American History
Related: About this forum"The Men Who Built America - Frontiersmen" was infuriatingly bad
I was really looking forward to this "Frontiersmen" series on History Channel. It was just awful!
IMO, nobody should be pointing their children or their students toward this series. It's the worst kind of program -- not a documentary and not a dramatization. It's just a mess.
I'm not an expert or historian, but I've learned quite a bit. Almost nothing that I learned about Boone and Kentucky over the years was correctly depicted in this series. Some elements were there, yes, but jumbled and rearranged. Important formative events in Boone's life were only touched upon, or ignored completely.
The series completely ignored the presence of slavery and Boone's ownership of slaves -- depicting the Western expansion as a complete white settler vs. native enterprise.
They made it seem that Boone hacked the trail through the Cumberland Gap himself, when in fact it had existed for ages before frontiersmen arrived. He just found out about it and capitalized upon it.
Ugh! There's too much wrong to list.
left-of-center2012
(34,195 posts)(the trail through the Cumberland Gap)
"... it had existed for ages before frontiersmen arrived.
He just found out about it and capitalized upon it."
roscoeroscoe
(1,618 posts)Sad waste of effort.
marble falls
(62,086 posts)© 2001 - 2018 History Channel LLC
BaileyBill
(172 posts)about history, at all.
JayhawkSD
(3,163 posts)They are famous for "history" shows that are a bunch of people running around filthy and dressed like cave men, doing whatever daily activities they believe cave men did.
They do have one show called "Ice Road Truckers" which I rather enjoy, although what it has to do with history I cannot imagine, and if I ran a trucking company I certainly would not hire any of the idiots they have driving the trucks.