Scott A. Sandage
Associate Professor, History
- Baker Hall 236-B
- 412-268-2878
Bio
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 (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 magazine and was awarded the 34th Annual Thomas J. Wilson Prize, for the best “first book” accepted by . Three translations of the book came out in 2007, in , , and the . Also in 2007, HarperCollins published Professor Sandage’s abridgement (with new introduction and annotations) of Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic .
As a teacher, he regularly offers an undergraduate lecture survey of United States history, small courses on capitalism and individualism, on American political humor, and on the U.S. Constitution and the presidency. Every spring, he teaches a large course, “The Roots of Rock & Roll,” which explores how American’s most popular and profitable music genre grew out of open-source, collaborative innovation across races and regions after the Civil War. At the graduate level, Professor Sandage advises doctoral dissertations and teaches historiography and research courses.
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 in Washington, D.C. In 2004, he was invited to contribute an essay on loserdom to the catalog of the Whitney Biennial Exhibition. From 1998 to 2015, he was an elected member of the board of directors of the , in Washington, D.C. In 2006, he was elected to membership in the .
Professor Sandage has written for , , , and other mainstream publications. His interviews have appeared in , , , , Business Week, Fast Company Magazine, and the , among other outlets. He has been interviewed on “” and other programs, , Radio Hong Kong, Radio New Zealand, , , , “The Tavis Smiley Show” (PBS), “” (C-Span), and other radio and television programs.
His honors and awards include being named a . He was selected for Carnegie Mellon’s Elliot Dunlap Smith Award for Distinguished Teaching and Educational Service in 2006. He has also received a 2007-2008 senior faculty fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the 1998 Jameson Fellowship from the Library of Congress and the American Historical Association, and the 1995-1996 Dissertation Prize from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. His study, (Journal of American History, June 1993) won best article prizes from the Organization of American Historians and from the Eugene V. Debs Foundation.
In 2007, he was named one of America’s “Top Young Historians” by the .
Professor Sandage’s next book project, Laughing Buffalo in Paris: A Tall Tale of Race from the Half-Breed Rez, centers on a Nebraska reservation established for families with Native American and white or African-American ancestry, to explore how the law, the federal government, field anthropology, folklore, popular culture, and science have fostered conflicting narratives that have shaped racial identity in the United States.
Education
Ph.D.: Rutgers University, 1995Publications
- “,” co-author, with , Smithsonian, June 30, 2020.
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“The Symmetry of 1819 in American History,” Journal of the Early Republic, forthcoming 2020
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The New York Times Book Review, March 29, 2015
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Slate, May 28, 2014
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The New York Times Book Review, April 6, 2014.
- (Cambridge: Mass., Harvard University Press, 2005); paperback, 2006.
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[Chinese translation (complex characters) of Born Losers], paperback, (Taiwan: New Century Publishing Co., 2007).
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[Chinese translation (simplified characters) of Born Losers], paperback (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2007).
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[Japanese translation of Born Losers], hardcover, (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2007).
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by Alexis de Tocqueville, abridgement with annotations and introduction (New York: HarperPerennial, 2007).
- “The Gilded Age,” in , ed. Halttunen (London: Blackwell, 2008).
- “The L on Your Forehead,” thematic essay about art and failure, Catalog of the 2004 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), 94-101.
- James Longhurst and Scott Sandage, College Teaching 45 (Spring 2004): 1-6.
- Social Politics vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer 1999), 105-130.
- “The Gaze of Success: Failed Men and the Sentimental Marketplace, 1873-1893,” in , ed. Chapman and Hendler (University of California Press, 1999).
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Journal of American History, vol. 80, no. 1 (June 1993), pp. 135-167; reprinted in , ed. Scott-Childress, (Garland Press, 1998), 273-311; and Charles Payne and Adam Green, eds., (NYU Press, 2003), 492-535.
- History News Network, 11 September 2006.
- “Dead End for the Freedom Trail” (2002), National Coalition to Save Our Mall, Washington, D.C.
- Cabinet Magazine (Summer 2002): 88-89.
- “'Help' Wanted: Begging Letters to John D. Rockefeller,” Research Reports from the Rockefeller Archive Center (Spring 2000)
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, OpEd Section, 21 November, reprinted in Philadelphia Gay News 3-9 December 1999, pp. 10, 12.
- “Marian Anderson” and “Abraham Lincoln,” in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, ed. Andrews (Oxford, 1997); both selected for inclusion in The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature (Oxford, 2001).
- review essay on Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America, American Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 4 (December 1994), 605-611.
Courses Taught
Department Member Since: 1995