Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition

by Aaron Sachs

Overview

How a forgotten environmental tradition of the pre-Civil War era may prove powerfully useful to us now

Perhaps America's best environmental idea was not the national park but the garden cemetery, a use of space that quickly gained popularit

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300205886
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	03/25/2014
Series:	New Directions in Narrative History
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Aaron Sachs is associate professor of history and American studies, Cornell University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Prologue: Waterfalls and Cemeteries 1

1 Common Shade: Cultivating a Place for Death 19

2 The Middle Landscapes of New England Culture 62

3 Sleepy Hollow: A Young Nation in Repose 96

4 Stumps 137

5 Three Men of the Middle Border (Part One): Twilight 210

6 Three Men of the Middle Border (Part Two): American Homelessness 252

7 Atlantis: Arcadia and Armageddon 300

Epilogue: American Gothic; or, Death by Landscape 347

Acknowledgments 369

Notes 375

Illustration Credits 461

Index 465

What People are Saying About This

Robert D. Johnston

 "In Arcadian America, Aaron Sachs provides us with a genuine gift—indeed, with one of the most profound moral reflections ever penned by a historian. At times a loving paean to an unknown brother and an aging father, at times a pained reflection on the American way of death, this immensely moving work inspires us to reimagine the very boundaries of scholarly history. Deeply learned, Sachs ultimately transcends the intellectual to teach us how us how we might rediscover true hope in life—by grounding ourselves in our country’s most meaningful traditions of death.—Robert D. Johnston, author of The Radical Middle Class

Jonathan Holloway

A book of great ambition that is charting a changing consciousness on the American scene as articulated through classic literature, the built environment, war, art, and invention. . . . Powerful and evocative.—Jonathan Holloway, Yale University

Louis P. Masur

If you crossed Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden with Rebecca Solnit's Savage Dreams you would have a book as original and insightful as Arcadian America. This lyrical, eye-opening work will reshape how readers think about American culture and their place within it.—Louis P. Masur, author of Lincoln's Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union

Thomas Potter

In Arcadian America, Sachs weaves personal memoir throughout an extraordinary review of 19th-century urban planners, horticulturalists and writers who also sought the Arcadian experience. Rich in scholarship, yet very readable, it is stylistically reminiscent of Thoreau’s, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, as both draw on personal experience and historic materials.—Thomas Potter, Immediate Past-President, Thoreau Society

Jackson Lears

 "A fascinating exploration of a neglected environmental tradition, Arcadian America is a timely and important book.—Jackson Lears, author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920

Editorial Reviews

In Arcadian America, Sachs weaves personal memoir throughout an extraordinary review of 19th-century urban planners, horticulturalists and writers who also sought the Arcadian experience. Rich in scholarship, yet very readable, it is stylistically reminiscent of Thoreau’s, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, as both draw on personal experience and historic materials.”—Thomas Potter, Immediate Past-President, Thoreau Society

Thomas Potter

A book of great ambition that is charting a changing consciousness on the American scene as articulated through classic literature, the built environment, war, art, and invention. . . . Powerful and evocative.”—Jonathan Holloway, Yale University

Jonathan Holloway

"A fascinating exploration of a neglected environmental tradition, Arcadian America is a timely and important book."—Jackson Lears, author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920

Jackson Lears

If you crossed Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden with Rebecca Solnit's Savage Dreams you would have a book as original and insightful as Arcadian America. This lyrical, eye-opening work will reshape how readers think about American culture and their place within it.”—Louis P. Masur, author of Lincoln's Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union

Louis P. Masur

Won an Honorable Mention for the 2013 New England Book Festival given by the JM Northern Media Family of Festivals, in the General Non-Fiction Category.

JM Northern Media - New England Book Festival

"In Arcadian America, Aaron Sachs provides us with a genuine gift—indeed, with one of the most profound moral reflections ever penned by a historian. At times a loving paean to an unknown brother and an aging father, at times a pained reflection on the American way of death, this immensely moving work inspires us to reimagine the very boundaries of scholarly history. Deeply learned, Sachs ultimately transcends the intellectual to teach us how us how we might rediscover true hope in life—by grounding ourselves in our country’s most meaningful traditions of death."—Robert D. Johnston, author of The Radical Middle Class

Robert D. Johnston

Sachs’s experience with death is at the center of his vision of repose. It is what makes his book not only honest, but profound, important.”—The Common Vision

The Common Vision

The book is an appeal for environmental awareness, an appreciation of landscapes, an analysis of American writings about nature and design, a review of 19th century American history and, most strikingly, a personal memoir as its author deals with very basic matters of life and death.”—WSKG, “Off the Page

"Off the Page" WSKG

Any serious scholar of nineteenth-century American ideas will want to consider how Sachs has reconfigured and repositioned key elements in America’s narrative.”—Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

An impressive and ambitious experiment . . . . Sachs’s . . . intensely personal anecdotes testify directly to the Arcadian tradition’s value as a remedy for contemporary American ecosocial disorders . . . . An idiosyncratic and absorbing book that deserves to be read both for its innovative historiographical methods and its encyclopedic documentation of an original and compelling thesis.”—New England Quarterly

New England Quarterly

Sachs . . . pays attention to his peripheral vision to see beyond the obvious and catch the unexpected . . . . He achieves a rich and compelling emotional context by weaving the Arcadians’ stories together with his own . . . . Sachs’s accessible and engaging style . . . . retains scholarly credibility while drawing people into the discussion through emotional traction. More scholarly work should be written this way.”—Science

Science

"Ambitious. . . Sachs’s ruminative, associative style makes for interesting takes on dozens of writers, artists, and landscape architects."—Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker

The New Yorker - Nicholas Lemann

“From Yosemite to Yellowstone, the US national parks remain a historical touchstone for national environmentalism — but not the only one, argues Aaron Sachs. In a rich mix of history, cultural critique and memoir, Sachs reveals the cemetery as a half-forgotten nineteenth-century landscape tradition. These micro-Arcadias inspired close observation of nature in increasingly urbanized spaces, as well as contemplation of mortality and the sublime.”—Nature

Nature

Sachs (History and American Studies/Cornell Univ.; The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism, 2006) offers a deep-running meditation on life, death, and our place in and responsibility to our world. The author is an environmentalist of the romantic sort--not flighty, but with a great Whitmanesque inclusiveness, awareness of and engagement with his home places, and a honed appreciation of mortality. With considerable enthusiasm, Sachs pleads the case for the picturesque, so well met by the mid-19th-century cemetery, balancing openness, mystery, the local and the cosmic--a middle ground that brought the country to the city, a constant reminder of the need for green and, critically, a common ground when commons were fast disappearing in the wake of rampant capitalism. In the process of shaping his perspective, Sachs covers much literary and theoretical turf, examining Hawthorne's fraught association with the communitarian experiment at Brook Farm, Margaret Fuller's seemingly postmodern understanding of nature and culture, Thoreau's Arcadian hopefulness, the landscape works of Downing and Olmstead, Mumford's twining of urban and rural, and the repose of a silent battlefield and a rural burial ground. All the while, threaded through the research is Sachs' own story, in which the mortality continues to inform his humanity: "the presence of death gives Arcadian life new meaning. Without death paradise is static, lacking the possibility of creative transformation." An artful blend of reflection and call to action that steers around environmental fatalism toward "the exhilaration and melancholy that mark every life."

Kirkus Reviews