Who (really) said that?…
The three types of misattributed statement: an analysis…
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As we quote with care, we might send learned birthday greetings to Daniel Joseph Boorstin; he was born on this date in 1914. As a Rhodes Scholar, Boorstin took first-class honors in jurisprudence at Oxford and was admitted as a barrister to the Inner Temple in 1937. Two years later, he returned to the US to teach history, first at Harvard, then at the University of Chicago. He left Chicago in 1969 to become the director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution; then, in 1975 moved on to become the Librarian of Congress, a post he held until 1987. He’s probably best-known for his three-volume history, The Americans, the third volume of which, The Americans: The Democratic Experience, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.
