Again, a useful take on an otherwise solid series.
To bin last week’s post and this, part of the difficulty Ken Burns faces is a general lack of awareness of naval warfare and its character. Yorktown is a land victory, crucially enabled by sea power. All the other notable Patriot victories are land battles, with the exception of John Paul Jones, and Burns would have had to explain how naval operations (as we term them today) worked.
More broadly, look at the French and Indian War, in which most North American land battles won by the English (Louisburg, Quebec, and even Ticonderoga and Niagara) had maritime components. The same could be said about the Caribbean, India, the Philippines and West Africa. But putting all of that together in a documentary tajes a lot of effort.
I hope I've been fair to Burns about the challenges that he faced in communicating a story of the Revolution to a broad audience. But he backed himself into a corner when he spent four episodes on the period before French intervention and two episodes on the period after French intervention. That meant he had no room to explain maritime strategy, as you say, but I think that's bad! I will try to sum up my (overall positive) perspective on the series next week.
I don’t think Ken Burns adequately addressed the French sense of being betrayed by the Americans with this separate treaty
Again, a useful take on an otherwise solid series.
To bin last week’s post and this, part of the difficulty Ken Burns faces is a general lack of awareness of naval warfare and its character. Yorktown is a land victory, crucially enabled by sea power. All the other notable Patriot victories are land battles, with the exception of John Paul Jones, and Burns would have had to explain how naval operations (as we term them today) worked.
More broadly, look at the French and Indian War, in which most North American land battles won by the English (Louisburg, Quebec, and even Ticonderoga and Niagara) had maritime components. The same could be said about the Caribbean, India, the Philippines and West Africa. But putting all of that together in a documentary tajes a lot of effort.
I hope I've been fair to Burns about the challenges that he faced in communicating a story of the Revolution to a broad audience. But he backed himself into a corner when he spent four episodes on the period before French intervention and two episodes on the period after French intervention. That meant he had no room to explain maritime strategy, as you say, but I think that's bad! I will try to sum up my (overall positive) perspective on the series next week.