Surrounded by video cameras in a cramped Boston College classroom, Kathleen Dalton, Instructor in History, responded calmly to a string of questions, all centered on the Roosevelt family.
Dalton was one of 15 historians featured in Ken Burns’s seven-part, 14-hour long documentary, “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,” last week.
The documentary details the lives of the Roosevelt family, starting with Theodore Roosevelt’s birth in 1858 and ending with Eleanor Roosevelt’s death in 1962. Dalton discussed Theodore Roosevelt’s life after 1912.
A renowned Roosevelt historian, Dalton is known especially for her biography, “Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life,” which she credits for introducing her to Burns’s scriptwriter, Geoffrey Ward, and eventually landing her the documentary feature.
Dalton has been featured in several documentaries throughout her career, such as C-Span’s “First Ladies: Influence and Image.” She has found these opportunities to be creative escapes from traditional teaching methods.
“As a history teacher and a professional historian, I see documentary filmmaking as an art form. There are aesthetic and storytelling choices that any documentary filmmaker makes. I see it as a creative process and also how the average person who’s not taking a history course gets their history,” said Dalton.
“Whenever a documentary about the Roosevelts comes up, I am happy to share what I know. Doing public history means sharing your scholarship with new audiences, and an entertaining documentary film is a good way to do that,” wrote Dalton in an email to The Phillipian.
From Dalton’s perspective, Burns’s style focused more on appealing to a large audience, using a slightly different portrayal of Roosevelt than that in Dalton’s book.
Despite her disagreements with some of the ways the Roosevelts were depicted in the documentary, Dalton admires Burns’s prowess and has high hopes for the success of the film.
“He also has an aesthetic that’s really quite compelling because he looks at photographs in great detail…. [In particular,] he looks for facial expressions. I have used [Burns’s work] in my class to teach history because he’s a really good story teller,” said Dalton.
