The Discoverers is a non-fiction historical work by Daniel Boorstin, published in 1983, and is the first in the Knowledge Trilogy, which also includes The Creators and The Seekers.

Discovery in many forms is described: exploration, science, medicine, mathematics, and more-theoretical ones, such as time, evolution, plate tectonics, and relativity.

In this respect he is like other historians (David McCullough, Paul Johnson, Louis Hartz and Richard Hofstadter, to name a few) who give prominence to the individual and the incremental approach to history.

Boorstin, a reform Jew, has been described as a "secular, skeptical moderate Northeastern liberal of the New Deal rather than the New Left school.

Scientific research, discovery and education became intertwined with the moral good and were elevated to lofty goals within Western societies.

[3] Most importantly, the active public dissemination of scientific knowledge – geographical, cosmological, medical, mechanical, anthropological – never became common practice outside the Judeo-Christian world.

He became an exponent of tradition, wary of the implications of multiculturalism and along with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr and Brian Barry wrote of potential dangers it posed to a continuing liberal society.

Despite the fact that he served as director of the Smithsonian National Museum of History and Technology, he was a sharp critic of what he perceived as the institution's growing political correctness.

"[6] In 1975, he resigned as President of the American Studies Association after an attempt was made to inject radical politics into the scholarly body.

"In fact," writes Louise M. Bishop, "virtually every thinker and writer of the thousand year medieval period affirmed the spherical shape of the earth.

He exalts genuine discoveries (calendar, printing press, medicine) and bemoans media-driven ones of the modern age.

have alleged that the book's cover which has a colorized version of an image by Flammarion (made in the style of a woodcut), is used to promote the view that medieval Christianity was anti-scientific.