Background
Burns, Ken was born on July 29, 1953 in Brooklyn. Son of Robert Kyle and Lyla Smith (Tupper) Burns.
Burns, Ken was born on July 29, 1953 in Brooklyn. Son of Robert Kyle and Lyla Smith (Tupper) Burns.
He recieved a Bachelor's degree of Hampshire College, 1975. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Bowdoin College, 1991. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Amherst College, 1991.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), University New Hampshire. Doctor of Fine Arts (honorary), Franklin Pierce College. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Notre Dame College, Manchester, New Hampshire.
HHD (honorary), College of St. Joseph, Rutland, Vermont. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Springfield College Illinois. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Pace University.
Doctor of Philosophy (honorary), City University of New York.
A graduate of Hampshire College, he spent ten years working for PBS, developing his own unit and his powers as a fund-raiser. This was like a campaign for The Civil War five years in the making, eleven hours on the screen, one of the great American films and the redemption of national history for a large audience. Above all, it was the emotional undertaking that was so powerful. Burns knew that it was needed to rediscover the feeling of the war before we could have a chance of understanding it. The achievement was such that one could feel the series entering the mind and nervous system of the country.
Burns did the history' of baseball and the history of jazz next. He asserts that he has no interest in doing features—and one believes him, for he shows no need for fiction.
Burns’s quilt of American history grows. His series on ideas (like baseball and jazz) are richer than those on heroes (Jefferson or Twain). But the study of race is both earnest and committed—and it makes the mindset of feature film seem frivolous. On the other hand, there is by now a Burns tone that has earned parody, and some critical disquiet. For it is lofty, so high-minded, that it is sometimes hard to see how America has ever gone astray. One would like to see Burns face ordinary iniquity, or shortcoming. That omission was a serious Haw in Jazz, a series that could not account for—and therefore ignored—the decline in the music.
Mark Twain
2002Jazz
2001Frank Lloyd Wright
1998Trustee Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, since 1992, New Hampshire Humanities Council. Board directors MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire. Member Academy Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences, Society of America Historians, New Hampshire Humanities Council (trustee), Massachusetts History Society (correspondent).
Burns has both the energy and the educational zeal of one of the great nineteenth- century historians. His films are old-fashioned, romantic, made in the spirit of the time they are describing—essentially, the America of tire nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He believes in still pictures (paintings, prints, or photographs), new live footage that evokes place and atmosphere, and words. Burns makes composed, written films, in which the interplay of narrative, interview, and original document is intricate and moving.
Married Amy Stechler, July 10, 1982 (divorced 1993) children: Sarah, Lilly. Married Julie Deborah Brown, October 18, 2003.