So I don't care for Burns' work. Big deal. It gets other people thinking about history...talking about history...and looking into it for themselves. That, to me, is the important part. The old BBC series "The World at War" was an earlier version of the same idea...putting faces and images to what for many might have been colored dots on a map. Burns doesn't have a corner on the market any more than Ambrose did the printed version. Again, to me the important part is that both men get others interested in history...people who might not have looked at it otherwise.Don't like Burns' work or his work on the Civil War? Fine, feel free to produce your own.
IMO good history also frames the context for events and the decisions of the actors. It tries as much as possible to take the "20/20 hindsight" out of events to show what people might have seen (and didn't see) at the time.
The term "The Good War" came into popular use with Turkel's oral history, but I suspect it was around before that. The meaning, I think, came down it being a fairly clear-cut "good versus evil" sort of conflict...something that was much more blurred in Korea and Vietnam.
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