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. --
David Greenberg * 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. -- Louis Menand * 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. -- Katrina Forrester * Harper's *
A masterful study of privacy in the United States. -- Sue Halpern *
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. -- Katie Fitzpatrick * 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. -- Katrina Gulliver * 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. -- Steve Donoghue *
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. --
Palmer Rampell * 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. --
Josh Lauer * 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. -- David Lyon * 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.
-- Hamilton Cain * 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
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