For an excerpt, see Lapham’s Quarterly.

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In Star Territory: Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America, I argue that the United States has been colonizing space since 1789. Through the print production of almanacs, maps, star charts, and scientific treatises, the project of rationalizing the cosmos has enabled the expansion of US territory and the domination of indigenous, enslaved, and migrant peoples. Yet this is only part of the story. From black publishers to Cherokee legislators to Hawaiian resistance leaders, political actors across the nineteenth century printed and circulated alternative means of understanding space and time. Star Territory suggests that the deep origins of the US state’s cosmic instrumentalism, from geospatial navigation to the weaponization of space itself, can be found in the nineteenth century, and that efforts to rationalize space and time have flattened difference, erased alternative epistemologies, and enabled the fallacies of universality and exceptionalism. But it also suggests that there are other histories that might point our way to a more complex, pluralist future.