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Dr. Daniel J. Boorstin: Great American Author and Historian

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Dr. Daniel J. Boorstin: Great American Author and Historian

Dr. Daniel J. Boorstin (1914- ) holds many honorable positions and has received numerous awards for his notable work. He is one of America's most eminent historians, the author of more than fifteen books and numerous articles on the history of the United States, as well as a creator of a television show. His editor-wife, Ruth Frankel Boorstin, a Wellesley graduate, has been his close collaborator.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Oklahoma, he received his undergraduate degree with highest honors from Harvard and his doctor's degree from Yale. He has spent a great deal of his life abroad, first in
England as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. More …show more content…

His other works include The Mysterious Science of Law, The Genius of American
Politics, and The Republic of Technology. In addition, he is the editor of
An American Primer and the thirty volume series The Chicago History of
American Civilization. His books have been translated into twenty-five languages (GBN Reviews, 1997).

Most of Dr. Boorstin's books are not written as conventional chronological histories. Instead, their brief chapters explore many disparate facets of
American culture. The topics which he covers range from the new grammar, the rise of the candy bar and the moon landing, to the development of the cash register (Minskoff, 1973). He does not relate those facts simply because they are themselves interesting, amusing and enlightening - though they are that, too. He uses them all to help ask the questions that he strives to answer in most of his books: What has life come to mean and cease to mean to the late- twentieth century Americans? He makes history into a kind of national autobiography, reminding the people that they have made themselves what theyare.

Dr. Boorstin's most known book is probably The Americans: The Democratic
Experience. The democracy that is described in this book has little to do with majority rule and minority rights. It is a full scale portrait of modern America, which describes not only the

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