Star Territory: Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America
Cameron B. Strang
Abstract
Star Territory explores the deeper history behind today's “third space age,” an era when American entrepreneurs—backed by the presumptive might of the U.S. Space Force—envision campaigns of exploration and colonization that seem eerily similar to the military-backed expansion of Anglo-American settlers in the 1800s (p. 1). This wonderful, concise book argues that U.S. “space power”—the use of outer space to project influence on Earth—did not emerge with the space race of the twentieth century but, rather, in the nineteenth century, “the first American space age” (pp. 2, 9). From the beginning, U.S. leaders sought to use the night sky to expand the nation's limits, commerce, and prestige: surveyors measured the heavens to claim and privatize land; military and commercial navigators found their way with state-sponsored ephemerides; and astronomical institutions, publications, and apparatus helped establish the new republic as a leader in global science. However, this “instrumental” approach to space as an exploitable resource for building wealth and empire always coexisted with alternative cosmologies (p. 153). African American poets, Cherokee savants, and Hawaiian royalty, among others, sometimes had a firm grasp on Euro-American astronomy while nevertheless insisting that “the universe [was] wondrous, mysterious, and sacred” (p. 165). For these stargazers, the cosmos offered ways to challenge oppression and dispossession. Queen Lili‘uokalani, for instance, published her own translation of a Hawaiian history of the creation of the universe that bolstered her hereditary claim to rule. By emphasizing the deep past and personal connections to a living universe, Lili‘uokalani's vision stood in stark contrast to the texts of U.S. space power, such as the U.S. Navy's American Ephemeris, that turned future celestial motions into military and commercial strength by reducing the firmament to mathematical abstraction. Situating America's earthlings within a universal context—rather than, say, an Atlantic or global one—shines a bright new light on efforts to advance and resist settler colonialism.