Movie Review

Teaching survey courses in American history poses the daunting task of compressing and presenting several centuries of events, issues, and people in a package that students can grasp and retain meaningfully. All the more daunting is the challenge to turn that package into a videotaped television series that can serve as a telecourse, supplementary material for regular classwork, and a video reference for libraries. A Biography of America admirably achieves these objectives in twenty-six half-hour programs on videocassette, accompanied by a textbook (Mary Beth Norton, A People and a Nation, 2001), teacher and student guides, and an interactive Web site <www.learner.org>.	1
The series is framed as a course taught by Donald L. Miller, professor of history at Lafayette College. Positioned behind a podium, Miller delivers his lectures in a direct, intense, and engaging manner. From time to time he personalizes his accounts by drawing on the experiences of members of his own family. Supporting Miller is an impressive team of historians who gather in a faculty room setting at the outset of each episode to discuss the particular material to be covered. Periodically, members of the team step up to the podium as guest lecturers. They include Pauline Maier, Louis P. Masur, Waldo E. Martin Jr., Douglas Brinkley, and Virginia Scharff. Stephen Ambrose stops by briefly to offer some blunt and colorful commentary; and, although he never appears on camera, the former historian of the House of Representatives and coeditor of the Booker T. Washington Papers, Raymond Smock, completes the team as senior historical consultant. For good measure, the series concludes with appearances by the novelists Esmeralda Santiago, Charles Johnson, Arthur Golden, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., each of whom has blended fiction and nonfiction in search of historical "truth." Try matching that lineup in one of your own courses.	2
A Biography of America adopts a style of cinéma vérité. Speakers sometimes stumble verbally, and they chat amiably, argue, banter, and talk over each other. Miller appears the most at ease in front of the camera. Some of the other lecturers at times seem stiff, perhaps uncomfortable reading from a Teleprompter, but during the conversational segments they all unwind and become more animated. The series is amply illustrated with paintings, still photographs, motion picture footage, maps, and editorial cartoons. In order to squeeze the entire survey into thirteen hours, however, it adopts a fairly rapid-fire presentation and forgoes the slow panning of pictures in close-up that have become a staple of recent documentaries. The background music is varied but unobtrusive. The effect focuses the viewers' attention squarely on the course's content.	3
An ambitious undertaking, A Biography of America shares the strengths and weaknesses of any survey course. Its strength lies in its sweeping panorama of the history of the nation as a whole and of its many component parts. Its weakness is an inability to linger for very long on any one of those parts. Historians using this series will most likely find the episodes closest to their own specializations the least satisfying, while they will appreciate its adept condensation of other areas. The series manages to include a broad array of social, cultural, political, diplomatic, military, economic, and technological themes, but it strongly reflects the past several decades of historiography by devoting its greatest attention to issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity.	. . .