The Civil War, the Emmy® Award-winning series from Ken Burns, is now fully restored to high definition, achieving the optimal picture quality originally intended. Hailed as a film masterpiece and landmark in historical storytelling, Ken Burns’s epic documentary brings to life America’s most destructive – and defining – conflict. Here is the saga of celebrated generals and ordinary soldiers, a heroic and transcendent president and a country that had to divide itself in two in order to become one.

This epic presentation of America’s bloodiest conflict has received widespread critical praise from reviewers and historians alike as a landmark in documentary filmmaking. Producer/director Ken Burns searched over 60,000 archival images (and filmed 3,000 of them) along with period paintings, lithographs, and newspaper headlines and combined them with newsreels of veterans, live scenes, and first person quotations from the times read by a chorus of extraordinary voices. They tell the dramatic story of the nation’s struggle to preserve democracy by erasing the stain of slavery: but at a cost of 620,000 lives. The actual historical record is more compelling and emotionally powerful than any fictional account could be.