Burns, whose documentaries The Civil War and Baseball are among the most highly rated programs in public television history, talked about the struggles of integrating what he called the "top down" and "bottom up" views of history into a true and honest picture of our complicated past. Warning of the "arrogance" of history, Burns explained that in his work he attempts to take advantage of the fact that "the sources of memory lie in anecdote and story, those fragments of our past life that have an emotional coherence and stir an emotional response. This arrogance is conveyed in the words of poet Walt Whitman, who described the Civil War as a "seething hell," lamenting that he knew that the real war would never make it into the history books. Even if we are told that two per cent of the U.S. population died fighting in the Civil War, "facts by themselves are not the vital stuff of history." Anyone who has seen Burns' films knows the the truth of those words and the impact that his filmmaking style has. "With archival photographs and artifacts, diaries, letters and news reports, with sound effects and songs, I have tried to restore the myriad of voices of the past that speak to us not only of generals and presidents, but also of ordinary people, like you and me, who form the real fabric of our history and society - voices that remind us who we are."
The hour long speech was followed by an informal question-and-answer session in which Burns warmly described his experiences with historian Shelby Foote and addressed the different approaches which he took when tackling such seemingly incompatible topics as the Civil War and the national pasttime. Speaking of Baseball, "As a historical filmmaker, I faced many challenges in telling this story, but the most significant may have been that so much of what I had to tell was already part of my audience's experience. Baseball also posed some challenges due to the enormous time period which we covered, time in which the visual record evolved from black-and-white photography through newsreel footage and finally to color film and video tape." Burns also stated that, as documentaries, he felt that Baseball effectively served as a sequel to the Civil War. In so much as the Civil War was a four year battle to abolish slavery, the real struggle for racial equality would continue for many years to come, and nowhere was the struggle more evident than on nation's ballfields. Burns credited Jackie Robinson's appearance in the Brooklyn Dodger's starting lineup as the first real progress the country had seen in nearly one hundred years.
Burns also offered a preview of some of the diverse projects on which he is currently working. Debuting September of 1996 is The West, an eight part film which will document American expansion towards the Pacific under the controversial auspices of manifest destiny and the "competing impulses and irreconciable aspirations" which stood in our way. The most distant of his projects is Jazz, a comprehensive look at the unique and improvizational American musical artform, which should be completed by the year 2000. In the meantime, Burns plans a series of single-episode biographies on a wide variety of American historical figures. The series will include programs on President Thomas Jefferson, explorers Merriwether Lewis and William Clark, author/humorist Mark Twain, outspoken women's suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright.