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  • Daniel J. Boorstin, 1914–2004
  • Harold Skramstad (bio)

It may seem unusual to write about Daniel J. Boorstin in Technology and Culture. Neither his readers nor his academic colleagues saw him primarily as a historian of technology. The titles of his books and the great themes they explore do not have an overt focus on technology. Yet it is hard to overestimate the impact of Dan Boorstin's long and distinguished career as a scholar, thinker, and organizational leader in bringing the importance of technology into the mainstream of both historical and popular thinking.

Any one of Boorstin's major books would assure his place in the canon of important twentieth-century historians. His academic career at the University of Chicago spanned over two decades of exceptional research and teaching. But he was much more than a brilliant and original historical mind. His parallel career as a leader of two great cultural and intellectual institutions, the National Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History) and the Library of Congress, both expanded and enriched the world of the history of technology in ways that are still being discovered.

For historians of American technology, especially those who see technology as a central force in driving and shaping the American experience, Boorstin's histories and essays, especially the last two volumes of his three-volume history of the United States, The Americans (1958-73), were among the first to focus on such mundane things as ice making and refrigeration, the mass production of food and clothing, the "technology of haste" in building and transportation, and the emergence of print and electronic media as powerful forces used by Americans to shape their communities in new and innovative ways to meet the needs of an emerging nation always focused on the future. While Boorstin was by no means the first to identify the importance of technology in the shaping of American history, he was one of the most influential in pushing technology from the periphery to the [End Page 922] center of the American experience. And yet his point of view was never simplistic technological determinism. The Americans brims with a sense of the possibilities of an unexpected future born out of persistent technological innovation that continued to define and be defined by the broad search for new kinds of institutions and communities unique to America.

For many of my generation, reading The Americans was the revelation of a new way of looking at American history. Its themes and topics resonated with a growing sense that history was more than the evolution of ideas and political institutions; it was about experience. Boorstin's histories are rooted in a deep understanding of ways that the emerging technologies and institutions of everyday life in America had the power to shape and transform our world. He says it best in the introduction to the third volume of the trilogy, The Democratic Experience:

The century after the Civil War was to be an Age of Revolution— of countless, little-noticed revolutions, which occurred not in the halls of legislatures or on battlefields or on the barricades but in the homes and farms and factories and schools and stores, across the landscape and in the air—so little noticed because they came so swiftly, because they touched Americans everywhere and every day. Not merely the continent but human experience itself, the very meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future, was being revised again and again; a new democratic world was being invented and was being discovered by Americans wherever they lived.

But Boorstin's excitement for his subject did not result in an uncritical optimism. He understood technology is not an unmixed blessing, and that technological change creates loss as well as gain. Later in the same book he comments:

The old tricks of the miracle maker, the witch, and the magician became common place. Foods were preserved out of season, water poured from bottomless indoor containers, men flew up into space and landed out of the sky, past events were conjured up again, the living images and resounding voices of the dead were made audible, and the present moment was...

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