One enters a Ken Burns documentary a fledgling and departs soaring. Countless students who watched Burns’s The Civil War during their history curriculum were absorbed by the series—a remarkable achievement considering its nine episodes run over 11 hours. Burns’s Baseball is even longer, as is The Vietnam War. His latest documentary, The American Buffalo, surveys the “magnificent mammals” over 10,000 years of North American history and pays special attention to the buffalo as it relates to Indigenous Americans—all in a mere four hours. —Jack Sullivan