The first book to explore the forgotten terrestrial and celestial globes of early America—and the global imagination they shaped. 

Ranging from early modern Europe to the modern United States, American Cosmos introduces the objects, people, practices, and ideas that constituted the long-forgotten world of globes. As Tamara Plakins Thornton shows, paired terrestrial and celestial globes were important components of early American social, cultural, and intellectual life. They served as markers of learnedness and social status, provided a material vision of a human-centered cosmos, and as 3-D problem-solving devices, offered distinctive imaginative perspectives on global connections and human difference. Only some had access to these globes—including genteel families, men of science, navigators, and students in colleges, academies, and missionary schools—but in the nineteenth century, many more encountered mass-produced, stripped-down globes in common school classrooms and parlors. Yet with new cultural concerns taking root, these modern globes assumed a much-diminished role in American life and thought, and an older world of globes, rich with meaning and possibility, disappeared.

As we increasingly encounter global-scale experience—climate change, pandemics, human migrations, the economy—and as American historians strive to look beyond national borders, we can learn about the origins of American global thinking by looking at globes themselves and the people who used them.