In Memoriam: Daniel J. Boorstin

40 Historically Speaking January/February 2005 In Memoriam: Daniel J. Boorstin Harold D. Woodman DanielJ. Boorstin, one ofthe 20th century 's most prolific, insightful, and influential historians, died at the age of 89 in Washington D.C. on February 28, 2004. While so manyin the profession in the post-World War ? era were narrowing their focus, Boorstin, like the Progressive historians early in the century, sought to provide broader visions ofthe past, first in his interpretations ofAmerican history and then in his investigations of aspects of the intellectual history ofWestern civilization. And like the Progressive historians, Boorstin was also a social critic, raising significant questions about both the development of American society as well as the evolution ofthe historical profession in the United States. Boorstin's formal academic education was in the law rather than history . After earning his bachelor's degree atHarvard, he studied at BaIliol College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and read law at the InnerTemple in London. He passed the English bar examinations in 1937 and become a barrister-at-law before returning to the United States where in 1940 he earned a J.S.D. at Yale University and two years laterwas admitted to theMassachusetts bar. In the meantime he began his academic career in history, teaching briefly at Harvard and at Swarthmore College before joining the University of Chicago as an assistant professor in 1944. He remained at the University of Chicago for twenty-five years, becoming the Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor of History in 1964. During his tenure at Chicago hewas often invited to teach abroad. He was a Fulbright lecturer at the University ofRome, a visitingprofessor ofAmerican history at the University ofKyoto inJapan, and he lectured for the State Department in Turkey, Iran, Nepal, India, and Ceylon. In 1961 he accepted an invitation to inaugurate the chair in American History at the University ofParis, and in 1964-65 he was Pitt Professor ofAmerican History and Institutions and a Fellow ofTrinity College at Cambridge University. He left the University ofChicago in 1969 for the National Museum ofHistory and Technology, a part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C, where he served as Director and Senior Historian. In 1975 President Gerald Ford appointed him Librarian of Congress, a position he held until retiring in 1987. From the beginning ofhis long and illustrious career, Boorstin elicited both enthusiastic praise and sharp criticism. Because his degree was in law rather than history, a few questioned his credentials as a historian. Boorstin replied that his lack offormal trainDaniel Boorstin speaking at a 1 975 press conference.© Bettmann/CORBIS ing in historywas a strength, not a weakness, because it made him an "amateur." "With the good fortune to be permitted to be a historian without conventional credentials, I have delighted in pursuing history for the love of it," he wrote, and this opened him to fresh and untraditional ways ofthinking about the past: "An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in." This is, ofcourse, more than a bit disingenuous. He was weU aware ofhistorical controversies, but he was impatient with many of them and chose to stay out of the "ruts" and instead investigate other matters he deemed more important. These other matters were more important for Boorstin not because they were so obscure or esoteric, but because theywere so obvious, so self-evident, so commonplace that theywere ignored or given inadequate attention by historians. Although he called himself an intellectual historian—at least, that was what his courses at the University of Chicago were called—he did not deal with the great ideas that occupied the attention of most scholars in American intellectual history at the time. Instead he centered his attention on the ordinary, on the commonplace, on those things that occupied the attention ofmost people in the past. Boorstin insisted that the study of such things provided important insights into what people thought and how and why they behaved as they did. In a brilliant essay, "The Historian: ? Wrestler With the Angel'" (he borrowed the phrase ofthe Dutch historianJ . H. Huizinga) he noted how documents that are popular...