Product Details

• Actors: Tim Weske, Orion Barnes, Paul Savas, Lydia Alvita, Karimah Williams
• Directors: David Padrusch
• Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo)
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: A&E Home Video
• DVD Release Date: April 24, 2007
• Run Time: 90 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000NA2TTW
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #30,993 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

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  Movies & TV > Documentary > Military & War > Civil War

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
This unparalleled program provides a revealing look at the true horror of the civil war aftermath & tells a story which until now has largely gone untold. Studio: A&e Home Video Release Date: 04/24/2007 Run time: 90 minutes

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars H.S. History Teacher on Aftershock, September 11, 2007

By	B. S. Hobson (Virginia, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

With societies, as with individuals, it is often much easier for us to examine the mistakes of others than it is to take an honest look at our own. In both cases, however, honest examination is essential to making genuine progress. Aftershock succeeds in providing us with details on a topic of which most Gone-With-the-Wind-watching Americans are unaware: the atrocious violence and frequent chaos that followed Lee's surrender.

Anyone who has actually studied slavery and the slave trade as they existed in America (as opposed to simply treating them as unavoidable footnotes in U.S. history) is well-aware that it is difficult to fathom the cost of those institutions in human life, considering the shortened life spans, high morbidity rates, high infant mortality rates, etc., of those affected. On the other hand, we are aware of the literally millions who perished (some through intentional killings) in the Middle Passage and the 620 thousand Americans who died in the Civil War.

With all of the above in mind, we might be tempted to minimize the significance of the bloodshed that occurred during the Reconstruction era and the entire century of strife that followed the war; Aftershock, however, does an outstanding job of illustrating the former. This film tells the stories of a variety of individuals and organizations, including the Arkansas National Guard; ex-Confederate soldiers; state officials; African American troops; displaced Southern civilians; and one of our nation's oldest homegrown terrorist groups, the Ku Klux Klan. It also devotes a few (though far from enough) moments to the often overlooked role of Native Americans in the post-war years. It even touches on the frustration that some government officials felt with Andrew Johnson's calamitous approach to the nation's troubles.

This is one of the few documentaries on the years immediately following the war that I would consider incorporating into a larger class project.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Reconstruction reconsidered, December 22, 2007

By	Gerald R. Hibbs "gerbear" (Edmond, Oklahoma United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This DVD from the history channel is well done. It highlights some of the outstanding events of reconstruction after the Civil War including the founding of the KKK. It makes the point grahphically that while the North won the Civil War, the South won the period of Reconstruction. It is essential to understand this period of time in order to understand subsequent American History.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Amateurish, historically inacurate , February 3, 2009

By	G. Kincaid (RICHMOND HILL, GA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Buy American Experience - Reconstruction: The Second Civil War, not this one. This is History channel at its worst, the video is amateurish, and poorly done. A book or real historians would have to cite sources, apparently being a video gives Padrusch license to make things up. This film mixes fact, and fiction with an obvious agenda to make southerners and the South look like evil, racists who violate blacks and Indians. Zero ballance, huge generalizations - for example mentions "thousands of blacks starved to death while conveniently forgetting the fact thousands of white southerners also starved and it was the North that starved them both. There is almost no mention of, or real examination, about outrages committed by the Federals or Radical Republicans. It makes up dialog of historic figures like N.B. Forrest and fabricates his role in a "KKK war". One point they show the well known photo (but they blur it) of a civil war soldier executed by the Federals as a black hung by the KKK. They stage silly reenactments, like one where a real figure, General Daniel Phillips Upham, in completely fabricated hand to hand fight pulls the horn off a KKK man's hood and kills him by jabbing the horn in the KKK mans eye. It also recycles a lot of video from American Experience - Reconstruction: The Second Civil War - which is a much better choice on Reconstruction.