brush history that I like to refer to as history with a big H. But every family has some item in their house that connects their family to the broader events of American history. And I like to refer to that as history with a little h. The Civil War sword, the World War Two scrapbook, the Coke bottle that Grandpa got when he started working at the Coke factory; those kinds of stories are what interest Americans.”
One such story, due for broadcast on 12 July, starts out as a simple records search, but ends up going right to the heart of the ugliness of slavery and the emotions it engendered. A stamp collector, in a stash of materials he purchased, finds some letters, one from a Union soldier to his brother inquiring about a commission, another from a comrade of that soldier informing the brother that his sibling had been wounded. By the time the History Detectives folks run the tale down, they are not at Gettysburg or Antietam or one of the other marquee battles, but at Poison Springs, Arkansas, where, in April of 1864, a Union foraging expedition ran into Confederate forces. The Union troops included the First Kansas Colored Infantry, which had in it some former slaves. When the Confederates won the day, the white Union soldiers who were wounded were taken to a Confederate field hospital, but not the black troops. “For the First Kansas Colored Infantry, the real nightmare began after the battle,” Mark Christ, a Civil War historian, says in the episode. “As the Confederates approached through the battlefield, they shot any wounded men that they saw. If you were an African-American soldier, wounded, it’s very unlikely that you would have survived this battlefield.”
That, in a gruesome microcosm, drives home the consequences of an institution that labeled one race as property. The nation had to shed a part of itself that was indefensible on moral grounds, and doing so was going to be traumatic. “I’m always concerned with the way we cloak the war in bloodless, gallant myth,” Mr. Burns said. There is a tendency, he said, to shrug off the overriding, glaring fact of 1861: “Four million Americans were owned by other Americans.” When he was researching his series years ago, Mr. Burns said, he would be driving through the South and see signs outside, say, a barn advertising Civil War memorabilia, which in that part of the country meant Confederate memorabilia. “I was always struck that in practically every other place we’d go in, there was a side room where they were selling Nazi stuff,” he said, evidence of “the fascination with the Lost Cause.”
The History Channel actually took a cue from World War Two storytelling when it came to Gettysburg. “We really were inspired by the way Saving Private Ryan was done,” said Nancy Dubuc, president of the channel, referring to Steven Spielberg’s film about World War Two, released in 1998, whose beachfront battle scene was shockingly violent. The company brought in some heavy hitters from movie land, the directors (and brothers) Tony and Ridley Scott, as executive producers. The usual stuff of Civil War documentaries is included in Gettysburg— the troop movements, the casualty figures— but, Ms. Dubuc said: “we spent a tremendous amount of effort not to just lay this out in a linear way, but to lay it out in a very personal way.”
For Tony Scott, who trained early on as an artist, that meant a lot of red, but also the subtler tones of common soldiers caught in momentous events, heroism in impossible circumstances. “I always love to be able to tap into all those colors, and it’s not gratuitous,” he said. “I began life as a painter, and I still think like a painter.”
The channel nevertheless remains committed to thinking like a historian. It has announced a four-year programming commitment (matching the length of the war itself), as well as related initiatives that include a Civil War iPad application and Give 150, a campaign encouraging viewers to donate to foundations that preserve Civil War sites.
“With the exception of the actual birth of our country in the American Revolution,” Ms. Dubuc said, “you can’t match the Civil War as a defining moment in our history.”
The mind-sets and divisions of the 1860s, of course, are still evident today, in the red state-blue state split, the veiled racism of some political discourse, and, yes, even the relatively benign world of artifact buying and selling. “If you asked me how many of my customers, as an auctioneer, who are Civil War collectors from the South, collect things that belonged to the North,” Mr. Cowan noted, “the answer would be: not very many.”
Other History Detectives episodes this summer involve a doll that may have been used to smuggle medicines into the blockaded South, and a pike— a blade on a pole— that could have been used in John Brown’s ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.
To end the season in September, Mr. Cowan presides over another war-theme episode, centered on a faded tintype that shows a white man and a black man, both in uniform. Mr. Cowan first saw the image when he appraised it on another PBS program, Antiques Roadshow. At the time the story that accompanied it went something like this: the black man was a freed slave whose family had been owned by the white man; both men fought for the Confederacy, the white man was injured, and the black man prevented surgeons from amputating a leg and nursed him back to health. “When it was presented on the air, it unleashed a real firestorm of controversy,” Mr. Cowan said. “Did this really happen? A number of viewers questioned it.” Again, all the emotions of the time, bound up in a humble artifact. The History Detectives segment will try to determine the real story; Mr. Cowan wouldn’t divulge the results, but promised a memorable installment.
Two of the History channel’s more popular shows, Pawn Stars and American Pickers, are also offering Civil War-theme segments. Pawn Stars, which revolves around the buying and selling at a family-owned pawnshop near Las Vegas, will include Civil War objects this week: some firearms from the period; and a John Wilkes Booth wanted poster. And American Pickers, in which two genial fellows named Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz go hunting in barns and attics for historical tidbits and then try to buy them from the owners, will devote an entire episode to Civil War memorabilia. It is an episode with a difference: instead of working for themselves, as they usually do, they are buying on behalf of the Gettysburg Museum of History. They set off with a $15,000 budget and a wish list from the museum, and some of the collectors they end up visiting and buying from are a far cry from the rural hoarders with a barn full of junk who often turn up on their show. These aficionados have houses that look like private museums, with a lifetime’s worth of collectibles. “A lot of these guys were extremely passionate about what they had,” Mr. Wolfe said, which made them reluctant to sell it to the Pickers. “When they learned that it was going to be in a museum and in the public eye, that worked to our advantage.” He said that among the artifacts he was especially pleased to end up with was a Union frock coat with the owner’s name inside. The episode also includes a brief segment in which he and Mr. Fritz dress and skirmish with some Civil War reenactors. These people are easy to mock, but Mr. Wolfe came away with nothing but respect. He also came away with a hint as to why the reenactors are so dedicated, one that underscores the continuing mystique of the Civil War: “A lot of them,” he said, “were playing their own relatives.”

Rico says that reenactors are easy to mock, until you remember that they're armed... (Given that his Northern relatives all escaped the draft, and one Southern relative was said to have "lit out for the trees in Sixty-One and didn't come home until Sixty-Five", he won't be portraying any of them during the Sesquicentennial.)