and American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy and the Rise of the American Constellation, and shared the following:
Page 99 describes a common but now largely forgotten way in which early Americans represented the American Union: America and its republican governmental structures as a political sun. The page demonstrates how, from the founding of the United States through the Civil War, Americans across the country repeatedly employed astronomical language to conceptualize the federal system in solar terms. Drawing on metaphors that had developed within a European monarchical culture of “sun kings,” this imagery was reborn and refitted in the United States to serve a democratic and republican political culture. Page 99 offers several examples of how early Americans described the federal government as a sun sustaining “a whole planetary system” of states, or as occupying “the same relation towards the States that the sun does towards the solar system—that is, the centre of gravitation.”Learn more about The Star-Spangled Republic at the University of Virginia Press website.
The page provides a vivid illustration of the solar image as a mode of explaining the federal system, one of the central forms of imagery that the book uncovers and unpacks. At the same time, it necessarily offers only a partial view of what the book terms political astronomy. Other major components of this conceptual language are not present on this page, including, for example, the constellational mode of understanding relations among the states. Page 99 thus does not capture the full argument, but it does serve as an effective entry point and a useful test case for grasping how astronomical metaphors structured early American political thought.
While page 99 conveys one of the most prominent manifestations of political astronomy, the notion of the Union, the Constitution, or the federal government as suns that hold the political nation together, it does not present the full range of the rich astronomical language in circulation. An alternative and sometimes overlapping and even competing vision was constellational rather than solar: an understanding of the United States as composed not of a single dominant sun but of many stars, equal and harmoniously arranged. This imagery was particularly well suited to expressing the federal nature of the Union and the equality of the states. It also informed the choice of stars to spangle the American flag, a decision that cannot be fully understood without reference to political astronomy. The book further recovers the meaning of other culturally prevalent but little- examined practices, such as calling celebrities “stars” or describing them as “meteors.” To grasp the full richness of this language, one must recover the experience of the dark, star-filled skies of pre-industrial societies, in which astronomical metaphors carried an immediacy and explanatory power that has since faded.
--Marshal Zeringue
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