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A Humorous and Compassionate Bridge Builder

Professor David Sacks [history 1986鈥�2015]

David Harris Sacks, the late Richard F. Scholz Professor of History and Humanities, is photographed in the Cambridge University Library Tea Room by Brian Cowan 鈥�92, who generously gave his permission for Reed Magazine to use this photo.

June 16, 2026

David Harris Sacks once described Richard Hakluyt as “my friend” who’d been educated at Oxford and later in life became divinely inspired to learn about the New World and maps. Catherine Hinchliff ’10, then a student in Sacks’s English Renaissance class, sat up in her chair to listen more closely. 

“Odd, I thought, but I guess within the realm of possibility that David would have a friend who was really interested in early modern geography,” Catherine says. “It was only when David discussed Hakluyt’s death in 1616 that I realized…David was speaking affectionately about his research subject.”

Sacks’s quirky and passionate approach to teaching early modern history endeared him to students and the broader Reed community. Just as Sacks brought historical characters like Hakluyt vividly into present-day classrooms for his students, the Reed community will continue its close friendship with Sacks following his death at the age of 83.

Reedies who attended college during the height of boy-band culture remember how Sacks provided all of his students with eight-by-11-inch portraits of Thomas Hobbes, suitable for posting on dorm-room walls. Although many of his students had their tongues firmly planted in cheeks while hanging the Hobbesian pin-ups, Sacks's ruse was successful in generating interest about the origins of English social contracts. Another student reported leaving Sacks's office after a thesis meeting in tears, not for any of the reasons you might think, but rather because she was laughing wildly at a joke he told about chickens.

Sacks's humor was an integral part of his success, both in academia and in modeling an expansive view of what’s possible, says Professor Michael Breen [history 2000-present]. One of Sacks's most popular lectures looked at the 16th-century Utopia as an ongoing joke, demonstrating to students how text suffused with what he called Renaissance humanist humor can still resonate today. “David was just [as] at home with Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Seinfeld, Monty Python, and Mel Brooks’ 2,000-year-old man as he was with the economy of early modern Bristol,” Breen says.

Sacks's positive influence on students wasn’t bound by the walls of his classroom or his retirement date. While on sabbaticals, Sacks generously met with students to discuss books they had read and find potential directions for their work. As an emeritus, he continued to teach classes, advise thesis students, and help launch a wide variety of careers. 

Several of Sacks's students stayed in academia, becoming history professors in their own right after thesising with Sacks and going on to earn doctorate degrees. But Sacks was equally enthusiastic about supporting his students who pursued careers in journalism, public relations, and nonprofit development and consulting. He saw how a strong background in historical inquiry could aid all types of endeavors. 

Sacks was concerned with helping his students grow into themselves, not into his protégés. Sandeep Kaushik ’89, who has worked on multiple successful political campaigns in the Northwest, has fond memories of his time under Sacks's tutelage, saying Sacks profoundly changed the course of his life. “Even though academia turned out to be the wrong path for me, I learned so much that still shapes how I see the world from the track he put me on,” Sandeep says.

Modest and generous, Sacks often praised his students and his wife of 54 years, Eleanor, a decorated and award-winning academic. Until her death in 2025, she wrote about the history of the development of community foundations in the 19th century, while working for nonprofit foundations at the local, national and international levels.

Sacks demonstrated his interdisciplinary range by authoring over 25 articles and book chapters, many in leading journals such as Past & Present and Modern Language Quarterly. He knew that the pursuit of history is necessarily framed through each time period’s bias and each historical author’s preferences. Through co-editing the 1997 Historical Imagination compendium, he contributed to a growing recognition that historical writing is another form of “representation” that’s therefore related to literary and artistic pursuits. 

Now following in Sacks's footsteps as a history professor, Brian Cowan ’92 noted how Sacks's role as a mainstay in the humanities teaching curriculum had an impact on Sacks's urban history masterpiece, The Widening Gate. Published in 1991, the book is replete with erudite references to early modern poetry, drama, and political philosophy, along with the usual archival references to city records and state papers that one might expect from traditional historians. It was a pioneering work in the field of Atlantic history and was named the best pre-1800 history by the North American Conference on British Studies. Sacks's scholarship broke ground by combining social and economic history with intellectual history. 

Over the years, Sacks taught courses on a wide range of topics that crossed geographical, chronological, and thematic boundaries. “When I was a student at Reed, I didn’t think that this was all that unusual, as I had become accustomed to making such connections in the humanities curriculum and through immersion in the social science courses that are required of Reed history majors,” Brian says.

Sacks read all of his students’ writing with the same spirit in which he examined the Atlantic world. He had strong opinions, Catherine noted, but gave students the tools to develop their own opinions before divulging his own. “Make sure you're always framing the question as a problem that you can unfold in a compelling way,” Sacks told Isaiah Silvers '19 after listening to the Reedie’s PhD dissertation proposal at a history conference in Denver. 

Born on December 14, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, Sacks attended New York City public schools, including Erasmus Hall High School—which uniquely taught classical Greek, classical Latin, and ancient Hebrew. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1963 from Brooklyn College, which at the time offered free tuition to all students.

At the college, Professor Raymond De Roover was inspirational for Sacks, both because of his teaching style and because he discovered the secret account books of the Medici Bank. “If you were willing to put in the work to puzzle out what [Raymond] was trying to tell you, there wasn’t anyone in the world who could tell you more. I’ve always told that to students, that half of what teaching is about is what you’re willing to do to make sense out of a teacher,” Sacks said in a 2015 oral history.

By the end of his career, Sacks received National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, a National Humanities Center fellowship, and numerous other research fellowships (including a multi-year research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada). After Brooklyn College, Sacks received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship that covered the cost of tuition and other expenses at Harvard University, where he studied with the acclaimed Elizabethan historian Wallace McCaffrey ’42.

Praising his friend and mentor, Sacks discussed Wallace’s “abiding curiosity about what had happened in the past; a relentless instinct for digging into the surviving evidence to get to the bottom of things; a devotion to precision and accuracy in regard to the facts; judiciousness and sound judgment in interpreting what he had found; an astute critical eye always exercised in a spirit of generosity; an ‘awesome’ and awe-inspiring capacity to tell a story in a vivid and lucid way; and perhaps—above all—a breadth of historical interests and a passion for knowledge about the past.” Those qualities also applied to Sacks, who was successful in establishing a Reed lecture series dedicated to his mentor.

Wallace was not Sacks's only early connection to Reed. Sacks taught in Harvard’s history and literature program, whose basic structure—with a junior qualifying exam, yearlong senior thesis, and thesis oral—provided Reed’s first president, William Trufant Foster [1910-19], with the template for the college’s curriculum. Sacks said that his experience at Harvard meant that he was already immersed in a Reed-style “ethos of the quest,” and in the pursuit of the reciprocal relationship between scholarship and learning.

That relationship was put into practice when Professors Ray Kierstead [history 1978–2000] and Richard Wightman Fox [history 1981–90] recruited Sacks to help challenge the history department to expand its vision and engage the wider world of historical scholarship. Sacks's persistent efforts, along with those of Professor Jacqueline Dirks ’82 [history and humanities 1991-present], helped secure the history department with a tenure-track professor position focusing on U.S. and environmental history. Sacks also fought tirelessly for the college to recruit and hire more female professors.

Sacks's former students recall how his courses’ massive reading assignments helped them detect patterns in the texts they examined. Several alumni have described Sacks as one of the most challenging and best professors with whom they studied. “There was almost no higher praise as a history major at Reed than to elicit a half-smile from David by correctly identifying the central idea he was obliquely leading you towards,” says Scott Foreman-Murray '06. “That smile, perhaps accompanied by a few small nods, was especially well-earned if you could meaningfully answer one of his favorite questions: 'So what?'”

Sacks was interred privately next to his wife at the , at an event led by his sister-in-law, Margaret Woodward. He is survived by his brother, , professor emeritus of environmental studies, film studies, and English at the Colorado School of Mines. 

A book-in-progress by Sacks focuses on the careers and writing of Richard Hakluyt and Thomas Harriot, exploring the connections between theological and religious conflict and the development of the modern “sciences” in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Its working title is The Certain and Full Discovery of the World, and it’s expected to be published posthumously, so David Sacks will get the last laugh. —Raymond Rendleman '06

Appeared in Reed magazine: Fall 2026