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. 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. He died of pneumonia February 28, 2004, in Washington D.C. He was survived by Ruth, his three sons, Paul, Jonathan and David, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. David Levy, a history professor at the
University of Oklahoma, said humorously in one of his lectures after Boorstin's death: "One can only imagine what he might have achieved, if he had only listened to his father’s advice about where to go to college."
Boorstin's approach to history Professor Levy delivered a lecture about Boorstin in April 2014 at an Oklahoma University event, the President's Day of Learning. He had several observations about Boorstin's approach to American history that seem to explain why many contemporary historians opposed his appointment to head the Library of Congress. According to Levy: • Boorstin believed that the main points of American history were made by what the people agreed upon, rather than what they fought over. • He emphasized continuities in history, rather than radical changes. • He distrusted doctrinaire thinking; his writings minimized the role of pure thinkers and emphasized the role of problem solvers. • He was conservative in politics and his approach to culture, and was revolted by what he saw as vulgarities in American life and advertising. • He observed the transformative power of seemingly mundane cultural advances as air conditioning, telephones, catalog shopping, canned food and typewriters. == Smithsonian Institution Career ==