In addition to serving as the twelfth Librarian of Congress through three presidential administrations, Daniel J. Boorstin was also a prolific historian of the post-war United States (The Americans) and the scientific, artistic, and philosophical history of humanity (The Discoverers, The Creators, and The Seekers) at the University of Chicago. Boorstin was a historian who celebrated frontier optimism and America's infinite capacity for hope. Yet the history of his family suggests a more complicated truth.
As Jon Boorstin, Daniel's novelist and filmmaker son, details in The American, even the prolific Boorstin the Elder left holes in his histories of the United States. He wrote half a million words about being American, but only nine pages about himself. In searching out the America that shaped Daniel Boorstin, his son confronts the story he never told, a true story about fathers and sons, about Jews and race and the price of being American. And Boorstin the younger finds what his father found that gave him hope.
While he was born in Atlanta, for example, Boorstin the Elder grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He and his father, Samuel, did not flee Atlanta for greener pastures. Instead, they headed west because, after serving on Leo Frank's defense team, Samuel and his family were the victims of vicious anti-Semitism. That they ended up in Tulsa--a city transformed after a race riot destroyed the Black Greenwood District--is an irony that doesn't escape Jon Boorstin's notice. The American, then, explores and expands upon the life and work of Daniel Boorstin to further illuminate the major historical events that shaped the Librarian of America and his world.Boorstin the younger explores why certain optimistic strands of history are celebrated in his father's work, while others are suppressed. He illuminates Dan's lifelong friendship with Black historian John Hope Franklin, whose father lost everything in the Tulsa Massacre. Together these two celebrated sons of the city offer a fascinating alternative for how we write about racial and religious experience. With affection, respect, and a sharp critical eye, Jon Boorstin illuminates the hidden history of his father's work.