Review of: The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism

Aaron Sachs’s impressive study of Alexander von Humboldt’s influence on nineteenth-century American explorer-scientists reexamines terrain long familiar to historians of science and of exploration. It also advances a post-postcolonial perspective on Humboldt’s influence in the United States that is ultimately an argument about the history of environmental thought and activism in America in general