Ken Burns
About Ken Burns
Speech topics
On-Stage Conversation/Audience Q&A
This is a less formal, Inside-the-Actors-Studio type of event. Ken Burns responds to questions from a moderator on all his films (or film-specific) and issues in history and contemporary American culture. Audience Q&A to conclude if requested.
Speaking videos
Media coverage
Opinion | Ken Burns: Our monuments are representations of myth, not fact
Filmmaker Ken Burns reflects on James Baldwin's understanding of liberty, and how our most venerated monuments can remind us of where America falls short.
Books by Ken Burns
“The American Revolution: An Intimate History” (2025)
The American Revolution An Intimate History
“The Dust Bowl: An Illustrated History” (2012)
In this riveting chronicle, which accompanies a documentary to be broadcast on PBS in the fall, Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns capture the profound drama of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Terrifying photographs of mile-high dust storms, along with firsthand accounts by more than two dozen eyewitnesses, bring to life this heart-wrenching catastrophe, when a combination of drought, wind, and poor farming practices turned millions of acres of the Great Plains into a wasteland, killing crops and livestock, threatening the lives of small children, burying homesteaders' hopes under huge dunes of dirt. Burns and Duncan collected more than 300 mesmerizing photographs, some never before published, scoured private letters, government reports, and newspaper articles, and conducted in-depth interviews to produce a document that may likely be the last recorded testimony of the generation who lived through this defining decade.
“The National Parks: America's Best Idea” (2011)
America’s national parks spring from an idea as radical as the Declaration of Independence: that the nation’s most magnificent and sacred places should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone. In this evocative and lavishly illustrated narrative, Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan delve into the history of the park idea, from the first sighting by white men in 1851 of the valley that would become Yosemite and the creation of the world’s first national park at Yellowstone in 1872, through the most recent additions to a system that now encompasses nearly four hundred sites and 84 million acres.
“The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945” (2010)
The vivid voices that speak from these pages are not those of historians or scholars. They are the voices of ordinary men and women who experienced—and helped to win—the most devastating war in history, in which between 50 and 60 million lives were lost.
“Baseball: An Illustrated History, including The Tenth Inning” (2010)
The acclaimed nationwide best seller and companion volume to Ken Burns’s grand-slam PBS documentary—updated and expanded to coincide with the broadcast of a new, two-part Tenth Inning that looks back on the age of steroids, home-run records, the rise of Latino players, and so much more.
At a glanceKen Burns
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