When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - that it brings us momentous events since the night before...We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless..We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence, to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy...to go to 'a church of our choice' and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

The idea of pseudo-events anticipates later work by Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. Books
The Mysterious Science of the Law (1941)
The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948)
The Genius of American Politics (1953)
The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958)
America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought (1960)
A Lady's Life In The Rocky Mountains: Introduction (1960)
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America (1962)
The Americans: The National Experience (1965)
The Landmark History of the American People: From Plymouth to Appomattox (1968)
The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections of America Today (1969)
The Landmark History of the American People: From Appomattox to the Moon (1970)
The Sociology of the Absurd: Or the Application of Professor X (1970)
The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973)
Democracy and Its Discontents: Reflections on Everyday America (1974)
The Exploring Spirit: America and the World Then and Now (1976)
The Republic of Technology (1978)
A History of the United States with Brooks M. He also served as director of the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution.

He was appointed twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress in 1975 and served until 1987. Daniel Joseph Boorstin (October 1 1914 – February 28 2004) was an American historian professor attorney and writer.