I was gearing up to respond as well. I was quite disappointed, as I'd mentioned earlier. David Voorhees quite accurately sums up my feelings about it. One other thing I wil mention is that someone had mentioned that the non-historians liked it better and viewed it for the sake of learning/entertainment/etc. What bothers me about that is that they walk away with a fairly skewed view. I'm quite proud of being of Dutch extraction and I really felt they were shortchanged in the documentary. I actually stopped watching it, I think by the third day. Cindy Robinson -----Original Message----- From: David Voorhees [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 5:22 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: NYC Documentary The first episode of Ric's Burns New York unfortunately set the tone for the rest of the series. His stereotypical characterization of the Dutch was offensive at best, and downright crude and ignorant. Had the same things been said about any other people, he would be facing a serious law suit. Indeed, the entire series pandered to a stereotyping of all New Yorkers (though not always so negatively) throughout the city's history into neat little packages, depending on today's popular political correctness. New Yorkers of all groups and classes have from the very beginning been an immensely complex people that defy easy catagorization. The first two-hundred years of the city's history was crammed into two hours and showed an almost absolute ignorance of the period and the scholarship on it. Popular, and incorrect myths, such as Lord Cornbury's cross-dressing, were presented as fact. Particularly insulting was the use of visual caricatures from Washington Irving's satiric works as if they were historical representations of Dutch New Amsterdam. Although Mr. Burns thesis seemed to be that New York City was the great democratic testing ground (though evidence is that class differences have always been huge in the city, and that the descendants of the city's 17th-century Anglo-Dutch oligarchy continue to exert a powerful influence today), virtually nothing positive seemed to have occurred in New York City with the exception of an insatiable "greed." Yet, the very legal foundations for the freedoms we enjoy in America today were often first fought in New York City. There was no mention of the battles between Stuyvesant and the Lutherans, Jews, and Quakers in their appeals for religious toleration, which the minority religions won precisely because of the Dutch constitution and not because of the "greed" of the West India Company; the Leisler Rebellion was glossed over and the show's assessment of it as an uprising against the English rather than as a part of England's Glorious Revolution was totally incorrect and its impact on the city's development should have been futher explored; there was no mention of the John Peter Zenger trial, which established freedom of the press. And one could go on and on. Indeed, many of the institutions which continue to shape New York today, such as New York Hospital, Columbia University, etc., had their formation in this period, yet were barely touched at all. Moreover, no colonial city has a greater amount of surviving contemporary visual materials from which to draw, which Mr. Burns seemed particularly ignorant of. His use of the 1730 Carthwian view of the city with an American flag pasted on it to represent the city after the Revolution is but one silly example. One can appreciate that only so much can be covered in brief program space, and that selectivity in putting together the presentation is always going to offend someone who would like their particular interest receive fuller coverage. But to mislead the public with stereotypes is a more serious problem that this program suffered from.