An American filmmaker who revolutionized the documentary film genre, Ken Burns is the award-winning creator of the documentary series Baseball, Jazz, and Unforgivable Blackness. His landmark film, The Civil War, was the highest-rated series in public television history, boasting an audience of 40 million viewers when it first aired and going on to win more than 40 prizes, including two Emmy and two Grammy awards. Airing this fall on public television, Burns’s new work, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, tells the story of the creation and evolution of the National Parks System using archival photographs, first-person accounts, and some of the most breathtaking new images of our national parks ever captured on film. In his review of the companion book to the series, historian Joseph J. Ellis writes, “the book permits the eye and mind to linger over the truly breathtaking pictures in a more meditative way that film does not allow. The result is almost elegiac, producing the same kind of goose bumps that Burns created in his early work on the Brooklyn Bridge and the Civil War.”