Podcast appearances and mentions of sarah igo

Utah First Lady Abby Cox led a discussion with Michelle Sobel (Unify America), David McCullough (American Exchange Project), and Sarah Igo (Vanderbilt University) on how we can help students develop conversation skills. Learn more about the Disagree Better Initiative at: https://www.nga.org/disagree-better/ You can also read about the conversation at: https://www.nga.org/news/commentary/disagree-better-panelists-highlight-ways-to-help-students-have-healthier-conversations/  

Listen to our podcast from the new co-authors of The American Promise, Sarah Igo and François Furstenberg. In this episode, Sarah and François address questions from the history teaching community on becoming textbook authors, teaching American history, and the complications of education today.

The Phi Beta Kappa book awards are given annually to three outstanding scholarly books published in the United States. 2019’s winners are Imani Perry for Looking for Lorraine: the Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry; Adam Frank, for Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth; and Sarah Igo for The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America. They revealed their thinking behind the works we celebrated and shared stories of unmatched discovery, spoke of love beyond adversity, and fueled our collective imagination with examples of unbound human curiosity.

The data collection practices of companies such as facebook, google and amazon have led many Americans to wonder if privacy is dead. Though these companies are relatively new, this is far from the first time that Americans have felt their privacy to be under attack. In this episode, we speak with Vanderbilt University's Sarah Igo to learn about the ways that Americans have understood privacy from the advent of “instant photography” in the 1890s to the rise of the internet in the 21st century.  Dr. Sarah E. Igo is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Program in American Studies, as well as the inaugural Faculty Director of E. Bronson Ingram College at Vanderbilt University. Her book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America was published by Harvard university Press in 2018. The Road to Now is part of the Osiris Podcast Network. 

Every day, it seems like there’s a new story about privacy: A Facebook hack that puts the private data of millions at risk. A years-long surveillance program of personal communications by the government. Endless concerns about how much of our lives we share on social media. With all this in the air, it can certainly feel like we have a lot less privacy nowadays. But is that really the case? Well, according to Vanderbilt professor Sarah Igo, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America, the answer is actually pretty complicated.

Donald Goldsmith describes the quest for extraterrestrial life. Sarah Igo of Vanderbilt University questions whether we really want privacy. Ariana Curtis of the Smithsonian reveals how museums can tell stories more accurately. Harvard's Irene Pepperberg on parrots' surprising intelligence.

Every day, Americans make decisions about their privacy: what to share and when, how much to expose and to whom. Securing the boundary between one’s private affairs and public identity has become a central task of citizenship. How did privacy come to loom so large in American life? Sarah Igo tracks this elusive social value across the twentieth century, as individuals questioned how they would, and should, be known by their own society. Privacy was not always a matter of public import. But beginning in the late nineteenth century, as corporate industry, social institutions, and the federal government swelled, increasing numbers of citizens believed their privacy to be endangered. Popular journalism and communication technologies, welfare bureaucracies and police tactics, market research and workplace testing, scientific inquiry and computer data banks, tell-all memoirs and social media all propelled privacy to the foreground of U.S. culture. Jurists and philosophers but also ordinary people weighed the perils, the possibilities, and the promise of being known. In the process, they redrew the borders of contemporary selfhood and citizenship. The Known Citizen reveals how privacy became the indispensable language for monitoring the ever-shifting line between our personal and social selves. Igo’s sweeping history, from the era of “instantaneous photography” to the age of big data, uncovers the surprising ways that debates over what should be kept out of the public eye have shaped U.S. politics and society. It offers the first wide-angle view of privacy as it has been lived and imagined by modern Americans. Sarah E. Igo is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Program in American Studies, as well as the inaugural Faculty Director of E. Bronson Ingram College.  She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University.  Professor Igo's primary research interests are in modern American cultural and intellectual history, the history of the human sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and the history of the public sphere. Her first book, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Harvard University Press, 2007), explores the relationship between survey data—opinion polls, sex surveys, consumer research—and modern understandings of self and nation. An Editor’s Choice selection of the New York Times and one of Slate’s Best Books of 2007, The Averaged American was the winner of the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association and the Cheiron Book Prize as well as a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award of the American Sociological Association.  Igo has just published her second book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018).

Every day, it seems like there’s a new story about privacy: A Facebook hack that puts the private data of millions at risk. A years-long surveillance program of personal communications by the government. Endless concerns about how much of our lives we share on social media. With all this in the air, it can certainly feel like we have a lot less privacy nowadays. But is that really the case? Well, according to Vanderbilt professor Sarah Igo, author of “The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America,” the answer is actually pretty complicated.

To write a book on such a multifarious and vast, if not ubiquitous, concept as privacy is a tall task for the historian. Sarah Igo, associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, took this on and succeeded masterfully. Her book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018), is filled with sophisticated arguments and compelling stories. It explores how privacy first burst into political debate and cultural anxieties in the late nineteenth-century and how Americans ever since have navigated the moving line between the private and the public. She traces how new technologies (e.g. instant cameras), new practices (e.g. journalistic focus on the personal), new forms of knowledge (e.g. psychology), and new book genres (e.g. the tell-all memoir) spurred debates about privacy in the United States. Most critically, she shows how claims to privacy—made by gay Americans, the poor, and other marginalized groups—were also assertions of citizenship. Who gets privacy, and how much of it—and their counterpart, who gets to know what—were questions of politics as much as culture. Igo’s book is a welcome contribution to understanding the longer history of privacy—especially welcome in our own age of social media and mass surveillance. The book should be read by cultural historians, intellectual historians, media studies scholars, historians of the state, and scholars interested in material culture. Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To write a book on such a multifarious and vast, if not ubiquitous, concept as privacy is a tall task for the historian. Sarah Igo, associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, took this on and succeeded masterfully. Her book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018), is filled with sophisticated arguments and compelling stories. It explores how privacy first burst into political debate and cultural anxieties in the late nineteenth-century and how Americans ever since have navigated the moving line between the private and the public. She traces how new technologies (e.g. instant cameras), new practices (e.g. journalistic focus on the personal), new forms of knowledge (e.g. psychology), and new book genres (e.g. the tell-all memoir) spurred debates about privacy in the United States. Most critically, she shows how claims to privacy—made by gay Americans, the poor, and other marginalized groups—were also assertions of citizenship. Who gets privacy, and how much of it—and their counterpart, who gets to know what—were questions of politics as much as culture. Igo’s book is a welcome contribution to understanding the longer history of privacy—especially welcome in our own age of social media and mass surveillance. The book should be read by cultural historians, intellectual historians, media studies scholars, historians of the state, and scholars interested in material culture. Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To write a book on such a multifarious and vast, if not ubiquitous, concept as privacy is a tall task for the historian. Sarah Igo, associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, took this on and succeeded masterfully. Her book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018), is filled with sophisticated arguments and compelling stories. It explores how privacy first burst into political debate and cultural anxieties in the late nineteenth-century and how Americans ever since have navigated the moving line between the private and the public. She traces how new technologies (e.g. instant cameras), new practices (e.g. journalistic focus on the personal), new forms of knowledge (e.g. psychology), and new book genres (e.g. the tell-all memoir) spurred debates about privacy in the United States. Most critically, she shows how claims to privacy—made by gay Americans, the poor, and other marginalized groups—were also assertions of citizenship. Who gets privacy, and how much of it—and their counterpart, who gets to know what—were questions of politics as much as culture. Igo’s book is a welcome contribution to understanding the longer history of privacy—especially welcome in our own age of social media and mass surveillance. The book should be read by cultural historians, intellectual historians, media studies scholars, historians of the state, and scholars interested in material culture. Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To write a book on such a multifarious and vast, if not ubiquitous, concept as privacy is a tall task for the historian. Sarah Igo, associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, took this on and succeeded masterfully. Her book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018), is filled with sophisticated arguments and compelling stories. It explores how privacy first burst into political debate and cultural anxieties in the late nineteenth-century and how Americans ever since have navigated the moving line between the private and the public. She traces how new technologies (e.g. instant cameras), new practices (e.g. journalistic focus on the personal), new forms of knowledge (e.g. psychology), and new book genres (e.g. the tell-all memoir) spurred debates about privacy in the United States. Most critically, she shows how claims to privacy—made by gay Americans, the poor, and other marginalized groups—were also assertions of citizenship. Who gets privacy, and how much of it—and their counterpart, who gets to know what—were questions of politics as much as culture. Igo’s book is a welcome contribution to understanding the longer history of privacy—especially welcome in our own age of social media and mass surveillance. The book should be read by cultural historians, intellectual historians, media studies scholars, historians of the state, and scholars interested in material culture. Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To write a book on such a multifarious and vast, if not ubiquitous, concept as privacy is a tall task for the historian. Sarah Igo, associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, took this on and succeeded masterfully. Her book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018), is filled with sophisticated arguments and compelling stories. It explores how privacy first burst into political debate and cultural anxieties in the late nineteenth-century and how Americans ever since have navigated the moving line between the private and the public. She traces how new technologies (e.g. instant cameras), new practices (e.g. journalistic focus on the personal), new forms of knowledge (e.g. psychology), and new book genres (e.g. the tell-all memoir) spurred debates about privacy in the United States. Most critically, she shows how claims to privacy—made by gay Americans, the poor, and other marginalized groups—were also assertions of citizenship. Who gets privacy, and how much of it—and their counterpart, who gets to know what—were questions of politics as much as culture. Igo’s book is a welcome contribution to understanding the longer history of privacy—especially welcome in our own age of social media and mass surveillance. The book should be read by cultural historians, intellectual historians, media studies scholars, historians of the state, and scholars interested in material culture. Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Host Brian Wesolowski sits down with CDT's Joseph Jerome as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is finally here. They talk about what it means for businesses both in Europe and the US, and what it means for your personal data. Brian then brings in Vanderbilt professor, historian, and author Sarah Igo to discuss how the meaning of privacy has evolved over time in the United States – and how that changing notion of privacy has impacted policy and society. Sarah's new book, "The Known Citizen:" http://bit.ly/2J0c9nf More on Joe: https://twitter.com/joejerome More on Sarah: http://bit.ly/2klBSbU More on our host, Brian: bit.ly/cdtbrian Attribution: sounds used from Psykophobia, Taira Komori, BenKoning, Zabuhailo, bloomypetal, guitarguy1985, bmusic92, and offthesky of freesound.org.

May 10, 2018 at the Boston Athenæum. Every day, Americans make decisions about their privacy: what to share and when, how much to expose and to whom. Securing the boundary between one’s private affairs and public identity has become a central task of citizenship. How did privacy come to loom so large in American life? Sarah Igo tracks this elusive social value across the twentieth century, as individuals questioned how they would, and should, be known by their own society. Popular journalism and communication technologies, welfare bureaucracies and police tactics, market research and workplace testing, scientific inquiry and computer data banks, tell-all memoirs and social media all propelled privacy to the foreground of U.S. culture. Jurists and philosophers but also ordinary people weighed the perils, the possibilities, and the promise of being known. In the process, they redrew the borders of contemporary selfhood and citizenship. The Known Citizen reveals how privacy became the indispensable language for monitoring the ever-shifting line between our personal and social selves. Igo’s sweeping history, from the era of “instantaneous photography” to the age of big data, uncovers the surprising ways that debates over what should be kept out of the public eye have shaped U.S. politics and society. It offers the first wide-angle view of privacy as it has been lived and imagined by modern Americans.

On this week’s Past Present podcast, Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, and Neil Young discuss Bernie Sanders and the history of socialism in America, Fitbit, and why adults are now celebrating Halloween.  Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show:  Bernie Sanders’ bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination has raised the old question, “Why is there no socialism in America?” That question served as the title of Werner Sombart’s 1906 classic. Natalia mentioned the historian Eric Foner’s advice that Sanders should use moral language to defend socialism as Eugene Debs did in the early 20th century. Natalia also noted that Larry David’s portrayal of Sanders on Saturday Night Live could make the senator’s Jewishness more well-known among American voters.Some Wall Street banks have ordered Fitbit activity trackers for their employees, a decision they explained for improving workers’ health. But many see dangerous possibilities when companies track their employees’ personal lives. Niki recommended Sarah Igo’s book, The Averaged American, for thinking more about the history of data in Americans’ lives. Natalia noted the recent book The Wellness Syndrome discusses how Americans’ obsession with health and fitness may be becoming an unhealthy obsession. Natalia, our fitness history expert, has written about wellness culture in America for the Huffington Post.Once a holiday for children, Halloween has become a popular event for many American adults in part because of the dangers associated with it for children. Steven Mintz’s Huck’s Raft and Paula Fass’ Kidnapped were recommended as two books that historicize American fears about child welfare and safety. In our regular closing feature, What’s Making History: Natalia recommended Michelle Miller’s The Underwriting as a page-turning thriller about a Silicon Valley dating website’s IPO. Natalia noted the novel had originally been published online in downloadable installments, harkening back the older publishing traditional of serializing literature.Neil commented on the discovery that Mike Huckabee’s 1998 book Kids Who Kill was found to have contained numerous false and misattributed historical quotations from figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. Neil presented this as another cautionary tale in how politicians use and misuse history for their political advantage.  Niki discussed the Slate article, “French Tadpoles and Persian Pickles,” an excerpt from Jude Stewart’s book, Patternalia. The article presented a fascinating history of paisley, but Niki noted it also demonstrated how the history of a pattern was also a way of understanding the history of society and culture.