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Historian of Hope
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14108 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1988 |
3,918 Words |
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Edward S. Shapiro
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HIDDEN HISTORY
Exploring Our Secret Past
Daniel J. Boorstin
New York: Harper & Row, 1987
334 pp., $19.95
For the past thirty years, the publication of a book by Daniel J. Boorstin has been a significant event in American intellectual life. The Colonial Experience (1958), the first volume of his three-part history of the United States, won the Bancroft Prize. The second volume, The National Experience (1965), won the Parkman Prize. The third volume, The Democratic Experience (1973), won the Pulitzer Prize for history and the Dexter Prize, and was a Book of the Month Club main selection. The Discoverers (1983), his most famous book, was on the New York Times best-seller list for six months. It also won the History of Science Society's Watson Davis Prize.
Hidden History, Boorstin's latest book, includes several hitherto unpublished essays, as well as a good sample of previously published essays and chapters from books. The reprinted sections indicate why he is a preferred historian of recent Republican presidents--appointed by Richard Nixon to be director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of History and Technology and by Ronald Reagan as librarian of Congress. They also reveal why radical historians during the 1960s believed he, more than any other American historian, personified what was wrong with American historiography. One senses that their antipathy toward Boorstin was due not only to his unique view of the American past, but also to his repudiation of the radical world of which he had been a part during the 1930s.
There was little in Boorstin's early years that could have suggested his emergence in the 1950s as the most prominent exponent of a "consensus" conservative interpretation of American history. The grandson of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Boorstin was born in 1914 in Atlanta, Georgia. His parents moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1916, where his father became a successful lawyer and a "booster" of Tulsa. Boorstin graduated first in his class from Tulsa Central High School when he was only fifteen and, in 1930, entered Harvard. He majored in English history and literature at Harvard, where he was an editor of the undergraduate newspaper the Crimson. He won the Bowdoin Prize for his senior honors essay on Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Included in Hidden History is Boorstin's essay "The Intimacy of Gibbon's Decline and Fall." Decline and Fall was the first serious work of history Boorstin ever read, and an engraving of Gibbon's face today hangs in his study. This interest in Gibbon is not surprising, since Boorstin's description of the Englishman's great opus strongly resembles the historiographic path he himself blazed after World War II. Boorstin noted Gibbon's "inexhaustible sense of wonder and his tolerant curiosity about the foibles of the human race. The case of an eye, the excess of an appetite, the perversity of tastes, the beauty or deformity of stature--he witnessed all these with delight. For Gibbon, there are no trivia. Human habit, utterances, exclamations, and emotions are the very essence of his history--not mere raw material for distilling 'forces' and 'movements.'"
There has been no such thing as trivia for Boorstin. The Americans describes activities of
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