Grant on PBS

Posted in African Americans, Media, Memory by Andy Hall on January 10, 2011

As a companion piece to last week’s film on Lee, American Experience will tonight air a similar documentary on Ulysses S. Grant.

Also: Last week I called out Washington Times Civil War blogger Martha Boltz for posting a tired, cliché-driven critique of American Experience‘s biography of Robert E. Lee, before she’d even seen it. On Saturday, she posted an update, and acknowledged that “the folks at PBS did a fairly decent job of presenting the man.” She noted, as well, that she’d gotten a number of messages from others via e-mail and Facebook that she should give the episode a fair hearing.

Her review still has an unforced error or two, such as her assertion that Lee “grew up in Arlington House,” and that the show avoided the “typical overbearing slave-owner depiction [of Lee] with which we are frequently presented,” which was in the show and which is, in my experience, anything but “typical” in popular depictions of Lee, but — whatever. Progress is progress.