Word: boorstins
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...third and final volume of The Americans, Daniel Boorstin chronicles the making of the American democratic experience and the unmaking of the democratic paragon. It is a sad book with an all too tragic tale to tell...
...Boorstin is a social historian, and politics is conspicuous in his work by its absence. Perhaps it is silly to try to discuss democracy without reference to political institutions, but social historians--and Boorstin must be counted among the most influential of these--have made a convincing case that American political institutions have evolved as they did because of the social and economic influences exerted upon them...
...most striking feature of Boorstin's interpretation of the American democratic experience is his understanding that the experience was not shaped so much by human will as it was by physical circumstance. According to Boorstin's account, the institutions that developed in this country were molded more by the physical conditions in which Americans found themselves--the vast expanse of land, the challange of an untamed wilderness and the presence of exploitable natural resources--than by their rational desires and good intentions...
...historian who deplores the "thinner life of things," Boorstin seems spare in his appraisal of the life of the spirit during the past century. His one bow to it is a somewhat ingenuous section on the American missionary impulse and what he calls "Samaritan diplomacy," though he does allude to the cultural imperialism that has often accompanied missionaries. He limits his discussion of America's inexorable technology to vignettes about the atomic bomb and the space race. His assay of the century's "democratic experience" does not include any mention of the fate of the American Indian...
...mentioned only in reference to the Xeroxing of the Pentagon papers. The war, after all, was a product of America's military-industrial momentum and the missionary spirit - at least its anti-Communist version - as well as the Go-Getter mystique that the author so ad mires. Boorstin may dislike "important events," but that is one that no historian can ignore. · Mayo Mahs