The Quarto

THE HEAVENS

No. 61 (Spring/Summer 2025)

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Collection Encounters: Making Sense of the Skies

Maggie Vanderford

Librarian for Instruction and Engagement

Over the past two-and-a-half years the Clements Library has been fortunate enough to welcome several visiting research fellows whose projects in some way or another involved early Americans’ relationship with the skies. As you will see, these three scholars–Trent MacNamara, Carrie Tirado Bramen, and Jeremy McLaughlin–bring perspectives from a range of disciplines to bear on their questions about what people were looking for when they looked up. Clements Librarian for Instruction and Engagement Maggie Vanderford reached out to them to ask questions about their projects and what they learned at the Clements about the heavens. Their answers are below.
Trent MacNamara headshot.

MacNamara

Carrie Tirado Bramen headshot.

Bramen

Jeremy McLaughlin headshot.

McLaughlin

Who are you? Please share a few sentences about your current position (and relevant academic background), as well as a bit more information about when you visited the Clements Library as a research fellow.

Trent: I’m an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University. I received my Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 2015. I spent a month at the Clements in summer 2022 as a Mary G. Stange Short-Term Fellow.

Carrie: I am a professor of English at the University at Buffalo and I write cultural and intellectual histories about the American 19th century. My last book was American Niceness: A Cultural History (Cambridge, Mass., 2017). I spent a week at the Clements in October 2022 on a Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship.
Jeremy: I am a Ph.D. candidate in the iSchool (School of Information) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a James E. Laramy Fellow in American Visual Culture, I completed part of my fellowship in November 2024 and will be returning to Clements in Spring 2025.
Describe the project for which you conducted research at the Clements. How did you come to this project? Where did your inspiration come from, and what drives your interest in historical relationships to the skies/heavens?

Trent: I’m writing a history of ordinary Americans’ ideas about the cosmos. My basic questions are: How have non-intellectuals understood the content and meaning of the heavens? How have their understandings changed since circa 1800? How have big spaces shaped big ideas? I think we often hear casual observations about our impersonal, mechanical, ultra-vast universe. We also encounter the view, very common in the story of the Scientific Revolution, that in earlier centuries people assumed a more personal, moral, human-scaled cosmos. I see that narrative as basically correct. But it’s very abstract. It’s told in a sweeping, grand-gesture type of way. I like giving it specific life in time and space. So I write about loggers’ camps in Vermont, or spectrocopes, or funeral sermons about where specifically we go when we die. I like the connection between the looming sky, a plainly visible object, and existential questions. I think the physics enriches the metaphysics and vice versa.

Carrie: I have always enjoyed astrology as a hobby, and I decided to combine my love of the 19th-century archive with the stars for my current book project, a cultural history of astrology in the American 19th century. Thanks to my time at the Clements and elsewhere, I have discovered a prophetic almanac tradition, imported from Britain but popular in the U.S. There were also astrological subcultures among officers in the military, physicians, Transcendentalists, and Freemasons.

For most of the 19th century, the emphasis was on planetary relations or aspects, combined with timing techniques. By the late 19th century, there was the “psychological turn” and the rise of what we refer to as modern astrology. Sun Sign astrology appears in the early 20th century, led in part by American women such as Katherine Brown. This type of astrology is the most popular form, epitomized in the question: What’s your sign? The answer is based on the placement of the sun at the time of your birth, and it paved the way for horoscope columns in newspapers by the 1930s.

Jeremy: My dissertation examines the typography, visual contents, and paratextual elements of 17th-century British North American almanacs. I was drawn to these fascinating artifacts because of their paradoxical nature: simultaneously mundane and ephemeral, yet vital to the scientific, social, and intellectual fabric of daily life — especially given the “rough-and-ready” typography and sparse illustrations of early colonial printing. The almanac was among the first items printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1639. Yet, as Samuel Briggs observed in 1887, studying American almanacs often feels like an exercise in apology — they are both ridiculed and revered, dismissed as trivial but universally read and valued. Rather than apologizing for these “lowly” artifacts, my goal is to elevate 17th-century American almanacs. Beyond their annual content, they represent cultural astronomy and embedded materialism, shaped by the labor of authors, printers, and readers alike. I aim to show that 17th-century almanacs deserve more credit for their typographical and scientific contributions to colonial intellectual history.
Writing in Thomas Davenport's memoir with an illustration of the heavenly city of New Jerusalem, pictured as concentric circles.
Thomas Davenport penned his memoir in or after 1863, including his small depiction of the heavenly city of New Jerusalem, pictured as concentric circles. Davenport was predeceased by his three children and his wife, perhaps explaining his intense interest in an afterlife in the sky.
What sources at the Clements were of most use to your project? Did you walk away with any major discoveries or realizations that shaped the course of your work?
Trent: The best source I found at the Clements, and one of the two or three best in the thousands of primary sources I use in my book, is the handwritten, unpublished “Memoir of Thomas Davenport” (ca. 1865). Born in 1788, raised in the mountains of western Massachusetts, Davenport ended up as a hardscrabble farmer and woodcutter in the Adirondacks. Beginning in 1823, he had heavenly visions. “You have said it was a vain thing to serve the Lord, and that it was useless to pray,” God told Davenport, “for . . . it was more than ninety five million miles to heaven and how could you get faith from heaven to ask for the things you need.” But the next morning as Davenport worked in the woodlot, God opened a window in the sky and allowed him to see the heavenly city, 1,500 miles in diameter. Davenport drew a small diagram. After that time, he was able to corral his doubts, if not vanquish them completely. It’s hard to do Davenport justice in a short space, but he’s a rich character. I greatly appreciate the introduction.
Carrie: The Clements offers a treasure trove of rare books from the Western astrological tradition from the early modern period through the Renaissance and into the 19th century. I spent a lot of time with the 19th-century almanacs, many from rural regions including rareexamples from the Southern U.S. such as The Southern Almanac (Virginia) and Mirror Almanac from Georgia and the Carolinas. In addition, the George and José Bill Papers will certainly be included in the book, as they are a wonderful example of medical astrology and a reminder of how eclectic astrology was as it incorporated symbols from a range of occult traditions including the kabbalah and freemasonry. I also had a chance to see Elijah Burritt’s Geography of the Heavens (New York, 1841), a beautifully illustrated celestial atlas that Paul Erickson had recently purchased. One of the takeaways from my Clements research is how astrology is the interpretation of astronomical data, a form of literacy based on numbers that we would understand today as emerging from the intersection of STEM and the Humanities.
Jeremy: The Clements has an impressive set of facsimile reproductions of most 17th-century Cambridge, Massachusetts, almanacs, which were central to my project. But — oh my! — there was so much more to explore. One item I plan to revisit after my dissertation is the Clements’ copy of John Tulley’s An Almanack for the Year of Our Lord MDCXCIII, printed in Boston by Benjamin Harris in 1693. Bound with the almanac are 71 leaves of manuscript notes, including diary entries, poetry, accounts, recipes, and more. The sheer extent of annotation offers a vivid glimpse into how almanacs functioned far beyond their humble printed origins, acting as tools for life writing, household management, and personal reflection.

John Tulley (1638–1701), author of a popular series of almanacs, was a teacher of astronomy and navigation from Saybrook, Connecticut. He issued almanacs each year between 1687 and 1702, and was the first to include astrological predictions and weather forecasts. Tulley’s innovations also included starting the year in January instead of March, and his defending the celebration of Christmas Day, a practice long discouraged by the Puritans.

Spread from a John Tulley almanac.
How does your work on historical pasts and figures shape or clarify our understanding of current human relationships with the heavens in 2025?
Trent: I think it’s hard to live under blank skies. The tight moral enclosure of the early United States — a cosmos superintended by a man-like God in an earth-like heaven, with both those things existing just beyond the limit of human sight, and each having a key role in deciding human fates — had serious drawbacks. It had extraordinary physical-into-metaphysical power, and that power was abused by earthly schemers. The dispossessed might have demanded better lives on Earth, for example, had they not been sedated by visions of the world above.

But after years of reading about the antebellum heavens, I cannot avoid concluding that it also gave people something valuable (including the will to resist earth’s petty tyrants). It lent people clear moral purpose during their fleeting lives. I think it’s harder to take encouragement from the heavens of modern astronomy. For some large share of the population, knowing what they know about modern astronomy, it’s hard to avoid the idea that we’re a cosmic accident in a dark, blank mechanism.

Carrie: I agree with Trent that there has been a long-standing need to see the sky as a readable text, as part of a meaning-making tradition that connects our transient lives to a cosmic order. Astrology is one tradition of sky literacy, one that interprets the sky to tell collective and individual stories. Despite astronomical discoveries and the turn from the heavens to outer space, which Trent is researching, you still have the belief in the heavens as a meaningful sign-system that can speak to one’s life.

Today, astrology is experiencing a resurgence in popularity due, in part, to its ability to adapt to technological innovation in the form of astrology apps such as Co-Star. Since its launch in 2017, Co-Star has been downloaded over 20 million times, and one in four American women between the ages of 18 and 25 have it on their phones. It promises “hyper-personalized, real-time horoscopes” based on all your birth data. Its planetary data comes from NASA satellites and are interpreted by AI, as well as astrologers and a few poets on staff. Astronomical data and astrological interpretation have found a new symbiosis in the 21st century, illustrating how this ancient form of sky reading continues to give meaning to many people’s lives.

Jeremy: I have enjoyed incorporating my research on cultural astronomy, visual communication, and almanacs into my teaching of the history and future of books and print culture. Students today are amazed at what was considered “popular” use of astronomical data. In order to read and understand the importance of the signs and symbols in a calendar, to know what a conjunction of Mars and Venus meant in the sky and for life on earth, people throughout history had to have a basic understanding of astronomy.That understanding helped to situate the place of planet Earth within the cosmos, the place of individuals within their local communities, and the place of personal lives within that universal context. From eclipses to elections, understanding the heavens was once essential to economic, social, and personal success.

At present, as we continue to focus inward, becoming more secluded while simultaneously associating with “imagined communities” that span the internet and social media landscape, we cut ourselves off from understanding those universal and global embodiments that link us on a fundamental level. This has implications for how we conceptualize science in our daily lives but also how we think about and act on global environmental concerns. A connection to the sky has united humanity for millennia. Its decline today parallels a troubling apathy toward science in the 21st century.