Scott A. Sandage is a

cultural historian Cultural history combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. It examines the records and narrative descriptions of past matter, encompassing ...

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

. He is best known as the author of ''Born Losers: A History of Failure in America'', which was selected as an "Editor's Choice" book by ''

Atlantic Monthly ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...

'', and was awarded the 34th Annual Thomas J. Wilson Prize, for the best "first book" accepted by

Harvard University Press Harvard University Press (HUP) is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. After the reti ...

. In 2007 he was named as one of America's Top Young Historians by the

History News Network History News Network (HNN) at George Washington University is a platform for historians writing about current events. History History News Network (HNN) is a non-profit corporation registered in Washington DC. HNN was founded by Richard Shenkma ...

.Author and Cultural Historian Scott Sandage to Deliver 17th Annual Levine Lecture
". Rider University, September – May 2009. Accessed July 29, 2009. Sandage was born in 1964 in

Mason City, Iowa Mason City is a city and the county seat of Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, United States. The population was 27,338 in the 2020 census, a decline from 29,172 in the 2000 census. The Mason City Micropolitan Statistical Area includes all of Cerro G ...

. He graduated from the

University of Iowa The University of Iowa (UI, U of I, UIowa, or simply Iowa) is a public research university in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. Founded in 1847, it is the oldest and largest university in the state. The University of Iowa is organized into 12 coll ...

(B.A., 1985) and from

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and wa ...

(M.A., 1992; Ph.D., 1995) in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Active as a public historian, Sandage has been a consultant to the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...

, the National Archives, the

National Park Service The National Park Service (NPS) is an List of federal agencies in the United States, agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government within the United States Department of the Interior, U.S. Department of ...

, an off-Broadway play, and film and radio documentaries. He is on the board of directors for the

Abraham Lincoln Institute The Abraham Lincoln Institute (ALI), founded in 1997, is an American non-profit organization promoting scholarly research on the subject of Abraham Lincoln.Lincoln Memorial The Lincoln Memorial is a U.S. national memorial built to honor the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. It is on the western end of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., across from the Washington Monument, and is in ...

. His commentaries have appeared in

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large n ...

The Industry Standard ''The Industry Standard'' is a U.S. news web site dedicated to technology business news, part of ''InfoWorld'', a news website covering technology in general. It is a revival of a weekly magazine based in San Francisco which was published betwe ...

Fast Company ''Fast Company'' is a monthly American business magazine published in print and online that focuses on technology, business, and design. It publishes six print issues per year. History ''Fast Company'' was launched in November 1995 by Alan We ...

magazine, and other periodicals. He contributed an essay on "loserdom" to the 2004

Whitney Biennial The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition ...

exhibition catalog. As of 2020, his next book project is entitled ''Laughing Buffalo in Paris: A Tall Tale of Race from the Half-Breed Rez''.

Selected works

Books

* Sandage, Scott A
''Born Losers: A History of Failure in America''
Cambridge, Massachusetts:

, 2005. , * Sandage, Scott A. (editor
''Democracy in America'' by Alexis de Tocqueville, abridgement with annotations and introduction (New York: HarperPerennial, 2007).

Articles

* "The Gilded Age", in ''A Companion to American Cultural History'', 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, "Appropriate Technology and Journal Writing: Structured Dialogues that Enhance Learning", ''College Teaching'' 45 (Spring 2004): 1-6. * "Gender and the Economics of the Sentimental Market in Nineteenth-Century America", ''Social Politics'' vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer 1999), 105-130. * "The Gaze of Success: Failed Men and the Sentimental Marketplace, 1873-1893", in ''Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture'', ed. Chapman and Hendler (University of California Press, 1999). * "A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939-1963", ''Journal of American History'', vol. 80, no. 1 (June 1993), pp. 135–167; reprinted in ''Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism'', ed. Scott-Childress, (Garland Press, 1998), 273-311; and Charles Payne and Adam Green, eds., ''Time Longer than Rope: A Century of African-American Activism'' (NYU Press, 2003), 492-535.

History News Network, 11 September 2006.

(2002), National Coalition to Save Our Mall, Washington, D.C.
“Old Rags, Some Grand”
''Cabinet'' Magazine (Summer 2002): 88-89. * "'Help' Wanted: Begging Letters to John D. Rockefeller", Research Reports from the Rockefeller Archive Center (Spring 2000)
“Why One Gay Professor Would Leave Pennsylvania”
''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).
“From Puritan to Yankee Doodle Dandy”
review essay on Richard L. Bushman, ''The Refinement of America'', ''American Quarterly'', vol. 46, no. 4 (December 1994), 605-611.

References

External links

Born Losers book website

- Department of History, Carnegie Mellon University {{DEFAULTSORT:Sandage, Scott Living people Carnegie Mellon University faculty American non-fiction writers People from Mason City, Iowa Year of birth missing (living people) Cultural historians