Ric Burns
Ric Burns has been writing, directing and producing historical documentaries for nearly 20 years, since his collaboration on the celebrated PBS series The Civil War, (1990), which he produced with his brother Ken and co-wrote with Geoffrey C. Ward. Since founding Steeplechase Films in 1989, he has directed some of the most distinguished programs in the award-winning American Experience series including Coney Island (1991), The Donner Party (1992), The Way West (1995), Ansel Adams (2002), and Eugene O’Neill (2006). In 2006, his award winning film, Andy Warhol aired as a part of the PBS series, American Masters. In 2009, Tecumseh’s Vision aired as the second episode in WGBH Boston’s five-part series, We Shall Remain. Most recently, he completed Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World which aired nationally on PBS in the spring of 2010. Burns is perhaps best known for his eight-part, seventeen and a half hour series, New York: A Documentary Film, which continues to be a bestselling series on DVD.
By Ric Burns
Why Latin America Dislikes the United States
The deep-seated cause of this feeling of hostility does not spring from the actions of Americans who go to Latin-America but from the treatment accorded to Latin-Americans who come to the United States. In truth, the whole question is involved in our own national and local Negro problem.
Love Bank Park and Gentrification on Cherokee Street
St. Louis’s urban crisis happened along deeply divided lines of race and class, and so is its economic and spatial reinvigoration happening along those same lines. In many ways, the Cherokee Street district, the neighborhoods surrounding it, and Love Bank Park are unique urban arenas that reveal the pains of growth and decline in St. Louis, but they are also situated at the typical boundaries one might find in American cities of the twenty-first century.
The Black Hair Fantastic
I have a print of Paul Goodnight’s “Links and Lineages” that depicts three generations braiding each other hair in a colorful tapestry of Black female intimacy and beauty. Such pleasures exist in many families. Mine—not so much.
Between Optimism & Diligence
I am also hoping the long hot summer of 2020 will foster a new understanding of the fact that crime is systemic, it is not simply individual, and that deep systemic solutions are required to handle all social problems.
Linked Breath
To see and be otherwise will mean that we must look differently and act differently, make connections when many social forces encourage us to interpret in silos. How often have you thought about how breath—literally and metaphorically—links many issues of social inequality?
A Tour of the Divided City
A popular bus tour of St. Louis reveals the city's larger patterns to make its central narrative, and long-standing tensions, stand out.
Screening Africa
The new venture Afripedia is out to change your view of the continent, one featured artist at a time.