Scott Sandage

Scott A. Sandage is a cultural historian at Carnegie Mellon University. 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", and was awarded the 34th Annual Thomas J. Wilson Prize, for the best "first book" accepted by Harvard University Press. In 2007 he was named as one of America's Top Young Historians by the History News Network.
Sandage was born in 1964 in Mason City, Iowa. He graduated from the University of Iowa (B.A., 1985) and from Rutgers University (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 National Archives, the National Park Service, an off-Broadway play, and film and radio documentaries. He is on the board of directors for the Abraham Lincoln Institute and is an expert on the Lincoln Memorial. His commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Industry Standard, Fast Company magazine, and other periodicals. He contributed an essay on "loserdom" to the 2004 Whitney Biennial 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".