About the Author
Historian, public servant, and author, DANIEL J. BOORSTIN, the Librarian of Congress Emeritus, directed the Library from 1975 to 1987. He had previously been director of the National Museum of History and Technology, and senior historian of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Before that he was the Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught for twenty-five years.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Boorstin graduated with highest honors from Harvard College and received his doctorate from Yale University. As a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, England, he won a coveted double first in two degrees in law and was admitted as a barrister-at-law of the Inner Temple, London. He is also a member of the Massachusetts bar. He has been visiting professor at the University of Rome, the University of Geneva, the University of Kyoto in Japan, and the University of Puerto Rico. In Paris he was the first incumbent of a chair in American history at the Sorbonne, and at Cambridge University, England, he was Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions and Fellow of Trinity College. Boorstin has lectured widely in the United States and all over the world. He has received numerous honorary degrees and has been decorated by the governments of France, Belgium, Portugal, and Japan. He is married to the former Ruth Frankel, the editor of all his works, and they have three sons and four grandchildren.
The Discoverers, Boorstin’s history of man’s search to know the world and himself, was published in 1983. A Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection, The Discoverers was on the New York Times best-seller list for half a year and won the Watson Davis Prize of the History of Science Society. This and his other books have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Boorstin’s many books include The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958), which won the Bancroft Prize; The Americans: The National Experience (1965), which won the Parkman Prize; and The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Dexter Prize and was a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection. Among his other books are The Mysterious Science of the Law (1941), The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948), The Genius of American Politics (1953), The Image (1962), The Republic of Technology (1978), and The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader (1995). For young people he has written the Landmark History of the American People. His textbook for high schools, A History of the United States (1980), written with Brooks M. Kelley, has been widely adopted. He is the editor of An American Primer (1966) and the thirty-volume series The Chicago History of American Civilization, among other works.
BOOKS BY DANIEL J. BOORSTIN
The Discoverers
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The Creators
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The Seekers
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The Americans: The Colonial Experience
The Americans: The National Experience
The Americans: The Democratic Experience
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The Mysterious Science of the Law
The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson
The Genius of American Politics
America and the Image of Europe
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
The Decline of Radicalism
The Sociology of the Absurd
Democracy and Its Discontents
The Republic of Technology
The Exploring Spirit
The Republic of Letters
Hidden History
Cleopatra’s Nose
The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader
The Landmark History of the American People (with Ruth F. Boorstin)
A History of the United States (with Brooks M. Kelley)
About this Title
Throughout history, from the time of creation to our own modern age, the human race has sought the answers to fundamental questions of life: Who are we? Why are we here? “The Seekers” offers a history of our great Western heritage of ideas, as told through the lives of those who still speak to us, from Moses and Plato to Emerson and Einstein.
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