Ken Burns is an American documentary filmmaker known for such films as Huey Long, The Civil War, Baseball, and The Dust Bowl.
Ken Burns sat down with Jacobin to discuss his new documentary, Benjamin Franklin, and how the founding father’s spirit of humanitarianism and progress led him to establish America’s first abolitionist society two years before the Declaration of Independence.
The new four-part PBS documentary Muhammad Ali, codirected by Ken Burns, examines the life of the legendary boxer and antiwar radical. Burns talks to Jacobin about how a kid from Kentucky named Cassius Clay became “the spirit of the 20th century.”
From fighting alongside communists in the Spanish Civil War to backing revolutionaries in Cuba, documentarian Ken Burns shows us the radical side of writer Ernest Hemingway in the new PBS docuseries Hemingway. Burns talks to Jacobin about Hemingway’s forgotten left-wing politics and why the writer still matters.