The Humboldt Current: A European explorer and his American disciples - Hardcover

Through the lives of Americans who followed or echoed Humboldt, this fascinating, insightful book gives us a brilliant new account of U.S. geography and ecology, exploration and eccentricity. (Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Prince of Asturias Professor at Tufts University, and Professorial Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London)

...a dazzling debut performance by a young scholar-writer of extraordinary gifts. The book itself is a gift―carefully researched, and beautifully expressed, and deeply humane, understanding. The current of Humboldt's influence was vast indeed; it embraced many cultural luminaries of the 19th century, and still reaches out toward all of us today. This is one of those rare works in which historical learning makes a lasting difference on our way of seeing both past and present worlds. (John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor of History, Yale University)

In this groundbreaking book, Aaron Sachs plucks from relative obscurity the 19th-century Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt and demonstrates his profound, lasting influence on many aspects of American culture, including literature, art, science, and environmentalism. (David S. Reynolds, Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the City University of New York)

Alexander von Humboldt - the last "universal man," according to historian Hugh Trevor-Roper - was one of my heroes, as were the explorer-scientists of the American West, and as were their contemporaries, poets and writers such as Whitman and Thoreau, precursors of cosmic consciousness and American environmentalism. But it never occurred to me to bring them all together in one all-encompassing, yet detailed, narrative. That is left to Aaron Sachs in a work of striking originality, meticulous scholarship, and deep humanist sympathy. (Yi-Fu Tuan, Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Brilliant, imaginative, and bold. Like the great Humboldt, Sachs has taken us to new worlds, given us new meanings. (Donald Worster, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas)

While everyone has heard of the 'Humboldt Current', few know anything of the man after whom it was named. Yet Alexander von Humboldt was a towering figure of his time - scientist, explorer, and polymath, imbued with Enlightenment ideas - and he left a profound impact on the intellectual life of 19th century America. Aaron Sachs' colourful intellectual history rescues Humboldt from obscurity, and reveals the impact of a single European on both American thought and the environmental movement.

Aaron Sachs traces Humboldt's legacy by focusing not only on the man himself but on the lives of other remarkable individuals who took their lead from him - explorers of the American mid-West, alienated Romantics, seminal American writers and artists, who together laid the groundwork for the great ecological tradition in 19th century America.