Acknowledgments

Sachs, Aaron

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Acknowledgments

Aaron Sachs

Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition

From the start, I have thought of this book project as being dedicated to Christine Evans, who graciously enfolded it into the life we have been building together, even when that entailed significant sacrifices on her part. She is more skilled than I at the art of acknowledgment, in all senses. But I at least want to try to express my daily sense of gratitude for...

Author

Aaron Sachs

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23879

Acknowledgments

From the start, I have thought of this book project as being dedicated to Christine Evans, who graciously enfolded it into the life we have been building together, even when that entailed significant sacrifices on her part. She is more skilled than I at the art of acknowledgment, in all senses. But I at least want to try to express my daily sense of gratitude for who she is and all she does. Most of what I know about pausing, and resisting despair, and settling down, I have learned from her. Without question, the best thing about my life is that I am living it in her close company.

My next book will be for our children, Sam, Abe, and Oscar. Meanwhile, not much could be better than seeing the excitement on their faces as they follow mouse tracks in the snow, or pick mulberries in the cemetery, or catch glimpses of woodpeckers. I also learned a lot about rhythm and sound by reading books out loud to them, written by such linguistic masters as Dr. Seuss, William Steig, Robert McCloskey, Margaret Wise Brown, Sandra Boynton, and Lauren Child.

My last book was for my parents, Murray and Miriam Sachs, and I feel blessed to have enjoyed their continuing support through the writing of this one. Old age closes certain doors, yet also—I have been overjoyed to discover—provides unexpected opportunities for empathy, closeness, connection.

My sister Debbie Sachs Gabor has continued to be a source of many different kinds of support. And I am honored that she would trust me to write about our family and its history in so public a way. My departed grandparents, Sheldon and Amy Blank, are at the heart of this book; I think about them every day—when I pass Grandaddy’s canoe paddle in the dining room, when I read poems, when I stop to listen to the birds. Grandma’s two-volume Family Chronicle was another key source of inspiration. And thanks, also, to my cousins.

I could not have attempted this project, or even imagined it, without the help and caring of certain teachers. John Demos was the professor whom my cousin Stuart recommended to me when I went to graduate school, and Stuart could not have been more right about how John and I would get along. John’s solid, sensitive support has been invaluable to me, and I feel extraordinarily lucky to be collaborating with him on the series in which this book is being published. A mutual friend, Robert Johnston, remains a model of integrity, passion, and thoughtfulness. Robert’s incredibly detailed comments and hard questions, scribbled in the margins of my manuscript, were absolutely essential to my revisions; his relentless and generous alertness makes him an ideal reader. I’m fortunate to be able to depend on him. And Lou Masur has been there for me, like a trusted bench coach, for more than twenty years now: “Do your work and I shall know you.” It was Lou who first helped me to see the literary possibilities of history, and the life-embracing potential of pondering death. He also keeps me laughing, in part by reminding me that denial can be really fun.

My closest writing colleague over the last few years has been Amy Reading, whose last name is pronounced exactly the way it should be. I am continually amazed at the fullness of her engagement with texts, at the generosity and enthusiasm with which she commits herself as a critic, at the acuity of her comments.

About five years ago, Amy and I started a writing group together, and that quickly became one of my main Ithaca anchors. I’ve learned a huge amount from Geno Tournour’s memoirs, Jennifer Wilder’s fiction, and Rachel Dickinson’s science and travel writing. Geno, Jennifer, and Rachel have all become great friends, and I’m thankful for their support as well as their always just criticism. Alas, they know exactly how prolix I can be. Thanks, also, to former members Lizabeth Cain, Michael Sharp, and A. K. Summers.

At Cornell, I have been exceedingly lucky to work with a number of graduate students who have become both friends and critics, especially in the friendly confines of the working group known as HAW! (or Historians Are Writers!—the exclamation point is part of the name, as in Earth First!) I will always be grateful to Daegan Miller for many things, but especially for founding HAW! And I expect to be trading manuscripts with him for the next forty years or so. Thanks also to Laura Martin and Amy Kohout for establishing the Nature Reading Discussion Community (NRDC), which bolstered my sense of intellectual community in important ways; both Laura and Amy embody creativity and care. Heather Furnas’s sensitivity and consideration saved me from a couple of serious missteps. Josi Ward continually expanded my understanding of landscape. And Sarah Ensor blew me away with her quiet but cogent readings of various kinds of relationships. Daegan, Laura, Amy, Heather, Josi, and Sarah all improved not only my arguments but also my phrasing, pacing, and tone. Every day, they make me grateful that I have this job.

Nobody believes you when you say that you learned more from a given student than she learned from you, but I will stand by that assertion in the case of Rebecca Macmillan. In her creative and nuanced essays and our long discussions about gender categories, modernity, trauma, and everything else, she always pushed my thinking in brand-new directions. And her kindness and thoughtfulness remain an inspiration. Living in Ithaca for a while after she graduated, she wound up doing some research for this book and becoming my kids’ favorite babysitter. She’s also a phenomenal reader, and her impeccable ear for language has made a huge difference in my prose.

One last reader: it was my good fortune a couple of years ago to discover that Jonathan Holloway was engaged in a similar experiment with history and memoir, and his sympathetic but rigorous suggestions were an unexpected boon, as was the deepening of our friendship.

I’m also grateful to the many people and institutions who supported my research, long before I was able to start writing. Both Conrad Wright and Paul Erickson provided encouragement and resources at a very early stage, through their respective organizations, the Massachusetts Historical Society and the American Antiquarian Society. Meg Winslow welcomed me at the Mount Auburn archives. The Cornell History Department gave me a research account and also granted me tenure. Cornell’s Society for the Humanities—thanks especially to Brett de Bary and Tim Murray—allowed me to spend a year immersed in rich interdisciplinary conversations (especially with Monique Allewaert, Sam Baker, Verena Conley, Jenny Gaynor, and Christine Marran) and gave me an extraordinary opportunity to push myself as a teacher.

It was also a pleasure to do archival work at the Library of Congress (especially the Manuscripts Division), the New York Public Library, the Huntington Library, the Special Collections at the University of Southern California, Cornell’s Kroch Library, and the Minnesota Historical Society. Sincere thanks to the many archivists and other staff members who helped me all along the way, and also to the folks I corresponded with at the Mead Art Museum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Joslyn Art Museum, the New-York Historical Society, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Art Resource, A. J. Kollar Fine Paintings, the Denver Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art.

Countless colleagues at Cornell—faculty, staff, and students—offered friendship, advice, knowledge, logistical assistance, book recommendations, letters of support, and much more. I’m especially indebted to Anurag Agrawal, Lauren Chambliss, Abby Cohn, Stephanie Contino, Duane Corpis, Ray Craib, Chris Davis, Harry DiFrancesco, Frank DiSalvo, Barb Donnell, Maggie Edwards, Paula Euvrard, Sarah Fitzpatrick, Jeremy Foster, Jessica George, Melissa Gniadek, Harry Greene, Mike Gründler, Andrea Hammer, Drew Harvell, TJ Hinrichs, Mike Hoffman, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Carol Kammen, Michael Kammen, Virginia Kennedy, Cliff Kraft, Katie Kristof, Peter Lavelle, Dan Magaziner, Lena Masur, Larry Moore, Paul Nadasdy, Sara Pritchard, Katie Proctor, Shirley Samuels, Elizabeth Sanders, Paul Sawyer, Helene Schember, Phoebe Sengers, Greg Tremblay, Claudia Verhoeven, Ben Wang, Zellman Warhaft, and Dave Wolfe. Special thanks to Eric Cheyfitz for spurring me to think harder about kinship, to Steve Collicelli for early research assistance, and to Jake Seligman for the gentle encouragement to be more experimental in my writing.

Several colleagues and organizations invited me to offer up pieces of this book while they were still in development, and I’m grateful not only for the invitations but for all the thoughtful and challenging responses I got to my work. Thanks especially to Chandra Manning and Adam Rothman of the Georgetown 19th-Century U.S. History Workshop; Henry Cowles of the Princeton Modern America Workshop; the incomparable Steve Berry and Tom Okie at the University of Georgia; and Johnny Faragher and Christine DeLucia at Yale University. And I’m also grateful to all the people who attended my talks and participated in the discussions. Audience members were also a great help to me at sessions of the World Congress on Environmental History and the annual meetings of the American Society for Environmental History, the American Studies Association, and the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.

Many other scholars and friends offered both direct and indirect assistance with this project. I never would have been able to track down a couple of the paintings that appear in this book without the amazing Betsy Broun. And thanks to Amy Kohout for mentioning that I really had to check out the Hall of Wonders exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum when I was in Washington: that visit led me to Betsy. (Additional thanks to the private collectors who allowed me to use their paintings but who wished to remain anonymous.) Larry Buell got me started in the environmental humanities, more than twenty years ago, and just a few days ago he gave me a crucial Thoreau reference. Johnny Faragher, my dissertation director, continues to be a wonderful intellectual influence: he followed his first book, about western migrants, with a book about people who settled down—“stickers,” he called them, in his marvelous Sugar Creek—and I have followed a very similar trajectory in writing first about explorers of frontiers and then about dwellers in middle landscapes. Sandy Zipp always kept his wit about him, and made sure I was up to scratch in urban history. I’m also grateful to editor Mark Cioc and two anonymous reviewers for the journal Environmental History, which published some of my early work on Mount Auburn. Martha Hodes suggested that I pick up Daniel Mendelsohn’s book The Lost, and Ann Fabian told me to find Robert Harrison’s The Dominion of the Dead; both of those reading experiences had a major impact on my writing and thinking.

Other key colleagues include Ben Cohen, Jim Goodman, Karl Jacoby, Peter Mancall, Kathy Morse, Megan Nelson, Kristen Neuschel, Michael Robinson, Paul Sabin, Doug Sackman, Marni Sandweiss, Sam Truett, Laura Walls, and Rob Young. Their support has meant a great deal to me.

And I’ve long depended on such friends as Adam Arenson, Lila Corwin Berman, Lou Greenberg, Ari Handel, Brian Herrera, Tom Iurino, Kip Kosek, Mark Krasovic, Adriane Lentz-Smith, Roger Levine, Ben Liebman, Mary Lui, Christian McMillen, Bob Morrissey, Barry Muchnick, Devah Pager, Vicki Shepard, Catherine Whalen, Roxanne Willis, and many others. Midori Evans first mentioned the Brook Farm site to me, and thus utterly transformed this project. Stephanie Satz Alden suggested that I might want to take a look at the little hill adjacent to the new Guthrie Theater, in downtown Minneapolis, on the shore of the Mississippi—and, indeed, Gold Medal Park was a revelation.

In Ithaca, I remain grateful to the Beer and History gang: Derek Chang, Jeff Cowie, Michael Smith, Michael Trotti, and Rob Vanderlan. All five of them read the first 100 to 150 pages of this book and provided excellent criticisms; they also helped me exercise my wrist at the Chapter House and the Bowl-O-Drome. (And, speaking of beer: if you ever get the chance, try an Arcadia Ale.) Thanks also to Brian Hall, Mary Lauppe, Eric Miller, Bob Proehl, Sarah Rubenstein-Gillis, Gary Weissbrot, and John Young.

Besides the authors discussed explicitly in these pages, a number of others provided directly relevant inspiration over the last few years. Greg Dening (Beach Crossings), Amitav Ghosh (In an Antique Land), Saadiya Hartman (Lose Your Mother), and Bill McFeely (Sapelo’s People) all helped me understand the possibilities of combining scholarship with memoir. I often reread works by Lewis Hyde, W. G. Sebald, and Yi-Fu Tuan. Rebecca Solnit continues to dazzle with her prose: we often seem to be thinking along parallel tracks, but she’s always several steps ahead of me. And though I’ve never met Robert Pogue Harrison, his ideas have been absolutely essential to my outlook: together with The Dominion of the Dead, his books Forests and Gardens have combined to form something like a Holy Trilogy for me.

Zoe Pagnamenta has continued to be an effective and thoughtful agent. Her comments on Chapter 2, and especially her encouragement to do more with the first person, were exactly what I needed. Thanks also to Gavin Lewis for some extremely sensitive copyediting. At Yale University Press, Chris Rogers has been staunchly supportive and understanding; this book may not have made it without him, and I will always be grateful for his help. Christina Tucker has been a paragon of friendly competence, as has Margaret Otzel. And many thanks, as well, to the press’s two anonymous reviewers, who challenged me in a number of useful and constructive ways.

You can’t be an academic for long without recognizing your dependence on the generosity of people whose identities you may never know. Many anonymous students have written letters of support on my behalf; many anonymous professors have done the same; and many anonymous committees have read my work with care and open minds. They have made a huge difference in my life, and I’m grateful. So, one last acknowledgment: to all those thinkers out there committed to cultivating a sense of commonality.

Aaron Sachs
February 2012
Ithaca, NY
Five minutes from the cemetery

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