If you were among the thousands of people who watched the outstanding public television series, The Civil War, you saw a great many of Gardner's photographs as they were used by producer Ken Burns.

That series, by the way, drew the largest audience in public television history and WHRO was proud to bring it to you.

Ken Burns was in Hampton Roads recently on behalf of WHRO, and we were able to capture him for an interview for you.

We talked to him at Fort Monroe, a place which in itself played a large role in Civil War history.

Presidents north and south stayed at Fort Monroe.

Inside the East Gate, Abraham Lincoln in May 1862 stayed for four days at the graceful old house called Quarters number one.

Lincoln and his staff plotted in these rooms the invasion of Norfolk.

Lincoln's bedroom window looked south toward Norfolk.

It was inside a casemate's cell where Jefferson Davis stayed for four and a half months, a prisoner after the war that we talked with Ken Burns.

This is sort of funny.

I never thought I'd be sitting in Jefferson Davis', lying in Jefferson Davis's bed.

For an acrimonious, mean spirited, horrible war.

Very few people were imprisoned or punished for it besides those who participated in it, whatever punishment is implied by loss and death and sacrifice.

But Jefferson Davis was in prison for a while here in this room, could only see what he could see out of this casement window.

And I think it is a tribute to how quickly this reconciliation, the spirit of reconciliation came over us, that he didn't spend too terribly long.

This architect many Northerners felt of the entire fiasco.

What inspired you to do the Civil War series?

What inspired me was a developing sense in the course of many other historical documentary films that the Civil War was the central story of American history, but also something of central importance to how we are as a people.

Each one of the films that I've done can basically be reduced to one simple question.

Who are we?

The Brooklyn Bridge, the Shakers, Huey Long, the Statue of Liberty, each one of these films in its own way attempts to ask that question.

Civil War better than any other deepens that question, asks it more fully.

Doesn't necessarily always get an answer.

I don't think in essence we're looking for an answer.

We nearly, we merely wish to pursue the question.

But more than any other subject, the Civil War tells us more about who we are answers that question more fully.

The Civil War is in a nine part, 11 hour series.

I'm interested in how you organized the work.

It was a mammoth job.

For example, when did you make the decision you needed Shelby Foote and when did you make the decision that you were going to use photographs as the basis of the visual part of the program?

Well, I have a history of making documentary films for 10 years before the Civil War and the hallmark of those films is the animation of archival material photographs as opposed to newsreels.

That's what, that's the style that we evolved.

So I knew going in that that's what we would use to tell a story.

Fortunately since there's no footage from the Civil War period, Robert Pen Warren, the late poet laureate of our country and a man I had gotten to know as a result of the Huey Long documentary made called me up one evening and said that I would be an idiot not to talk to Shelby Foote.

This was early on.

So the first roles of film we exposed were the interview with Shelby Foote.

That was a great beginning.

And basically the rest of the process is sort of the collecting of raw material, old photographs on the one hand.

First person quotes on the other.

Live cinematography of the now quiet battle sites on the third, writing good narration.

And then sort of coming into this process that we call editing, which is this long involved sort of horse trading before between these elements, music, the sound effects, the voices, the narration, the photographs, the paintings, the lithographs, the live cinematography.

And really having a kind of spirited vociferous argument among ourselves about what works.

This fall you've got a new program.

Tell me about it.

Is it finished?

What stage is it in?

We've just finished editing and are now in the process called sound cutting of a two hour film called Empire of the Air, which is a triple biography of three men mostly unfamiliar to the public.

Lee DeForest, Edwin Howard Armstrong and David Sarnoff.

Sarnoff might be well known as the head of RCA and NBC.

These are the men that for all intents and purposes made radio in this country.

Now normally what we get is a dose of the rather nostalgic thing called the golden age of radio.

What we chose to do was tell a much more complicated and darker story of the man whose inventions and genius helped to make this happen, but whose envy and greed and ambition and ultimate tragedies put a kind of eerie spin, a familiar kind of 20th century spin on the story and I think give backbone spine to what would otherwise be a kind of fluffy golden age kind of nostalgia.

It's not attempting to be a history of radio.

It's attempting to be a story of these three men.

Burns has also been discovering since the Civil War series the problems and pleasures of being a celebrity.

He admits he likes the role but says he isn't yet comfortable with it.

He prefers holding up in his small town New Hampshire home and production studio working and being with his wife and two children.

Burns' next project will be a history of baseball.

He's already shot archival material and scores of interviews.

He is aiming to have the history finished by the time of the World Series 1994.

I played Pony League and Little League and until I got interested in girls baseball was the biggest thing in my life.

And I think that for the purposes of American history, it's a wonderful yardstick of where we've been in many ways where we've been since the Civil War.

It tells us a lot about who we are.

It tells us what kind of people we are, good and bad.

Baseball players aren't unique.

They reflect us.

They have problems with gambling and drugs and have all through their history and so do we.

They reflect the greed of a particular era.

When I was growing up, I collected baseball cards not because of their monetary value, but because the people on those cards meant something terrifically important to me.

Now you find kids disinterested in anything but the monetary value of the cards, which is an inevitable bypod of the kind of emphasis we placed in the 1980s.

Baseball's a barometer of who we are.