Word: boorstins
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...historian must be judged on criteria beyond creative-writing ability. He must display some sort of comprehensive understanding of and sympathy for historical process. If he is to be compared with Turner and Beard (as Boorstin is), the historian must offer a convincing explanation for why something happened as well as showing that something did happen in a certain way. Boorstin's quality as an historian consistently fails to equal his quality as a writer...
...Boorstin's tale of democracy gone astray and the defiling of the ideal has the ring of truth to it. He is always persuasive in his demonstration of these failings. His ability to show the historical roots of America's present uninspired attitude toward democracy is worthy of the highest praise. But the reader has a right to expect more from the historian than an explanation which holds that what happened happened because physical circumstance did not allow otherwise...
...must be a democracy not of things but of people, history must be a history of people and their motivations rather than of their physical limitations. One can imagine thousands of different patterns of development given a certain set of physical limitations, and Boorstin's failure to recognize a whole set of human influences upon American development is a major...
...BOORSTIN EXAMINES, FOR instance, the growth of Coca-Cola and Ford without examining the economic class which directed their growth. Ford Motor Company did not develop the way it did because it had to, but because there was a profit to be made from its developing that way. Americans did not settle for low quality of franchise hamburger-stand fare because they wanted it or because it was the only way for them to associate with each other from coast to coast. Instead, an entrepreneurial class discovered it was a profitable way of marketing food and the rest...
...simple notion of the profit motive. But at least the theory of the profit motive recognizes that certain people in America were in a position to make clear decisions about the direction American society was to take and that these people were responsible for American society's eventual course. Boorstin's failure as an historian is his failure to make that recognition a central part of his understanding of history...