Ken Burns spent several hours trying to explain why America tried to ban alcohol. The answer turns out to be more uncomfortable than either side of the argument expected.

There is a temptation, looking back at Prohibition, to treat it as a collective delusion — an episode of puritanical overreach so obviously doomed that it is hard to take seriously the people who fought for it. Ken Burns resists that temptation with characteristic care. His three-part documentary series gives equal weight to both the dry movement and the wet resistance, and what emerges is not a story of foolishness versus wisdom but of two genuine moral positions, each internally coherent, each producing consequences its advocates neither intended nor foresaw.

The drys were not simply zealots. Many of them were women who had watched alcohol destroy families — their own families — with no legal recourse and no social support. The temperance movement emerged from real suffering, and it carried with it a moral seriousness that is too easily dismissed from the other side of the experiment. The wets were not simply libertines. They understood, correctly, that legislating private behaviour at this scale would produce consequences worse than the problem it claimed to solve. Both were right about something. Both were wrong about something else. That is Burns's argument, and it is an empathetic one: that the people who made history were not fools or villains but human beings acting on convictions shaped by their specific experience of the world.

This is the quality that distinguishes Burns's best work across decades of filmmaking. His method — slow pans across archival photographs, period music, actors reading from letters and diaries in the voices of the dead — is designed to close the distance between the viewer and the historical subject. The technique has been widely imitated and occasionally satirised, but it works because it is grounded in a genuine conviction: that history is not a sequence of events but an accumulation of individual experiences, and that understanding it requires something closer to imaginative inhabitation than to analysis.

Prohibition is a particularly concentrated example of this because its subject is so resistant to comfortable retrospective judgment. The Eighteenth Amendment was passed, repealed, and is now regarded as an embarrassing detour in American legal history. Burns makes you feel, without ever stating it, that this verdict is too simple — that it forecloses the questions the episode actually raises about government, personal liberty, moral consensus, and the limits of legislation as a tool for social change. These are not historical questions. They are live ones, and Burns knows it. His skill is in making you arrive at that recognition yourself, through the accumulated weight of individual stories, rather than being told it.

His wider body of work extends this project across the full range of American experience. The War (2007) reconstructs the Second World War almost entirely through the testimony of ordinary soldiers and civilians from four American towns — a deliberate narrowing of scale that makes the enormity of the conflict legible through individual human cost. The Vietnam War (2017) is his most formally ambitious attempt to hold multiple incompatible perspectives simultaneously: American soldiers, Vietnamese combatants, protesters, politicians, all given space to speak without the film adjudicating between them. Whether that withholding of judgment is a strength or an evasion is a question worth sitting with — but the attempt itself reflects the same empathetic commitment that animates Prohibition: the insistence that the people on every side of a historical conflict were living inside their own coherent moral world, and that understanding history means taking that seriously.