Sarah Igo's 'The Known Citizen' traces American debates over privacy from the nineteenth century to the present, showing how arguments about what could and should be known about individuals have shaped national identity. Igo, a historian at Vanderbilt, examines episodes from the introduction of the census and social surveys through wiretapping controversies to contemporary data mining, demonstrating that anxieties about being known are not new but take different forms in different technological and political contexts. The book shows how Americans have simultaneously demanded privacy and craved recognition, wanting both to be left alone and to be seen and counted. Igo examines how concepts of privacy have been contested along lines of race, class, and gender, with surveillance falling unequally on different populations while privacy rights were often framed around white middle-class norms. She traces how legal and political frameworks developed to mediate between the state's desire for knowledge and citizens' claims to autonomy. Readers will come away understanding contemporary privacy debates as the latest chapter in a long American conversation rather than an unprecedented crisis created by new technology.