Sarah E. Igo is the Andrew Jackson Professor of History and Director of American Studies at Vanderbilt University.
Masterful (and timely)…Privacy is clearly a protean concept, and
Igo deftly reviews the definitions that scholars have offered in
their efforts to cage its elusive essence. She judges these
attempts helpful but less than conclusive. Her own ambitious
solution is to embrace privacy’s multifariousness. In her marathon
trek from Victorian propriety to social media exhibitionism, she
recounts dozens of forgotten public debates…Utterly original.
*Washington Post*
A mighty effort to tell the story of modern America as a story of
anxieties about privacy… Igo is an intelligent interpreter of the
facts…She shows us that although we may feel that the threat to
privacy today is unprecedented, every generation has felt that way
since the introduction of the postcard.
*New Yorker*
[An] excellent new book on privacy in America…Igo follows the
different ways in which Americans have been scrutinized—in the
home, school, and workplace; by the state, the press, and marketing
firms, corporations and psychologists, data aggregators and
algorithms…Her book can…help us better understand our own debates
over privacy today.
*Harper’s*
A masterful study of privacy in the United States.
*New York Review of Books*
Engaging and wide-ranging…Igo’s analysis of state surveillance from
the New Deal through Watergate is remarkably thorough and
insightful.
*The Nation*
A highly readable new history of privacy in America [that] offers
insight into the ways attitudes have evolved as different forms of
identification, and different expectations of privacy, have
emerged.
*Reason*
Luminous… For a century and a half, people in this country have
been arguing at high volume about privacy… Today, we are watched as
never before, through surreptitious governmental data collection
and through corporate profiles of our desires and habits. Yet we
also divulge private matters aggressively, seeking freedom through
publicity.
*Dissent*
Monumental…In vigorous, smooth-flowing prose, case by case and
landmark by landmark, Igo tells this story with an authority and
insight no previous comprehensive account has achieved…The Known
Citizen is the best history yet to appear of the long road leading
to that unprecedented privacy crisis, and she concludes by
observing that no matter how altered the modern landscape is, we
cannot do without privacy.
*Open Letters Review*
While most studies of privacy dwell on laws, court decisions, and
other regulations, the premise of Igo’s book is that we might gain
a better vantage point if we think about privacy as part and parcel
of a larger culture…Igo tracks shifts in popular expectations about
privacy across disciplines, decades, and media forms.
*Public Books*
Igo brilliantly interrogates the long history of privacy’s
much-heralded demise and its shape-shifting meaning in the modern
United States…A tour de force of cultural history that maps out
privacy’s sprawling legal, social, and moral terrain with
tremendous insight and verve…This is a major achievement and an
essential guide to the competing and often contradictory dynamics
of exposure and recognition in our intensively mediated
society.
*American Historical Review*
Brilliant…Capture[s] the shifting cultural moods around privacy…to
reveal their relevance in the American public sphere…A literary and
historical gem that deserves a wide readership.
*American Journal of Sociology*
Sweeping [and] meticulously researched… Igo gives us the definitive
biography of an idea that all readers should both cherish and fear…
The Known Citizen is essential reading.
*Chapter 16*
From prison cells to memoirs, from suburban living to the big data
revolution, this remarkable book chronicles how Americans have
defined, debated, and litigated privacy for more than a hundred
years. The Known Citizen shows that drawing the line between the
private self and public citizen has been the essential modern
social question.
*Robert O. Self, author of All in the Family: The Realignment of
American Democracy since the 1960s*
A masterful history of the role that privacy has played in the
lives of American citizens. Following the ‘known citizen’ over
time, Igo brilliantly reveals what it means to be modern—to claim
protection against the prying eyes of marketers or the national
security state while making one’s self more visible by a social
security number or disclosing intimate secrets on social media. An
amazing book!
*Brian Balogh, author of The Associational State: American
Governance in the Twentieth Century*
In this deeply researched and wonderfully astute history of the
rise of privacy as a problem in American society, Sarah Igo shows
us how privacy in our liberal culture has always been about both
protection of one’s self from public view and control of the
narrative by which one wants to be known.
*Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University*
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
