Boorstin Daniel J.
Prolific American social historian who charted the corrupting influence of advertising and spin on political life Godfrey Hodgson Monday March 1, 2004 The Guardian The American Daniel Boorstin, who has died aged 89, was a powerful and original social historian and critic, and the first to examine, often with distaste, many aspects of modern culture, including the "image", the "non-event" and the "celebrity", all concepts either invented, or first dissected, by him. He taught at the University of Chicago for 25 years, and served as librarian of the US Congress for 12 years. He published more than 20 books. Among them were The Image (1962), a brilliant and original essay about the black arts and corrupting influences of advertising and public relations, The Americans, a trilogy on intellectual and social history, divided into The Colonial Experience (1959), The National Experience (1966) and The Democratic Experience (1974), and three volumes on world history, with an emphasis on the history of ideas and technology - The Discoverers (1983), on scientists and inventors, The Creators (1992), on artists, and The Seekers (1998), about religious and spiritual thought. Politically, Boorstin started out on the left, and was briefly a member of the US Communist party in the 1930s. He later moved to a conservative position. Although he never took any active part in politics after his youthful flirtation with communism, in many ways his intellectual trajectory paralleled that of neo-conservatives who moved to the right after what they saw as the excesses and absurdities of 1960s liberalism. When attacked by the new left, Boorstin responded by calling his critics "incoherent kooks" and "barbarians". He stoutly maintained that he hated racism and believed in equal opportunity for blacks, but he angered many African-American leaders and intellectuals by dismissing black studies as "racist trash". Boorstin's learning and diligence were legendary. When he was appointed librarian of Congress, a public office requiring approval from the US senate, several senators asked him to give up writing while he was in the job. He refused, but said he would not write in the public's time. He continued to pour forth scholarly works by getting up at 4.30am and working until it was time to go to the library at nine. His books became bestsellers, and had an immense influence. There is a certain irony about the fact that, although one of Boorstin's main themes was the way intellectual life had been cheapened and vulgarised by the simplifications of politicians, journalists and publicists, his own work was far more popular with the general reader than with professional historians, who accused him of various biases and myth-making. Boorstin's first book to make a major impact, The Image, evolved from an essay he wrote in response to the televised debates between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in the 1960 US presidential campaign. America, he argued, was threatened by "the menace of unreality". He was particularly angered by the packaging of politicians and policies, and by the way that political advertising and journalism replaced factual description and analysis with the presentation of self-interested images. Boorstin apologised for his Communist party membership, and was one of those who agreed to name names in evidence to the House of Representatives unAmerican Activities Committee in 1953. From the 1960s, his work acquired an unmistakably conservative tone, influenced by strong American patriotism. Following the work of Frederick Jackson Turner on the influence of the frontier on American democracy, he argued that the American character had been shaped by the experience of taming and settling a continent. His conservatism stood on the grand American tradition of the grouch and the curmudgeon; he had more in common with Albert Jay Nock and HL Mencken than with President William McKinley or the opponents of the New Deal. He also loved to twist the tails of shallow and fashionable progressives. Even those who were made uncomfortable by his conservative and nationalistic conclusions found much in Boorstin's work to admire. He said that as an "amateur historian" - he trained as a lawyer - he looked at subjects that were outside the canon of conventional history, such as the effect of wrist watches, mail-order catalogues and air conditioning on history. He was also a master of epigram and aphorism. "We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant," he wrote, and he defined a celebrity as "a person who is known for his well-knownness". Boorstin was born in Atlanta, Georgia. His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants, and his father, a lawyer, was part of the defence team in the notorious lynching case of Leo Frank, a Jewish manager falsely accused - and convicted - of raping and murdering a gentile girl. After Frank's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, he was lynched by a Ku Klux-Klan-style mob. Boorstin's parents were driven to move to Oklahoma, where Daniel went to school. He then studied at Harvard University, graduating with the highest honours, and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, where he took a double first and qualified as a barrister. On his return to America, he earned a doctorate in law from Yale Law School and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. Before going to Chicago University, he taught at Swarthmore, Radcliffe and Harvard. In 1969, he moved to Washington to become director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. One of his first moves on being appointed librarian of Congress in 1975 was to insist that the heavy bronze doors of the building should be left open. "They said it would create a draught," he later recalled, "and I said, 'Good. That's just what we need.'" Boorstin wrote about many inventions and new technologies. He maintained that mankind's single, greatest technical advance was the book. In 1941, he married Ruth Frankel, with whom he had three children, and who became his editor. "Without her," he was quoted as saying, "I think my works would have been twice as long and half as readable." · Daniel J Boorstin, social historian, born October 1 1914; died February 28 2004 |
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Chronolgie Library of Congress Libre de droits
1914, Oct. 1 Born, Atlanta, Ga.
1934 A.B., Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
1934-1937 Read law at the Inner Temple, London, England
1936 B.A., Balliol College, Oxford University, Oxford,
England
1937 B.C.L., Balliol College, Oxford University,
Oxford, England
Passed English bar examinations and became a
barrister-at-law
1938-1942 Tutor, history and literature, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Mass., and Radcliffe College,
Cambridge, Mass.
1939-1942 Lecturer, American legal history, Harvard
University, Cambridge, Mass.
1940 J.S.D., Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
1941 Married Ruth Carolyn Frankel
Published _The Mysterious Science of the Law_
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
257 pp.)
1942 Admitted to the Massachusetts bar
Senior attorney, Lend-Lease Administration,
Washington, D.C.
1942-1944 Assistant professor of history, Swarthmore
College, Swarthmore, Pa.
1943 Editor, _Delaware Cases, 1792-1830_ (St. Paul:
West Publishing Co. 3 vols.)
1944-1949 Assistant professor of history, University of
Chicago, Chicago, Ill.
1948 Published _The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson_
(New York: Holt. 306 pp.)
1949-1956 Associate professor of history, University of
Chicago, Chicago, Ill.
1950-1951 Fulbright lecturer, University of Rome, Rome,
Italy
1953 Published _The Genius of American Politics_
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 202 pp.)
1956-1964 Professor of history, University of Chicago,
Chicago, Ill.
1957 Visiting professor of American history, University
of Kyoto, Kyoto, Japan
Lecturer, Korea
1958 Published _The Americans: The Colonial Experience_
(New York: Random House. 434 pp.); awarded
Bancroft Prize, 1959
1959-1960 Lecturer for the State Department in Turkey, Iran,
Nepal, India, and Ceylon
1960 Published _America and the Image of Europe:
Reflections on American Thought_ (Cleveland:
World Publishing Co.
192 pp.)
1961-1962 First incumbent, chair of American history,
University of Paris, Paris, France
1962 Published _The Image, or What Happened to the
American Dream_ (New York: Atheneum. 315 pp.);
republished in 1964 as _The Image: A Guide to
Pseudo-events in America_ (New York: Harper and
Row. 315 pp.)
1964-1965 Pitt professor of American history and
institutions, Cambridge University, Cambridge,
England
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge University,
Cambridge, England
1964-1969 Preston and Sterling Morton distinguished service
professor of history, University of Chicago,
Chicago, Ill.
1965 Published _The Americans: The National Experience_
(New York: Random House. 517 pp.); awarded
Francis Parkman Prize, 1966
1966 Editor, _An American Primer_ (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press. 994 pp.)
1968 Published _The Landmark History of the American
People: From Plymouth to Appomattox_ (New York:
Random House. 185 pp.)
1969 Published _The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections
of America Today_ (New York: Random House.
141 pp.)
1969-1973 Director, National Museum of History and
Technology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,
D.C.
1970 Published _The Landmark History of the American
People: From Appomattox to the Moon_ (New York:
Random House. 192 pp.)
Published _The Sociology of the Absurd: Or, the
Application of Professor X_ (New York: Simon &
Schuster. 94 pp.)
1972 Editor, _American Civilization_ (London: Thames
and Hudson. 352 pp.)
1973 Published _The Americans: The Democratic
Experience_ (New York: Random House. 717 pp.);
awarded Pulitizer Prize, 1974
1973-1975 Senior historian, National Museum of History and
Technology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,
D.C.
1974 Published _Democracy and Its Discontents:
Reflections on Everyday America_ (New York:
Random House. 136 pp.)
1974-1981 Member, State Department's Indo-American Joint
Subcommittee on Education and Culture
1975-1987 Librarian of Congress
1976 Published _The Exploring Spirit: America and the
World, Then and Now_ (New York: Random House.
102 pp.)
1978 Published _The Republic of Technology_ (New York:
Harper & Row. 105 pp.)
1978-1984 Member, Japan-United States Friendship Committee
1981 Published with Brooks M. Kelley and Ruth Frankel
Boorstin _The History of the United States_
(Lexington: Ginn. 828 pp.)
1981- Member, board of editors, _Encyclopedia
Britannica_
1983 Published _The Discoverers_ (New York: Random
House. 745 pp.); awarded Watson-Davis Prize for
History of Science and Society, 1986
1987 Published _Hidden History_ (New York: Harper &
Row. 332 pp.)
1987- Librarian of Congress Emeritus
1989 Published _The Republic of Letters: Librarian of
Congress Daniel J. Boorstin on Books, Reading,
and Libraries, 1975-87_ (Washington: Library of
Congress. 115 pp.)
Awarded the Charles Frankel Prize of the National
Endowment for the Humanities
Awarded the National Book Award Medal for
distinguished contribution to American letters
1992 Published _The Creators_ (New York: Random House.
811 pp.)
1994 Published _Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the
Unexpected_ (New York: Random House. 224 pp.)
1995 Published _The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader_ (New
York: Modern Library. 908 pp.)