Honor Sachs
- Associate Professor
- EARLY AMERICA
Address
Hellems W116
Office Hours
Fall 2026 W 11:00 AM-1:00 PM / Also by appointment
Professor Sachs specializes in the history of early America, with particular focus on slavery, gender, and law.
Professor Sachs teaches courses on early America broadly, with particular focus on the revolutionary and founding eras, histories of race and slavery, legal and constitutional history, and histories of family, genealogy, and memory. Some of the courses she offers include: "American History to 1865" "The Revolutionary War & the Making of the American Republic, 1775-1801," and "U.S. History and Genealogy."
Honor Sachs received her B.A. from Dartmouth College and her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her first book, Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier (Yale University Press, 2015) received the Armitage-Jameson Prize from the Coalition for Western Women’s History and the Kentucky Book Prize. Her new book, “The Book of Judith: A Story of Family, Law, and Indigenous Ancestry in Slavery and Freedom,” documents the genealogy of an enslaved Virginia family that claimed freedom through Indigenous descent over multiple generations. Her research has been supported by multiple organizations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Huntington Library.
Professor Sachs is accepting both M.A. and Ph.D. students.
She is looking forward to working with graduate students interested in colonial and early American history, particularly those with interests in questions of race and slavery, gender and sexuality, law and legality, or public history and memory.