Daniel J. Boorstin
| Daniel J. Boorstin | |
|---|---|
 |
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| 12th Librarian of Congress | |
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In office November 12, 1975 – September 14, 1987 |
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| President | Ford, Carter, Reagan |
| Preceded by | Lawrence Mumford |
| Succeeded by | James Billington |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
Daniel Joseph Boorstin October 1, 1914 Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. |
| Died | February 28, 2004 (aged 89) Washington, D.C. |
| Alma mater | Harvard, Oxford, Yale |
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. He was appointed the twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress in 1975 and served until 1987. He was instrumental in the creation of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress.
Repudiating his youthful membership in the Communist Party while a Harvard undergraduate (1938–39), 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 linked with such historians as Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz and Clinton Rossiter as a proponent of 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.
Boorstin was born in 1914, in Atlanta, Georgia, into a Jewish family. His parents were Samuel Aaron (1887 - 1967) and Dora Olsan (1894 -1948) Boorstin. 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 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 in 1937, studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, receiving BA and BCL degrees. 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 a SJD degree at Yale University. He was hired as an assistant professor at Swarthmore College in 1942, where he stayed for two years. In 1944, he became a 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 served as director and senior historian of the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution (now known as the National Museum of American History, Behring Center from 1973 to 1975. President Gerald Ford nominated Boorstin to be Librarian of Congress, in 1975.
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