Sarah Igo

Media Appearances

• 11 Historians Predict How Joe Biden Will Be Remembered

  The evaluation of a U.S. presidency traditionally hinges on promises and reversals, accomplishments and failures, in domestic and foreign policy. In Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s case, it would encompass, on the home front, his concerted work to stem the Covid-19 pandemic and his ambitious, New Deal-inflected infrastructure and economic policies — but also the politically debilitating inflation that helped doom his party’s chances in the 2024 election. On the world stage, it would weigh Biden’s successful rallying of Western nations in support of Ukraine and apparent clinching of a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas in his twilight hours as commander-in-chief against the disastrous pullout of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and failure to prevent the massive death toll in Gaza.

  January 17th, 2025

• Are We on the Cusp of a New Political Order?

  And finally, Sarah Igo, “The Known Citizen” — very different kind of book — “A History of Privacy in Modern America.” We’re talking about morality, we’re talking about community, and of course, social media has put the question of privacy and what constitutes privacy and what’s private and what’s public — such an urgent question in understanding America. And she gives us a wonderful hundred-year overview of how Americans in almost every generation have redefined the boundary between private and public, and I found that extremely useful in thinking about where America is at in the 21st century.

  November 1st, 2024

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

  As an intellectual historian, Igo says, historically, what students learn can’t be captured in a single answer or data point. "Because universities and colleges offer such an incredible wealth of options — electives, majors, minors, small credential programs. It’s the wealth of what is offered. And then the number of pathways through is really quite astonishing and would have astonished someone looking at college, or who went to college 100 years ago, or honestly even 75 years ago. The big explosion in electives and kind of choose your own adventure really happened after the mid century, mid 20th century."

  May 30th, 2024

• Unleashing the ‘Animal Spirits’ That Course Through American History

  The first traffic jam in U.S. history, Jackson Lears tells us, occurred in February 1913. The cause? A crush of New Yorkers jostling for seats at a lecture (in French, no less) by the celebrity philosopher Henri Bergson. His topic was the élan vital, the notion of a dynamic life force, a “current sent through matter” that “transcends finality” and animates the world. It is Lears’s topic, too: the play of what he calls “animal spirits” across several centuries of American thought. The phrase captures a recurring desire to meld the material and the ethereal, body and soul, self and universe against powerful countercurrents in religious, scientific and commercial culture.

  June 22nd, 2023

• The Price of Privacy

  America's first newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was also one of its shortest-lived. Motivated by the creed “That Memorable Occurrents of Divine Providence may not be neglected or forgotten,” the inaugural issue, published in 1690, aired rumors of an affair between the French king and his daughter-in-law, along with other scandalous reports—and was promptly censored and confiscated by British authorities in Boston. But the American appetite for such salacious fare was irrepressible. By the time of the Civil War, journals such as The Illustrated Police News were devoted to graphic depictions of real-life criminal cases: Readers were served up vivid woodcuts of brothel raids, hangings, suicides, and child deaths—the more violent and gruesome, the better.

  April 6th, 2022

• Gaggle Knows Everything About Teens And Kids In School

  Parents and caregivers have always monitored their kids. Sarah Igo, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University who studies surveillance and privacy, told BuzzFeed News, modern schools are often a de facto “training house for personhood.” But student surveillance services like Gaggle raise questions about how much monitoring is too much, and what rights minors have to control the ways that they’re watched by adults.

  November 1st, 2019

• Census Has Been Subject of Legal Wrangling for Decades

  Legal wrangling has surrounded the U.S. census count for decades, culminating in this year’s fight over adding a citizenship question.

  July 10th, 2019

• We Would Have Known

  FACEBOOK’S recent admission that tens of millions of users’ personal information had been repurposed for political ends dramatizes concerns about digital-era privacy. But long before the Internet, “privacy was the language of choice for addressing the ways that U.S. citizens were—progressively and, some would say, relentlessly—rendered knowable by virtue of living in a modern industrial society,” writes Sarah E. Igo ’91, in The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard, $35). Igo, associate professor of history (and of political science and sociology and law) at Vanderbilt, uses all those disciplines in a sweeping overview that manages, fortuitously, to be especially timely and engagingly written, as the introduction, excerpted here, attests.

  July 1st, 2019

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

  The month of July is a time for Americans to look back at the country’s past—specifically to that indelible moment in 1776 when the Second Continental Congress declared independence from Britain. But, while the nearly 250 years since then have been chock full of major milestones, not every moment that shaped the country gets the credit it deserves.

  June 30th, 2019

• What your SSN really means — to you and potential fraudsters

  Sarah Igo, a history professor at Vanderbilt University and author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America, said there wasn’t “one clear event” that led to the widespread uses of the SSN we see today. Rather, it happened over decades, as government agencies and businesses adopted it as an identifier. “It’s precisely because there was no national ID in the US that there was this desire and hunger to track people and verify who they were,” says Igo. “From 1946 into the 1970s, [the Social Security card] specifically said ‘This is not an ID.’ They finally took it off in the ‘70s because everyone was using it that way.”

  February 1st, 2019