Volume Two of The Americans trilogy covers the period between the Revolution and the Civil War when America was shaping a national identity with boundless faith in the future. Like the young Mark Twain in Roughing It, many Americans felt that westward movement alone would give them purpose and that the future would somehow take care of itself.

History books which have bored me have relied excessively on the indiscriminate accumulation of detail. While this obsessive desire to be thorough might be necessary for the education of students, quantity of detail alone fails to give the complete, balanced view of reality that I look for in all kinds of reading. One reason I like Boorstin is that he writes narrative history, favoring theme over chronology, thus allowing the continuities and significance of history to emerge. His American story comprises many smaller stories. What I thought were signs of the times often turned out to be peculiarly American characteristics.

Boorstin writes, for example, that government paid for railroads and colleges in order to serve the growing community. Spencer's dichotomy of "The Man Versus the State" in 19th century Europe was meaningless in 19th Century America because distinctions such as public and private were often blurred. It is fitting that Boorstin divided his book into "Community" and "Nationality" because community preceded government. Contrary to the myth of the rugged individual explorer, Americans traveled in groups. Settlers who headed west, regardless of motive, wrote their own Mayflower Compact before loading the wagons. Venturing into lawless areas, they formed laws for their protection. Even vigilantism was a way of maintaining order rather than flaunting it.

The second half of the book examines vagueness as a source of strength. The country grew and prospered before its geographical boundaries had been explored. Here are also passages on American ways of talking, the creation of myths and legends, the establishment of the national holiday, and the importance of political parties.

Nearly every page of Boorstin's history contains some nugget of Americana which in isolation appears to be trivial but in historical context emerges to reveal something profound about American life.

Both this book and its counterpart, The Democratic Experience, offer an anecdotal and entertaining approach to American history. In The National Experience, Boorstin focuses on the development of a national character and national customs. Rather than trying to force history to fit into a deterministic and logical mold, Boorstin shows just how the disconnectedness of American history has contributed to American development.

I find Boorstin's works very readable, and the style enjoyable. My only concern is that sometimes it seems that some complexities are ignored in favor of developing an overall theme. However, this remains one of very few histories I pick up for fun to read a few chapters.

This really is a great book. From the American Industrial revolution to the western expansion, this book opened my eyes to many factors in the building of our nation. In lectures, I often quote Boorstin and his observations.

I also found it amusing when he exploded some common myths concerning our history. You really should read this book.

This is mostly a collection of mini-histories of the various American businesses and inventions that arose after the Civil War, which are often hugely fascinating on a purely factual level. Boorstin's big argument is that American life became more and more unmoored to local places and common bodies of knowledge, resulting in a disorienting and dispiriting world of mass marketing and suburbs, with gadgets that worked in ways no one can understand. There is a right-wing drift to his ideas, but the sureness of his opinions is nice to hear even if you don't agree.

Many have described Boorstin's "The Americans" series as being right-wing. I do not concur. He writes about a period, in reality our age, as if it is still happening because it is. The third and final book in the series shows that he is unsure if the changes from the Civil War to the present day have not all been for the betterment of mankind. Although written three decades ago, I would say that this book is more relevant than ever. I think that everyone should read "The Americans" series. There is a bit more of Boorstin's curmugeony personality in this last book, but don't let that disuade you from enjoying a very complex perspective of America in the Twentieth Century and, very possibly, the Twenty-First Century.

In un-Zinn-like, yet still richly diverse prose Mr. Boorstin gives the fair-minded liberal battleground to do revisionist work. Another reviewer on this site reads Boorstin as "drifting to the right". True enough, but by simultaneously worrying about the extent of 'progressive' change in Democratic America and declaring the (legitimate) concern of progressives to continue to press for even more, lest such ideas retreat to a lonely theoretical corner (time out!), he seems to be opining our past as the Bennet-Brookhiser-Will team will never do: Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and all of their Western European enlightened brothers' didn't know too many of the challenges ahead. That's why Madison left a record of the spirited talks in the hallowed halls of Philly way long ago. He read centuries of history to formulate his ideas for civility and government...as Susan B., Huey Long, MLK and Noam Chomsky (HAH!) have done in later years.

I liked this work a little bit better than the Creators, even though I am an artist and reader, I guess it's the calling of the sea, the forests, the mountains.
Just imagine being alive when people had no idea that the Pacific ocean existed or believing that nobody could live below the Equator, such "Anti-Pods" couldn't be real...
This work, like the former, really got me excited about history in general and lead me to read other works, say like "Longitude".
It's one weakness is that it often times reads like a textbook, but it's easy enough to skip parts that are of no interest and get to stuff that moves you.
I imagined many great movies being made from some of these stories, I hope Hollywood script writers find this book and give us some real interesting historical flicks.
My favorite story? The guy that finds the lost city of Troy, wow, what a great and inspirational bit of history.
If you're interested in ships, maps, the discovery of lands, oceans, lost cities and new worlds, you'll enjoy this work, highly recommended.

Boorstin's amazingly thorough and eminently readable account of 'Man the Discoverer' was a pleasure to read. Instructive without being pedantic, this approach offers history writing at its best. There are few shortcomings, though, that prevent it from a '10' rating. Lack of illustrations limits the book's effectiveness: many geographic areas Boorstin mentions are not commonly known, so maps would be helpful; and complex concepts (such as the "escapement mechanism" in time pieces) are not successfully explained in words, and desparately need pictures to demonstrate what he is talking about. Boorstin is also extremely limited in his discussions of discovery in the 20th century. Einstein is barely mentioned, powered flight isn't discussed, communication revolutions of discovery such as telephone, radio, or television aren't covered, and no mention is made of computers nor the amazing things we've discovered with their use. This does not prevent Boorstin from giving an inordinate amount of attention to other 20th century figures such as Freud in psychiatry or Keynes in economics. (Are these things really "discoveries" in the same sense as the other things he covers in the book??) Overall, this is a fine book, but it could be better.

Daniel Boorstin's Discoverers is a delight to read. Its sweeping theme is humanity's discovery of the natural and social world we inhabit. There are major sections that deal with the discovery of the calendar and the invention of the clock; the geographical discoveries of the 15th to 18th centuries; the natural world of astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology; and the social world of historiography and economics. An approach of this sort can't help but be anecdotal which might offend the sensibilities of many professional historians. Yet, for educated laymen (and those historians who recognize the importance of well written synthesis and popularization) the anecdotes are valuable illustrations of his theme-- and great fun to read. I learned much from this book: details of the lives and work of such luminaries and Isaac Newton, Christopher Columbus and Adam Smith; also of the lives of lesser known discoverers such as Aldus Manutius, Amerigo Vespucci and the Chinese explorer Cheng Ho. His bibliographic essay at the end is an excellent resource for further reading. I look forward to reading The Creators and The Seekers, the next two books in the trilogy.

Boornstin is such a prolific writer that it's easy to see how this book got passed over by most readers in the 60s. Coming from a serious academic, it must have sounded a stuffy attack on a progressive new medium (TV) and industry (Public Relations)...compare this to some of today's rantings about the evils of the internet.

It's so insightful. The book is quite powerful in that Boornstin's observations of 1962 are now just commonly accepted.

"A celebrity is a person who is well-known for their well-knownness" -- an observation from this book that is one of the most often quoted bits of wisdom on the subject of celebrity, and deservedly so. But this is just one of many quotable observations made by Boorstin in this prescient, clear-eyed look at the beginning of the post-modern world. Written in 1962, this book has been mined by writers on modern society of every stripe: French postmods (who don't credit Boorstin), Neil Postman (who does). Though it suffers a bit from the outdated examples used to elucidate his points about the "Graphic Revolution" -- his line in the sand between the modern and pre-modern -- the book is so cogently argued that it rarely matters.

His main thematic device is to dichotomize pre-modern and modern/postmodern categories. For instance, in discussing celebrity he notes that the precursor of the celebrity was the hero. He explains the difference by saying that the hero was "folk" based, while the celebrity is "mass" based. George Washington was raised to the level of hero by the people for his deeds, his fame embroidered by them, cherry trees invented for him to chop down. On the other hand, celebrities -- the Gabor sisters to use one of his examples -- were celebrities before they even starred in movies. They were created by astute publicists and through their own knack of getting into the paper.

He actually starts his discussion about how the image has come to be substituted for ideals in his first chapter on the gathering and dissemination of the news. He notes the rise of the pseudo-event, e.g., the press conference, the press leak, the crafty reporter calling sources and playing their quotes off of each other until the reporter arrives at something he can call news. He notes that newpapers actually used to contain reportage on events, things that had actually happened that were not designed to be covered by the media. Crimes, he notes in his summary, are the almost the only kind of real news left. (This before the era of copycat murders).

A brilliant, insightful diagnosis of our image-laden world that still holds up after 40 years. The only thing that's changed perhaps is how accustomed we've gotten to the image and the extent to which we're now sold on authenticity by marketers. His discussion of Barnum as the precursor to advertising is worth the price of the book. His sections on public opinion polling, on public relations, on advertising are dead on, too. He also takes on the sociologists of the time for their "nodal" thinking, their bland concepts such as "status anxiety." No one is spared.

The twist the postmods put on Boorstin's observations is that they say they take delight in the artificiality of the image, the bricolage, the spectacle, etc. (A postmod may be best known for their too-knowing knowingness and celebration of deception). But Boorstin is actually concerned about the destabilizing effects of the acceptance of the standard of "credibility" (which has supplanted "truth"). Too, he's worried that the American image we project is not based on ideas or ideals, but only things, only images. He says at one point that folks in the developing world prefer not to be hammered with the look of all things American, that it makes us look shallow as compared to those societies which are based on ideas (like Communism was -- ironically enough because it was founded on materialism). And though our images and our things apparently won out over Communism, there is still something pertinent about this observation. Pragmatism may have saved us from the ravages of idealism that gave rise to facist movements in Europe, but it spared us so that we could look empty-headed, only interested in moving ahead, unquestioningly.

In general, I recommend anything Boorstin writes: his essays are lucid and his ideas are always perceptive. I read this book around 6 years ago and lost it. I'd like to order it again. What makes this book particularly brilliant is Boorstin's insights into how perception, specifically media perception, influences us psychologically and, thereby, reality. (Think of that Esquire Ad campaign: perception vs. reality.) Also, Boorstin is one of the few contemporary thinkers who writes clearly, without pretensions.

This portrait of different aspects of colonial American social and governmental tendencies is a very interesting read. Mr. Boorstin's theses are well supported with historical information. His arguments made me reexamine some of my preconceptions about the colonial period and consider in a new light the impact of early American history on the present. That said, the author is not the most scintilating writer among historians. Also, the book ends abrubtly without a summary chapter, which would have been useful. It appears Boorstin performed surgery on a larger _The Americans_ work, slicing it in thirds, without gathering up the entrails and applying a suture.

Boorstin outlines the fundamentals and development of American consumerism and capitalism of the 19th Century. A great read for understanding why America was the great attraction of emigration. A good emphasis is put forth on how much American ingenuity happened by accident. This book is excellent for describing who we are, how we dressed, how we ate, and how we profited from it. Like the rest of Boorstin's works, this is a must for any student of history!

Boorstin examines the influences Old World ideas had on the New World of America. He pays close attention to how the Old World ideas were transplanted and changed in America. Boorstin demonstrates that this change was present with most every institution or idea brought from Europe to America. The Americans is the winner of the Bancroft Prize, a prestigious award for works in History. And rightly so. Boorstin's The Colonial Experience is extremely well organized, thorough, and related the history of America to me in a contemporary style. I applaud Boorstin, for he has succeeded in writing an excellent book on the history of early America that even a fledgling history student, like myself, could fully grasp without losing any detail.

The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson by Daniel J. Boorstin is a look into the early years preceding the birth of the United States and the climate of thought that was current at that time.
Scientific knowledge was starting to be shared and Jefferson seemed to absorb and process a lot of that times current philosophies.

This book is invaluble if you realy want to study or "get a feel" for the times of the 18th and early 19th century. The author goes to great pains in explaining particular events and ideas that were concerning these early scientific thinkers.

This book conveys the thought process behind the events and how the minds of the thinkers moved the nation. Mostly, this book is about American intellectual history, and is engaging as it is history of ideas. These ideas are blended with a purpose to bring the thought of the time into perspective and defines the key problems facing how Jefferson appeared.

This book is worthy of a place on your bookshelf, for reference and a look into American life and thought, aspects that are hard to see today, but are brought out richly in this book.

I highly recommend reading this book by one of America's leading historians .

The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson provides an in depth study of the philosophies and amazing depth of scientific knowledge that Thomas Jefferson displayed during his lifetime. The renowned historian, Daniel Boorstin, wrote this wonderful historic piece decades before his more famous works of The Creators, The Discovers and The Seekers. Boorstin's ability to explain a specific set of events and ideas amid the complex myriad of late 18th and early 19th century concerns in political thought and philosophy makes this book a invaluable reference. Thomas Jefferson's basic principle that all law, social construction and philosophy should be grounded with "Natural Law" is explained at depth. Boorstin also explains how the liberal ideals attributed to Jefferson were misinterpreted in the 100 years following his death. If you an interest in either early American Anthropology (although term was not being used per se, it is the only accurate way to describe the emphasis of this book) or American Scientific thought, then this book must grace your shelf.

Boorstin is the best historian I have read. He brings history to life by examining the thought behind the events and the assumptions behind the thought. This is not so much a book about what happened as to why it happened; what the underlying ideas were of the minds that moved the nation at its birth. Boorstin manages to effectively communicate thought processes that are foreign to the modern age. A remarkable achievement. I plan on reading more of his work in the future. Highest recommendation!