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Television has foreshortened our concept of history to the last 50 years, argues Bill McKibben '82 in his book The Age of Missing Information. Whatever happened before 1945, whatever history was not recorded on film or video, seems somehow less real than events of the television age, he suggests. The ascendent visual media have come to define, for millions of viewers, what the Roman Empire or the court of Louis XIV or the Roaring Twenties were really like.

Thus, TV producers have inherited a major responsibility. The eight-part television series The West, which airs on PBS stations September 15 to 19 and 22 to 24, takes this charge seriously and does its homework with care. Directed and coproduced by Stephen Ives '81, the 12-and-a-half-hour documentary offers a fresh account of the American West. Thankfully, the series avoids clichés like Manifest Destiny and the "Wild West"; instead, the narrative roots itself in illustrative human stories. As a result, The West is a welcome counterweight to the shopworn myths of old-time textbooks and movie Westerns.

Much of the saga could be called "How the West Was Seized." Episodes unblinkingly document the government's genocidal war against Native American nations and the endless, disheartening series of betrayals through breached treaties. Other minorities-Hispanic, African American, Chinese-also come into play, not only as key actors, but also as narrators: Ives interviews contemporary writers and scholars from the very racial and ethnic groups whose sobering histories they recount.

An american history concentrator at Harvard, Ives worked for seven years with Ken Burns, creator of the popular Public Broadcasting System documentaries The Civil War and Baseball. Burns is the executive producer this time around, and his fingerprints are all over The West. There are the slow zooms in and pans across old sepia-tone photographs; the white-on-black subtitles; the many colorful quotations from old letters and diaries read by celebrities (including the ubiquitous George Plimpton '48); the antique maps with lines bleeding forward to trace an army's route; the aerial landscape shots during voice-overs; and the languid pace, evocative of the era.

But The Civil War had built-in drama and coherence: a military conflict filled with colorful personalities and events, confined to a four-year period. In contrast, The West sprawls over everything west of the Mississippi from Lewis and Clark to World War I-and then some. Faced with this staggering enormity, Ives wisely chose to tell a few stories well. He focuses on such recognized figures as Sitting Bull, Mark Twain, and Brigham Young. But he also follows the stories of commoners like William Swain-a New York farmer who went west with the Gold Rush in 1849 and returned a year later, wiser but no richer. The result is televised history that avoids the Disney version. The West speaks in many accents, and so comes close to looking and sounding like America.

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