The result is comically counter-productive. Emoting is meant to make history "accessible", but at no point does the BBC allow Schama to gather basic information about the Battle of Gettysburg and pass it to the viewer. He doesn't, for instance, say who won, why the victory mattered, what Pickett's charge was and why it is still cursed in the American South. (It was an infantry assault ordered by the Confederate General Robert E. Lee against Major-General George G. Meade's Union positions on Cemetery Ridge on 3 July, 1863, the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg. It was named after Major-General George Pickett, one of three Confederate generals who led the charge.) American Future can't even bring itself to mention the Gettysburg Address.

Viewers will understand why Schama felt it necessary to go to Gettysburg only if they are already initiated into the history of the American Civil War. The references to "insanely deluded notions of chivalry" will make sense only if they have read elsewhere about Pickett's charge.

The uninitiated who rely on TV for their history will learn nothing beyond the notion that battles are a bloody business, which I expect they already knew. In the name of "accessibility", supposedly anti-elitist media executives maintain that the past must remain inaccessible. A more elitist approach to intellectual life has yet to be invented.