Aaron Sachs (historian)

Aaron Sachs (born 1969) is a historian and Cornell University professor who primarily studies American environmental and cultural history.

Life

He graduated from Harvard University in 1992 with a B.A. in history and literature, and from Yale University, with a Ph.D. in American Studies, in 2004.

He teaches at Cornell University[1] in Ithaca, NY.

Awards

Works
  • Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition (Yale U. Press, January 2013)
  • "Special Topics in Calamity History", Reviews in American History, Volume 35, Number 3, September 2007, pp. 453–463
  • The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism. Viking. 2006. ISBN 978-0-14-311192-4. (reprint Penguin 2007)

Reviews

Sachs has taken the nineteenth century historian Francis Parkman at his word when Parkman wrote that writing history should rely "less on books than on such personal experiences as should, in some sense, identify [the historian] with his theme." Sachs interjects himself often in this book, weaving between the history and his own physical and intellectual wanderings. He sees himself as a Humboldtian explorer and in this book he invites us to come join him on the journey.[2]

This ambitious book overreaches at times, and it can be disjointed, as the author tries to trace a set of loosely defined ideas through many different intellectual currents. But the portraits of these early environmentalists are compelling, particularly the surprising depiction of John Muir. For all his achievements, Sachs argues, Muir in his later, influential years came to believe that man had no permanent place in nature.[3]

The Humboldt Current is not lacking in resonant voices. Sachs's subjects are strong, and he describes them in extensive detail. The difficulty is that there are perhaps too many subjects and too much detail — digressing at length from Humboldt. As interesting as his followers were, their stories beg for a fuller portrait of the extraordinary figure who inspired them. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of him, he was "one of those wonders of the world [...] who appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind."[4]

Sachs has interjected his personal political viewpoint with literary commentary. Sachs writes in the Thoreau Society Bulletin, "Jews have created an entire culture based on laughing at dire situations. Granted, it feels a lot less innocent to invoke this historical oppression, now that the Jewish State has itself become oppressive." Thoreau Society Bulletin, (5) A Different Kind of Wildness: Environmental Humor and Cultural Resilience. Number 104, Winter 2019

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References
  1. http://www.arts.cornell.edu/history/faculty-department-sachs.php
  2. "Review: The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism", OSU, (June Review, 2007)
  3. "The Dawn of Ecology", Audubon Magazine, Kathleen McGowan, November 2006 Archived September 15, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  4. Candice Millard (August 13, 2006). "Thinking Globally". The New York Times.

5. Thoreau Society Bulletin, A Different Kind of Wildness: Environmental Humor and Cultural Resilience. Number 104, Winter 2019.


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