Discoverers and Creators : The author: Daniel J. Boorstin inspired the movie with his 1983 world history of the search for knowledge.

Historian and author Daniel J. Boorstin has studied the American heart and soul for more than half a century. As he surveys the terrain today, he sees a disturbing decline, both in public life and in the private sphere, of what he calls “the amateur spirit,” the spirit that our system of government was founded upon.

Before amateur became virtually a synonym for unskillful , it carried a meaning closer to its Latin root: amator, or lover. It is to this definition that Boorstin remains passionately devoted.

“The amateur spirit has been much maligned,” Boorstin, 79, said recently in a telephone interview from his home in Washington, D.C. “I think the amateur is a lover, a person who does something for love.

“Democracy,” he added, “is government by amateurs.”

In an essay that predated by several years the disillusionment with professional politicians that characterized the 1992 elections, Boorstin wrote: “The two new breeds whose power and prestige menace the amateur spirit are the professionals and the bureaucrats . Both are byproducts of American wealth, American progress. But they can stifle the amateur spirit on which the special quality and vision of our American leaders must depend.”

The amateur spirit also informs the best writings on history, Boorstin says.

The classic “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” written by 18th-Century British scholar Edward Gibbon, has long been held by Boorstin as a model of historical writing: “I’ve felt that the great works of history have also been great works of literature. That’s the only way they can reach out to people.”

If Boorstin is an amateur in spirit, he is not in deed. He was librarian of Congress for 12 years, director of the National Museum of History and Technology, senior historian of the Smithsonian Institution and professor of history at the University of Chicago for 25 years.

With a body of work that includes his trilogy “The Americans” (the third volume, “The Democratic Experience,” won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1973), plus “The Discoverers” (1983) and “The Creators,” his most recent opus, Boorstin has written some of the most widely read histories of the past several decades.

Fellow author Harrison E. Salisbury had this to say about Boorstin in his review of “The Creators”: “Not often in our contemporary world do we meet a man who evokes the expression ‘polymath.’ Indeed, we shy away from this concept--the man whose knowledge passes freely across eras, arts and disciplines. But it is clear that Boorstin is such a man.”

*

Boorstin considers himself lucky not to be writing only for his peers.

“I was fortunate in that I never had to make a living from writing,” Boorstin said, a situation that has allowed him to pursue only those book projects that interest him, and to write broad-ranging books for a general audience.

Through the first stage of his writing career, Boorstin distinguished himself as a keen and often prescient observer of the American scene, from Colonial times (“The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson,” 1948) to the present.

Three decades ago, for instance, Boorstin wrote “The Image,” a still-relevant chronicle of the rise this century of the public-relations industry and the concomitant dominance of the news by “pseudo-events,” calculated “for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced.”

The processes Boorstin documented have only accelerated in the decades since. He had thought of updating “The Image” but decided that his examples and the conclusions he drew still hold true.

“Nowadays everybody tells us that what we need is more belief, a stronger and deeper and more encompassing faith. A faith in America and what we are doing . . . ,” he wrote in 1961. “What ails us most is not what we have done with America, but what we have substituted for America. We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions.”

He said he hopes the book demonstrates to new readers that the processes have been going on for some time. “It’s meant to be a tonic and not an emetic,” he said.

With “The Discoverers,” Boorstin ventured into world history, outlining the human search for knowledge. “I thought perhaps it was time to grow up and deprovincialize myself,” he explained.

His trek into world history continued with “The Creators” (1992), which followed the development of the arts through the ages. As he approaches his 80th birthday (on Oct. 1), Boorstin is at work on the third book of the series, which he calls “The Seekers.”

The topic of the new work flows naturally from the previous two, he said. All the accumulated knowledge and the works of art, Boorstin said, beg a question: “So what? What does it all add up to?” The current work will be about “the search for meaning” and the ways in which Western peoples have strived for self-knowledge.

Boorstin’s most expansive works occupy him for long stretches. The three parts of “The Americans” took some 25 years to research and write; “The Discoverers” and “The Creators” each took about nine years. He works closely with his wife of more than 50 years, Ruth Boorstin, who is his primary editor (“Without her, my books would be twice as long and half as readable”).

“Every book is a kind of experiment,” said Boorstin, who works closely with his wife of more than 50 years, Ruth, his primary editor (“Without her, my books would be twice as long and half as readable”).

“There’s a special satisfaction in writing a long book, in that you hope to grow. . . . You must learn in the course of it. That’s the challenge of the historian, to keep learning. . . . If other people enjoy it, that’s a dividend.”

The personal challenge of expanding his own knowledge is balanced by another, broader goal: to make the book compelling to the average reader.

“In the case of nonfiction, people know how it turned out,” Boorstin said. “You have to create suspense within the limits of the facts. That’s what the good historian has to do, to create a drama.”

If there is a common thread through Boorstin’s writings on history, it’s that he is less likely to focus on politics and war than on the telling detail of individual lives, and the technological and social developments, that shaped history.

Two examples from “The Americans: The Democratic Experience” are men whose impact was very different in effect yet similar in scope.

It was Christopher Columbus Langdell, who took over in 1870 as dean of Harvard Law School, who invented and introduced the concept of “case law.” Langdell’s approach replaced the application of grand legal principles to matters of law. The new emphasis on the factual minutiae of law as it had been applied in previous cases produced a sea change in legal practice.

Then there was naturalist Clarence Birdseye, who went fishing one day in sub-freezing temperatures, caught a fish and set it on the ice until he was done. When he got home and threw the frozen fish into a pail of water, he was startled to see it revive and start swimming again. It prompted Birdseye to develop the frozen-food company bearing his name.

And, as Boorstin notes, decades later nearly every home in America contained a refrigerator-freezer unit.

*

Boorstin has written that a historian is both “discoverer and creator”--one who roots through the relics of the past to resurrect something of the spirit of an age. In his own searches and writings, Boorstin has refrained from espousing a dogmatic view of past events.

“I have always felt strongly that ideology is a kind of prison,” Boorstin said. “That’s the genius of American politics. What distinguishes American political institutions is the absence of dogma.” Of his series, “The Americans,” Boorstin said: “It’s not a history of philosophies; it’s a history of opportunities.”

“The Discoverers” and “The Creators” paint their pictures by spotlighting the lives of people Boorstin sees as key figures. “My books do not have abstract titles. The titles are about people,” Boorstin said. In the case of his most recent book, “I didn’t call it ‘Creativity’ or ‘The Arts,’ I called it ‘The Creators.’ ”

Boorstin has served books not only as an author, but also as librarian of Congress, a post he held until his retirement in 1987. As librarian emeritus, he maintains an office in the library, although he continues to do his writing and research at home.

A keen observer of advancing technology, and particularly its effects on the dispersal of images and information, Boorstin quickly makes the distinction between “information” and “knowledge,” remaining skeptical about the much-heralded information superhighway.

“Information tends to drive knowledge out of existence,” Boorstin said, and the coming rain of “pseudo-facts” only makes it more important “that we anchor ourselves in the printed word.”

Boorstin is often asked if he fears for the future of books, but he joked that as one who receives regular royalty checks, “I can bear witness to the fact that people are reading books.” The fear is predicated on the “displacive fallacy,” he said: “They assume that the new technology is going to drive the old one out of existence.”

Some predicted that “when movies came in, nobody would read a book anymore. That was not the case,” Boorstin said. What happens, he continued, is that new technology “forces people to find niches for the old technology.”

And books, he believes, will always have a niche.

Books can be “smuggled under a mattress,” carried and read anywhere, Boorstin said. The book is “an explosive and a sedative and a companion and an avenue to community for me.”

Someone once remarked to him that the Library of Congress is “the world’s largest collection of bad books,” Boorstin said, “and that is true, because we’re a free society . . .

“That’s one definition for freedom, that images are allowed to compete. . . . Libraries remain so important as reminders of how many efforts and reaches people have made.”

Historian Daniel J. Boorstin on . . .

Television:

“When people have running water, they don’t have to go to the well. The same thing happens with entertainment.”

In one sense, Boorstin says, television divides people and breaks down community, because they do not leave their homes. “That’s one of the reasons I’m glad to see movie theaters prosper. Even if they have to sit in the dark, at least they’re with other people.”

Multiculturalism:

“The building of the country is the building of communities.”

Boorstin said he is wary of any “emphasis on diversity as an end” in itself. “The history of the United States is a remarkable example” of the creation of a “shared humanity . . . between groups who had not lived together before.”

Heroes and celebrities:

“Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but who are famous because they are great. . . .

“The old heroic human mold has been broken. A new mold has been made. We have actually demanded that this mold be made, so that marketable human models--modern ‘heroes’--could be mass-produced, to satisfy the market, and without any hitches. The qualities which now commonly make a man or woman into a ‘nationally advertised brand’ are in fact a new category of human emptiness.” (From “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” 1961).