Burns made a subtle but important distinction in his Georgetown address between cynicism and skepticism. Cynicism, he argued, is a pose — it assumes the worst about people and institutions and uses that assumption as an excuse for disengagement. Skepticism, by contrast, is an active intellectual stance: it questions, probes, and demands evidence, but remains open to being convinced. As a documentarian who had spent thirty years excavating American history, Burns knew that the truth was always more complicated than either optimists or cynics admitted. The Civil War was both noble and horrific. The Jazz Age was both liberating and tragic. History, properly understood, teaches neither complacency nor despair but a kind of rigorous, open-eyed engagement that Burns called skepticism.