Daniel Joseph Boorstin (October 1, 1914 – February 28, 2004) was an American historian at the University of Chicago who wrote on many topics in American and world history.

Repudiating his youthful membership in the Communist Party, Boorstin became a political conservative and a prominent exponent of consensus history. He argued in The Genius of American Politics (1953) that ideology, propaganda, and political theory are foreign to America. His writings were often seen, along with those of historians such as Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz and Clinton Rossiter, as belonging to the "consensus school", which emphasized the unity of the American people and downplayed class and social conflict. Boorstin especially praised inventors and entrepreneurs as central to the American success story.

Biography

Boorstin was born in 1914, in Atlanta, Georgia, into a Jewish family. His father, Samuel, was a lawyer who participated in the defense of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent who was accused and convicted of the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl. After Frank's 1915 lynching led to a surge of anti-Semitic sentiment in Georgia, the family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Boorstin was raised. He graduated from Tulsa's Central High School in 1930, at the age of 15.

Although Samuel wanted his son to go to the University of Oklahoma, become an attorney and join his own law firm, Daniel wanted to go to Harvard Law School. He graduated with highest honors (summa cum laude) from Harvard College in 1934, then studied at Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, receiving BA and BCL degrees in 1936 and 1937. The American National Biography Online states that he joined the Communist Party in 1938 then left it in 1939, when Russia and Germany invaded Poland. In 1940, he earned an SJD degree at Yale University.

Boorstin moved away from his earlier leftist views. In 1953, after being subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Boorstin became a cooperating witness and gave the committee the names of other Party members in his cell. His lectures were later boycotted by some students due to his testimony to the HUAC.

Boorstin was hired as an assistant professor at Swarthmore College in 1942, where he stayed for two years. In 1944, he was hired by the University of Chicago, where he was a professor until 1969. Boorstin served on President Nixon's Commission on the American Revolution Bicentennial in 1968–69. President Gerald Ford nominated Boorstin to be Librarian of Congress, in 1975. She quickly became his partner and editor for his first book, The Mysterious Science of the Law, published in the same year.The Americans: The Democratic Experience, the final book in the trilogy, received the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in history. Boorstin's second trilogy, The Discoverers, The Creators and The Seekers, examines the scientific, artistic and philosophic histories of humanity, respectively.

Within the discipline of social theory, Boorstin's 1961 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America is an early description of aspects of American life that were later termed hyperreality and postmodernity. In The Image, Boorstin describes shifts in American culture – mainly due to advertising – where the reproduction or simulation of an event becomes more important or "real" than the event itself. He goes on to coin the term pseudo-event, which describes events or activities that serve little to no purpose other than to be reproduced through advertisements or other forms of publicity. This book also describes the type of false stories that came to be called "fake news" in the 2010s. The idea of pseudo-events anticipates later work by Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. The work is an often-used text in American sociology courses, and Boorstin's concerns about the social effects of technology remain influential.

Boorstin has been credited with saying, "Ideas need no passports from their place of origin, nor visas for the countries they enter... We, the librarians of the world, are servants of an indivisible world ... Books and ideas make a boundless world."

When President Ford nominated Boorstin to be Librarian of Congress in 1975, the nomination was supported by the Authors Guild but opposed by liberals, who objected to his perceived conservatism and his opposition to the social revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Boorstin retired in 1987, saying that he wanted to do full-time writing. Boorstin stepped down as director of MHT in 1973 to assume the position of Senior Historian, "so that he could devote more time to research and writing." He served the Smithsonian until his 1975 presidential appointment as Librarian of Congress.

As MHT director, Boorstin presided over several landmark exhibitions, including the 1970 show, “Do it the Hard Way: Rube Goldberg and Modern Times,” honoring the illustrator and artist, Rube Goldberg. Boorstin conceived of the exhibition, one of his first as MHT director. At a preview of the show, Boorstin remarked: “There have been exhibits of Einstein and Dr. Salk and Isaac Newton, but the exhibits here show us not only how to enrich and deepen man, but how to amuse him. This show is about the ways we've discovered to give ourselves a headache. It tells us where technology leads us and misleads us, and touches the life of every American. Rube Goldberg foresaw the road to the electric toothbrush.”

One of Boorstin's most influential public programs at MHT were the Frank Nelson Doubleday Lectures, which began in 1972 focusing on 'technology and the frontiers of knowledge' and featured speakers such as writers Saul Bellow, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke, and technologists like Sony's founder Akio Morita.

Completed during his Smithsonian tenure and published in June 1973, The Americans: The Democratic Experience was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in early 1974. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for writing The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973).

He was inducted into the Tulsa Hall of Fame in 1989, and received the Oklahoma Book Award in 1993 for The Creators.

He held twenty honorary degrees, including an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Tulsa

Books

  • The Mysterious Science of the Law: An Essay on Blackstone's Commentaries (1941)
  • The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948)
  • The Genius of American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1953)
  • The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958)
  • America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought (1960)
  • A Lady's Life In The Rocky Mountains: Introduction (1960)
  • The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America (1962)
  • The Americans: The National Experience (1965)
  • The Landmark History of the American People: From Plymouth to Appomattox (1968)
  • The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections of America Today (1969)
  • The Landmark History of the American People: From Appomattox to the Moon (1970)
  • The Sociology of the Absurd: Or, the Application of Professor X (1970)
  • The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973)
  • Democracy and Its Discontents: Reflections on Everyday America (1974)
  • The Exploring Spirit: America and the World, Then and Now (1976)
  • The Republic of Technology (1978)
  • A History of the United States with Brooks M. Kelley and Ruth Frankel (1981)
  • The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself (1983)
  • Hidden History (1987)
  • The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (1992)
  • Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected (1994)
  • The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (1998)

Notes

References

Further reading

  • Diggins, John P. "The Perils of Naturalism: Some Reflections on Daniel J. Boorstin's Approach to American History." American Quarterly (1971): 153–180. in JSTOR
  • Morgan, Edmund S. "Daniel J. Boorstin, 1 October 1914 · 28 February 2004," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (2006) 150#2 pp. 347–351 in JSTOR
  • Pole, J. R. "Daniel J. Boorstin." in Past-masters: Some Essays on American Historians edited by Marcus, Cunliffe and Robin Winks (Harper & Row, 1969). pp to 10–38
  • King, Wayne and Warren Weaver Jr. "Briefing: Boorstin and the Emperor", The New York Times, May 2, 1986.
  • Wilson, Clyde N. Twentieth-Century American Historians (Gale: 1983, Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 17, ) pp 79–85
  • Witham, Nick (2023). Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America. University of Chicago Press.
  • United States Library of Congress official site
  • [https://www.loc.gov/loc/cfbook/] founded in 1977 by Boorstin
  • Daniel J. Boorstin Papers, 1882–1995
  • Obituary in The Guardian
  • Obituary in The Economist
  • Robert D. McFadden, "Daniel Boorstin, 89, Former Librarian of Congress Who Won Pulitzer in History, Dies", The New York Times, March 1, 2004
  • Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture – Boorstin, Daniel J.