Books like The Americans, Vol. 3: The Democratic Experience

There are plenty of simple errors in this book, of date and place, and plenty of vacuous speculation, but overall, this book gives the reader a majestic overview of Americans inventing and creating over a hundred years of history. The themes that tie the book together are thin, but the brief individual biographies of creativity are great. There's the abolitionist "father of life insurance" Elizur Wright, who saw desperate people trading their life insurance policies as a shadow of the slave trade, and who created the first life insurance regulations. There's Willis H. Carrier, a mechanical engineer who created air conditioning to assure consistent color printing in a Brooklyn print shop, and formed a "Rational Psychrometric Formulae" for proper levels of cooling. There's Chester F. Carlson, an employee of Bell Laboratories who in 1938 charged a zinc and sulfur plate and thus created "xerography" (xeros was Greek for dry, or dry printing), but then was ignored until the Haloid Corporation found him in 1946 and started xerox machines.Boorstin highlights quotidian geniuses such as Luther Childs Crowell (who invented the square-bottomed paper bag), Walter Shewhart (industrial quality control), or Robert Gair (folded cardboard), and myriad other inventors of the mundane necessities of modern life. Yet he also discusses philosophers like John Dewey, advocates for schooling like Jonathan Baldwin Turner, and creative organizations like the Wyoming Stock Growers Association or the American Association of Painters and Sculptors (which put on the Armory Show in 1913) The overall theme of the book, such as it is, is that American inventiveness democratized and homogenized American life, usually for the better, but not always. The book contains a hint of wistfulness about lost community and lost authenticity, but overall it is in awe of the transformations these creative people wrought. While the endless stories and biographies about inventiveness can become tedious, they are a worthwhile look at some of the things that probably matter most in history.