Ken Burns builds his account of the American Civil War almost entirely from period photographs, brought to life with slow pans and narrator David McCullough's steady voice, across nine episodes running from Fort Sumter to Appomattox. Actors read from letters and diaries: a Rhode Island soldier named Sullivan Ballou writes to his wife days before he dies at Bull Run, a line that recurs through the whole series. Historian Shelby Foote appears constantly, telling battlefield stories with the timing of a novelist, while Barbara Fields and others push back on the romance, insisting the war was about slavery and nothing less. Battle sequences use maps, cannon fire recorded for the soundtrack, and the photographs of Mathew Brady's crews, who documented the dead at Antietam and Gettysburg when war photography was still new. The series gives equal time to the home front, the politics in Washington and Richmond, and the war's staggering cost, roughly 620,000 dead, a number the film returns to more than once.