Nature and Supernature in Early American Skies

• In Event: History After Dark: Histories of Nighttime Environments and Cultures

Abstract

As late as the 1830s, most Americans lived in profoundly three-dimensional worlds. Relevant space extended upwards into the heavens. Much of what mattered on earth came from the sky: weather originated above; fates were decided there; perfect justice was available there. Distractions for the eyes and mind were few, light pollution was nearly non-existent, and people spent most of their waking hours outdoors. Stargazing was a popular and populist pursuit, not least because the heavens were open to all, regardless of earthly station. The “celestial commons” had no human masters. It resisted capture by lowly clergy or philosophers. It belittled despots and offered everyone access to “higher” truths.

Historians tend to imagine the early republic’s overflowing heavenly rhetoric as just that—rhetoric— and the sky as a blank canvas onto which religious and scientific authorities projected their ideas for the passive consumption of the masses. This view reflects the perspective of the most articulate. Thousands of forgotten laypeople left behind heavenly visions, however—often starkly literal visions that struck elites as vulgar. These visions flip the script in the history of cosmology. They demonstrate that heavenly invocations were not mere rhetoric but rather gave shape and power to higher ideas, connecting physics to metaphysics, and that the sky was not a blank canvas, but an extra-human otherworld that allowed earthly society’s outcasts to conquer fate and own transcendent things.

Author

• Trent MacNamara, Texas A&M University