Rutgers’ Ambrose Oral History Award Goes to Ken Burns

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Ken Burns, whose documentary films have chronicled American history and culture from the building of the Brooklyn Bridge to the history of baseball, is the 2009 recipient of the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award.

The award is given annually by the Rutgers Living History Society, which will present it to Burns during its annual meeting on Friday, May 15, in the Neilson Dining Hall on Rutgers’ Cook/Douglass Campus, beginning at 9 a.m.

“This is a tremendous honor,” Burns said. “I was a close friend of Steve Ambrose, and so it’s doubly meaningful.”

Burns has directed 24 historical documentaries over the past 28 years. He is known for his use of archival footage and photos in his documentaries, with frequent use of personal diaries, letters or on-camera interviews. His first documentary, The Brooklyn Bridge,  which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1982, relied in part on archival material housed at Rutgers.

Oral history has been at the core of Burns' work, and his use of oral history has changed the way historical documentaries are made.

“I think that most [documentary] films, when they looked at history, used just a third-person, voice-of-God narrator that told you what you should know,” he said. “We tried to use a bottom-up view, in which the narrator was still important, but … gave a sense of how people spoke and answered.”

Burns' current documentary projects include The National Parks: America's Best Idea, which is scheduled for broadcast on the Public Broadcasting System in the fall. Burns will show an excerpt from that film at the May 15 event. Prohibition and Tenth Inning, an update of Burns' 1994 documentary Baseball, are in production.

The Rutgers Oral History Archives, which currently preserves the personal stories of more than 850 men and women with a Rutgers or New Jersey connection who participated in or lived through World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War or the Cold War, is headquartered at Rutgers in New Brunswick. To date, 480 of the interviews are accessible through the archives’ Web site, http://oralhistory.rutgers.edu.

The Rutgers Living History Society consists of those who participate in, or loyally support, the Rutgers Oral History Archives program.