Pulitzer Prize-winning historian dies

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin, who wrote more than 20 history books over his long career, died Saturday. He was 89.
Boorstin died after midnight of pneumonia at Washington's Sibley Hospital, his wife, Ruth, said.
Renowned for his books, Boorstin was appointed librarian of Congress in 1974 by President Ford and spent 12 years as director of the world's largest library.
It was also in 1974 that he won the Pulitzer for history for "The Americans: The Democratic Experience." The book was the third in Boorstin's "The Americans" trilogy and followed "The Colonial Experience" and "The National Experience." All sought to analyze the distinctive character of American institutions and culture.
Boorstin tackled world history with "The Discoverers," which looked at the human search for knowledge. That was perhaps the book he was most fond of, his wife said.
Boorstin's successor at the Library of Congress, James H. Billington, remembered Boorstin as a great historian and scholar. "This is a remarkable American of our times. He was an extraordinary historian, first and foremost of American historians. He was a polymath," he said.
Boorstin was born in Atlanta, reared in Tulsa, Okla., and educated at Harvard, Yale and Oxford universities. Before his appointment to the Library of Congress, he was director of the National Museum of History and Technology, senior historian of the Smithsonian Institution and a history professor at the University of Chicago for 25 years.