Dispatches from the Empire


The Land That Allowed Ken Burns to ‘Raise the Dead’

In a move that seemed rash then and remains unconventional now, he rented the white colonial, then heated by a wood-burning stove, and bought it a few years later for $94,000.

The decampment to the small town — a pinprick of a village a 3½-hour drive from Manhattan that then had a population just over 3,000 — allowed Mr. Burns to explore, gave him peace and shut him out from the rest of world so he could see it more clearly.

Ohh.

Yeah, maybe it’s exactly this.