"The Men Who Built America - Frontiersmen" was infuriatingly bad [View all]
I was really looking forward to this "Frontiersmen" series on History Channel. It was just awful!
IMO, nobody should be pointing their children or their students toward this series. It's the worst kind of program -- not a documentary and not a dramatization. It's just a mess.
I'm not an expert or historian, but I've learned quite a bit. Almost nothing that I learned about Boone and Kentucky over the years was correctly depicted in this series. Some elements were there, yes, but jumbled and rearranged. Important formative events in Boone's life were only touched upon, or ignored completely.
The series completely ignored the presence of slavery and Boone's ownership of slaves -- depicting the Western expansion as a complete white settler vs. native enterprise.
They made it seem that Boone hacked the trail through the Cumberland Gap himself, when in fact it had existed for ages before frontiersmen arrived. He just found out about it and capitalized upon it.
Ugh! There's too much wrong to list. 
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