Boorstin, Daniel J(oseph) (1914-2004)

US historian and librarian. Boorstin taught at the University of Chicago from 1944 until 1969 when he became director at the National Museum of Natural History. In 1975 he became librarian at the Library of Congress. Boorstin's Pulitzer prize-winning trilogy The Americans - The Colonial Experience (1964), The National Experience (1967), and The Democratic Experience (1974) - reflected his preferences for people, experiences, and inventions over ideology, and his belief in history as enduring literature.