Sandage, Scott A.

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Sandage, Scott A.

(Scott Sandage)

PERSONAL: Male. Education: University of Iowa, B.A., 1985; Rutgers University, M.A., 1992, Ph.D., 1995.

ADDRESSES: Office—Carnegie Mellon University, Department of History, Office BH 23B, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. E-mail—sandage@andrew.cmu.edu.

CAREER: Historian, consultant, and educator. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, associate professor, 1996–. Consultant to Smithsonian Institution, U.S. National Archives, National Park Service, and other organizations.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1998; Jameson fellowship, U.S. Library of Congress/American Historical Association, 1998; Thomas J. Wilson Prize for best first book accepted by Harvard Press, for Born Losers: A History of Failure in America; best article prizes, Organization of American Historians and Eugene V. Debs Foundation, both for "A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939–1963."

WRITINGS:

Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times, Fast Company, Industry Standard, College Teaching, Social Politics, American Quarterly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Washington Post. Coeditor, "American History and Culture" book series for New York University Press.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Half-Breed Creek: A Tall Tale of Race on the Frontier, 1800–1941, a book on how family folklore shaped racial identity in the United States; editing a one-volume abridged edition of Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, for HarperCollins.

SIDELIGHTS: Scott A. Sandage is an educator and cultural historian at Carnegie Mellon University, where he specializes in American history of the nineteenth century. He has taught classes on topics as varied as American cultural history, the rise of individualism, and the history of rock 'n' roll. As a public historian, Sandage has been a consultant for film and radio documentaries and an off-Broadway play, as well as for prominent historical organizations such as the U.S. National Archives and the Smithsonian Institution.

In his book Born Losers: A History of Failure in America Sandage "presents a darker side of the American Dream" noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Using detailed case studies, Sandage closely examines the numerous business and personal failures that occurred amidst the widespread economic optimism of nineteenth-century America, when capitalism took command of the American imagination and it seemed that anyone with enough determination could become wealthy and successful. Benjamin Schwarz, writing in Atlantic Monthly, observed that "what makes these reports so extraordinary a historical source is their subjectivity and scope." Sandage "movingly describes the emotional toll that economic collapse exacted on the self-worth of men in that patriarchal age," stated Frederick J. Augustyn, Jr., in Library Journal.