Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin
12th Librarian of Congress
In office November 12, 1975 – September 14, 1987
President	Gerald Ford Jimmy Carter Ronald Reagan
Preceded by	Lawrence Quincy Mumford
Succeeded by	James Billington
Personal details
Born	Daniel Joseph Boorstin (1914-10-01)October 1, 1914 Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
Died	February 28, 2004(2004-02-28) (aged 89) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Spouse	Ruth Frankel ​ (m. 1941)​ [1]
Children	3
Relatives	Julia Boorstin (granddaughter)
Alma mater	Harvard University (AB) Balliol College, Oxford (BA, BCL) Yale University (SJD)
Awards	Pulitzer Prize for History (1974)

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.^[2] 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.^[2][3]

Repudiating his youthful membership in the Communist Party, 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 seen, along with those of historians such as Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz and Clinton Rossiter, as belonging to 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.^[4][5]