Star Territory

The cosmic aspirations of present-day United States nationalists are not recent developments. Efforts to control and exploit the universe have deep roots in the nineteenth century. From John Adams to military explorer John C. Frâemont to astronomer Maria Mitchell, officials and agents of the United States participated in a large-scale effort to map the new nation onto cosmic space, what Henry David Thoreau referred to as star territory." Many nineteenth-century dissenters against an emerging regime of U.S. space power saw in the tools of astronomy, land surveying, and navigation a means of producing alternatives to that regime"--