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Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel Joseph Boorstin (October 1, 1914 – February 28, 2004) was an American historian, professor, attorney, and writer. He was appointed twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress from 1975 until 1987.

Biography

Boorstin was born in 1914 in Atlanta, Georgia, where his father was a lawyer who participated in the defense of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent who was accused of the rape and murder of a teenage 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 at the age of 15. He graduated with highest honors from Harvard, studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and earned his PhD at Yale University. He was a lawyer and a university professor at the University of Chicago for 25 years and was the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge in 1964. He also served as director of the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution. Boorstin wrote more than 20 books, including a trilogy on the American experience and one on world intellectual history. The Americans: The Democratic Experience, the final book in the first trilogy, received the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in history. Boorstin also wrote the books The Discoverers, The Creators and The Seekers, a trilogy of books that attempt to survey 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. The idea of pseudo-events closely mirrors work later done by Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. The work is still often used as a text in American sociology courses.

When President Gerald Ford nominated Boorstin to be Librarian of Congress, the nomination was supported by the Authors League of America but opposed by the American Library Association because Boorstin "was not a library administrator." The Senate confirmed the nomination without debate.

Boorstin died in 2004 in Washington, D.C.

Honors

Boorstin was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, First Class, by the Japanese government in 1986.

Books

• The Mysterious Science of the Law (1941)
• The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948)
• The Genius of American Politics (1953)
• The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958)
• America and the Image of Europe:Reflections on American Thought (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)
• The History of the United States with Brooks M. Kelley and Ruth Frankel (1981)
• The Discoverers (1983)
• Hidden History (1987)
• The Creators (1992)
• Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected (1994)
• The Seekers (1998)

References

• John Y. Cole (30 March 2006). "Jefferson's Legacy: A Brief History of the Library of Congress -- Librarians of Congress". Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/loc/legacy/librs.html. Retrieved 2008-12-15.  
• King, Wayne and Warren Weaver Jr. "Briefing: Boorstin and the Emperor", New York Times, May 2, 1986.

External links

• United States Library of Congress official site
• Center for the Book
• Daniel Boorstin papers collection
• Obituary in The Guardian
• Robert D. McFadden, "Daniel Boorstin, 89, Former Librarian of Congress Who Won Pulitzer in History, Dies", New York Times, March 1, 2004
• Linda D. Wilson, "Boorstin, Daniel J. (1914-2004)" at Oklahoma Historical Society Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture (retrieved March 11, 2009).
• Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture - Boorstin, Daniel J.
• Booknotes interview with Boorstin on Creators, December 6, 1992.

From Wikiquote

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions.

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-10-01 – 2004-02-28) was an American historian, professor, attorney and author. He served as Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987.

Sourced

• We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions.
  • The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) [Vintage, 1992, ISBN 0-679-74180-1], Preface

• Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
  • "A Case of Hypochondria," Newsweek (1970-07-06)

• I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
  • Wall Street Journal (1985-12-31)
  • On why he did his writing at home from 6:30 to 8:30 AM

• These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story — a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.
  • The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (1992) (Vintage, 1993, ISBN 0-679-74375-8), Preface, p. XV

The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948)

University of Chicago Press, 1993, ISBN 0-226-06497-2

• The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening stages which has been so dominant a feature of the European landscape.
  • Introduction, part 2: The Influence of America on the Mind (pp. 6-7)

• While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator's power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.
  • Ch. 1, part 2: The Economy of Nature (p. 41)

• While the easiest way in metaphysics is to condemn all metaphysics as nonsense, the easiest way in morals is to elevate the common practice of the community into a moral absolute.
  • Ch. 3, The Physiology of Thought and Morals, introduction (p. 111)

• The variety of minds served the economy of nature in many ways. The Creator, who designed the human brain for activity, had insured the restlessness of all minds by enabling no single one to envisage all the qualities of the creation. Since no one by himself could aspire to a serene knowledge of the whole truth, all men had been drawn into an active, exploratory and cooperative attitude.
  • Ch. 3, Part 2: The Happy Variety of Minds (p. 125)

• Jefferson refused to pin his hopes on the occasional success of honest and unambitious men; on the contrary, the great danger was that philosophers would be lulled into complacence by the accidental rise of a Franklin or a Washington. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.
  • Ch. 4, Part 1: Natural History and Political Science (p. 178)

• Jeffersonian isolationism expressed an essentially cosmopolitan spirit. The Jeffersonian was determined — even at the expense of separating himself from the rest of the globe, and even though he be charged with provincial selfishness — to preserve America as an uncontaminated laboratory.
  • Ch. 4, part 6: The American Destiny (p. 229)

• Since the Creator had made the facts of the after-life inaccessible to man, He must not have required that man understand death in order to live fruitfully.
  • Notes (p. 262)

Unsourced

• Bob de Graff, who started Pocket Books, had a patent on a non-re-readable book, bound like a sealed memo pad, from which you would tear each page after you'd read it.

• Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.

• A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.

Misattributed

• The cities of Italy are now deluged with droves of these creatures [tour groups], for they never separate, and you see them, forty in number, pouring along a street with their director — now in front, now at the rear, circling them like a sheep dog — and really the process is as like herding as may be.
  • Charles James Lever, Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men and Women and Other Things in General (Blackwood's Magazine, 1864-1865): "Continental Excursionists" [Adamant Media Corporation, 2001, ISBN 0-543-90729-5], p. 243. Quoted by Boorstin in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) [Vintage, 1992, ISBN 0-679-74180-1], Ch. 3: From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel (p. 88)

External links

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Daniel J. Boorstin