Boorstin

Today is the birthday of social historian and former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin (books by this author), born in Atlanta, Georgia (1914). He wasn't a historian by training; he studied law at Harvard, Oxford, and Yale, and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. He didn't write about major battles and political events, but about social and intellectual history, and the daily experiences of ordinary people. His personal and professional hero was Edward Gibbon, another amateur historian who had published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century. Boorstin was quite proud of his own lack of formal education in history, because he wasn't constricted by rules. His only qualification, he said, was his love of the subject.

When he was appointed Librarian of Congress in 1975, several senators asked him to give up his writing. He refused, but assured them that he wouldn't write "on the job." So he wrote in the evenings, and on weekends, and got up every morning at 4:30 and wrote until he went to the library at 9 a.m. One of his first acts as Librarian of Congress was to demand that the library's imposing bronze doors be left standing wide open. "They said it would create a draft," he recalled later, "and I replied, 'Great — that's just what we need.'"