Aaron Sachs

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

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

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."

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.

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