Eyes on the Prize
Kamille Bostick shares the moment when she first saw the PBS documentary <em>Eyes on the Prize</em> and discusses how the revelations of that film history have contributed to her career and her long interest in history, especially the lives and accomplishments of African Americans.<br /><br />Seeing herself reflected in pictures and stories of African American history inspired Bostick to learn more about the lives and stories of those who came before her. In tandem, an <em>Ebony</em> magazine series and the film prompted two realizations for Bostick: first, the extent to which history matters; second, given how much African Americans have enriched U.S. culture, she “couldn’t not know more” about the history of those she saw depicted. In her own work, Bostick strives to honor and remember the songs, creations, and stories of African Americans throughout the nation’s history.
Kamille Bostick, Vice President, Education Programs, Levine Museum of the New South
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The Day My Interest in Race in America Was Born
In this video submission, Ken Burns recounts how formative experiences, both deeply personal and as a young person growing up in the midst of the Civil Rights era, have shaped his perspective on American history and have informed nearly all his documentary projects.
Trying to make sense of his own individual story within the nation’s collective reckoning with race, Burns reflects on how “we human beings seek always to find some frame to understand things.” The humanities, he continues, facilitate our finding “some meaning in it all precisely because of our inevitable mortality.” He believes that the work of history, particularly biography, helps us to organize our stories, and perhaps even to divine “the way that human beings are.” Whether unsettling or inspirational, history always proves useful.
1963
Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker
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Why We Always Come Back to Abraham Lincoln
Ken Burns describes how lines from a historic speech given by 29-year-old Abraham Lincoln have “haunted and inspired” him for nearly 40 years. Expanding on what is revealed in those sentences, Burns discusses how they speak not only to Lincoln’s basic character and optimism, qualities that proved essential to his presidency. He goes on to note that Lincoln’s words, here and elsewhere, are suggestive of what is best in the American character.<br /><br />“A handful of sentences” from Lincoln’s 1838 Springfield speech on national security left a deep imprint on the filmmaker’s own philosophy. For Burns, Lincoln’s narrative illustrates how, as a nation, we are “still stitched together by words and, most important, their dangerous progeny, ideas.” Time and again, Lincoln’s eloquence and vision has guided Burns as he enlists documentary film to tell the story of the United States and its citizens.
Abraham Lincoln's 1838 speech on national security delivered in Springfield, Illinois
Ken Burns, documentary filmmaker
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