About the Film

Stephen Lang is a distinguished and award-winning actor who commands considerable respect and is equally at home on the Broadway stage, on television and in film. He has been nominated for and won numerous awards including the Grace Prize, Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, Helen Hayes and Tony Awards, as well as acting prizes at 2010’s VisionFest and the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival.

Ken Burns has been making documentary films for fifty years. Since the Academy Award–nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made.

Ken has been the recipient of more than thirty honorary degrees and has delivered many treasured commencement addresses. He is a sought-after public speaker, appearing at colleges, civic organizations and business groups throughout the country.

Multiple Emmy- and Golden Globe–winner Martin Sheen is one of America’s most celebrated, colorful, and accomplished actors. Moving flawlessly between artistic mediums, Sheen’s acting range is striking.

On the big screen, Sheen has appeared in more than 65 feature films including a star turn as Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard in Francis Ford Coppola’s landmark film Apocalypse Now (1979), which brought Sheen worldwide recognition.

Actor Jeff Daniels was born in Athens, Georgia, but was raised in Chelsea, Michigan. He is the son of Marjorie J. (Ferguson) and Robert Lee Daniels, who owned The Chelsea Lumber Company and was also mayor of Chelsea. Jeff attended Central Michigan University, but became involved in acting and dropped out to pursue a career as an actor. Daniels made his feature film debut in Miloš Forman’s Ragtime (1981).

History has been of primary interest to Maxwell throughout his life, and so has the nature of American identity. Born and raised in Clifton, New Jersey, son of a World War II veteran and his French war bride, it is only fitting that his graduate thesis film at NYU Film Institute was an adaptation of Albert Camus’ “The Guest” and that his major debut as a director was a tender but unsentimental love story set in his parents’ era that secured him an Emmy nomination: Verna: USO Girl (PBS, 1978).

He is a member of the Writers Guild of America, the Directors Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He is the recipient of an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Concordia College.

Caroline E. Janney is the John L. Nau III Professor of the American Civil War and Director of the John L. Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. A graduate of the University of Virginia, she worked as a historian for the National Park Service and taught at Purdue University before returning to Virginia in 2018. An active public lecturer, she has given presentations at locations across the globe. She is a speaker with the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lectureship program and has appeared in numerous television programs including the History Channel’s Grant and Lincoln. She serves as a co-editor of the University of North Carolina Press’s Civil War America Series and is the past president of the Society of Civil War Historians. She has published eight books, including Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (2013) and Ends of War: The Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox, winner of the 2022 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.