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Dr. Daniel J. Boorstin (1914- ) holds many honorable positions and has received numerous awards for his notable work. He is one of America's most eminent historians, the author of more than fifteen books and numerous articles on the history of the United States, as well as a creator of a television show. His editor-wife, Ruth Frankel Boorstin, a Wellesley graduate, has been his close collaborator.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Oklahoma, he received his undergraduate degree with highest honors from Harvard and his doctor's degree from Yale. He has spent a great deal of his life abroad, first in England as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. More recently he has been visiting professor of American History at the University of Rome, Italy, the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and at Kyoto University, Japan. He was the first incumbent of the chair of American History at the Sorbonne, and was the Professor of American History and Institutions as well as Fellow of Trinity College, at Cambridge University. He has been director of the National Museum of American History and the Librarian of Congress Emeritus. He is a member of the Massachusetts Bar and has practiced law. He has received more than fifty honorary degrees and has been honored by the governments of France, Belgium and Portugal. In 1989 he received the National Book Award for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters by the NationalBook Foundation.

Dr. Boorstin's many books include the trilogy The Americans: The Colonial Experience, which won the Bancroft Prize, The Americans: The National Experience, which won the Parkman Prize, and The Americans: The Democratic Experience, which won the Pulitzer Prize. His 1983 work, The Discoverers, a best selling history of man's search to know the world and himself, was awarded the Watson Davis Prize of the History of Science Society. His other works include The Mysterious Science of Law, The Genius of American Politics, and The Republic of...