Love it. Considering I'm not american and have no skin in that particular fight I have still watched it several times. Its such a rich telling of the war and it took longer to produce than the actual war took to fight.

To the bewilderment of my companions I got very excited last year when I travelled to Chattanooga. While the others went shopping for discount clothes I went to see some of the battle sites. While the others giggled about the name of "missionary ridge", I kept pointing out how important it was as a turning point in a battle long ago.

I bought the audiobooks of Shelby Footes epic, and spent a long time studying other sources. Enough to consider myself a very amateur historian on the subject.

It's one of those endlessly fascinating eras where so much change seemed to happen at once. What seem like clear motives of the virtuous are in fact pragmatic choices to assure victory. And Ken Burns documentary tells it in a way that almost transports you to that time. The use of music is especially effective.

I have since moved on to WW1 but the US civil war holds a certain level of fascination for so many. It was the first modern war and the last romantic war. It was a time when honour and courage were talked about as the essential elements of a good soldier. It was also a war where the power of the rifle and a defensive position ended those romantic notions.

On our side of the atlantic we should have learned a lot from the US struggle but we didn't, and many died because of it. From battle tactics improving enough to prevent the mass slaughter that was full frontal assaults against a defended position.

Or an even more important lesson we Europeans failed to learn was that war had changed due to modern economics. Before the US civil war, wars were usually small regional events where the loser was the one who ran out of funds and could not continue. The US civil war showed that modern states could fund a war on a large scale for several years. Even the south with its lack industry and trade, once the blockades were put in place, was able to put up a good fight.

It changed a lot of things.