Aaron Sachs (historian)
Encyclopedia
Life
He graduated from Harvard UniversityHarvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, and from Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, with a Ph.D. in 2004.
He teaches at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
.
Works
- "Special Topics in Calamity History", Reviews in American History, Volume 35, Number 3, September 2007, pp. 453–463 (reprint Penguin 2007)
Reviews
Sachs has taken the nineteenth century historian Francis ParkmanFrancis ParkmanFrancis Parkman was an American historian, best known as author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his monumental seven-volume France and England in North America. These works are still valued as history and especially as literature, although the biases of his...
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.
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 MuirJohn MuirJohn Muir was a Scottish-born American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, have been read by millions...
. For all his achievements, Sachs argues, Muir in his later, influential years came to believe that man had no permanent place in nature.
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.”