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2019 Merle Curti Award for Intellectual History

Social Science History Association, for The Averaged American

President's Book Award

Social Science Research Council Working Group : Member

National Young Faculty Leaders Forum : Member

The beginnings of the end of privacy

Hearing the Masses: The Modern Science of Opinion in the United States

“A gold mine and a tool for democracy”: George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and the business of scientific polling, 1935–1955

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.



The Known Citizen A History of Privacy in Modern America

Americans today “know” that a majority of the population supports the death penalty, that half of all marriages end in divorce, and that four out of five prefer a particular brand of toothpaste. Through statistics like these, we feel that we understand our fellow citizens. But remarkably, such data—now woven into our social fabric—became common currency only in the last century. Sarah Igo tells the story, for the first time, of how opinion polls, man-in-the-street interviews, sex surveys, commu


The Averaged American Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public

Sarah Igo's primary research interests are in modern American cultural, intellectual, legal and political history, the history of the human sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and the history of the public sphere. 

Her most recent book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018), traces U.S. debates over privacy beginning with “instantaneous photography” in the late nineteenth century and culminating in our present dilemmas over social media and big data.  Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History and the Merle Curti Award for Intellectual History, The Known Citizen was also named one of the Washington Post's “notable non-fiction books” of 2018.  

Igo's 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 is also a co-author of Bedford/St. Martin’s American history textbook, The American Promise.

Modern U.S. History

History of the Public Sphere

History of the Human Sciences

History of Survey Research

Opinion Poll

Sociology of Knowledge 

Big Data

Cultural History

Social Security

Privacy

Social Media

Vanderbilt University, Department of History Profile

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11 Historians Predict How Joe Biden Will Be Remembered

Are We on the Cusp of a New Political Order?

College Uncovered: What Do You Learn and What Will You Earn?

Unleashing the ‘Animal Spirits’ That Course Through American History

The Price of Privacy

Gaggle Knows Everything About Teens And Kids In School

Census Has Been Subject of Legal Wrangling for Decades

We Would Have Known

15 Unsung Moments From American History That Historians Say You Should Know About

What your SSN really means — to you and potential fraudsters

Andrew Jackson Chair in American History; Professor of Law; Professor of Political Science; Professor of Sociology; Director, American Studies Program

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