Scott Sandage

Professor Sandage is a cultural historian who specializes in the nineteenth-century United States and in the changing aspects of American identity. He is the author of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Harvard University Press, 2005), on which playwright Arthur Miller commented, “I found Born Losers a confirmation of an old belief that in American history there is a crash in every generation sufficient to mark us with a kind of congenital fear of failure. This is a bright light on a buried strain in the evolution of the United States.”

Born Losers was selected as an “Editor’s Choice” book by the Atlantic Monthly magazine and was awarded the 34th Annual Thomas J. Wilson Prize, for the best “first book” accepted by Harvard University Press. Three translations of the book came out in 2007, in Japan, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China. Also in 2007, HarperCollins published Professor Sandage’s abridgement (with new introduction and annotations) of Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America.

As a teacher, he regularly teaches an undergraduate lecture survey of United States history, small courses on the rise of individualism and on political humor, and “The Roots of Rock & Roll, 1870-1870” which combines lecture and discussion to explore the social and cultural history of converging black and white musical traditions after the Civil War. At the graduate level, Professor Sandage teaches historiography and research courses and is currently advising four doctoral dissertations.

Active as a public historian, he has been a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives, the National Park Service, the Kentucky Historical Society, an off-Broadway play, and film and radio documentaries. In 1999-2000, Professor Sandage chaired a panel of scholars to recommend an inscription for the “wheelchair” sculpture belatedly added to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. In 2004, he was invited to contribute an essay on loserdom to the catalog of the Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Since 1998, he has been an elected member of the board of directors of the Abraham Lincoln Institute, in Washington, D.C. In 2006, he was elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society. He is co-editor of the “American History and Culture” book series for New York University Press.