The Great American Calculator, Also Known As the Almanac

Mention the word almanac and the first thing that probably comes to mind is the weather, followed perhaps by its ubiquitous calendar often incorporated in its very title such as Samuel Stearns's Universal Calendar, and North-American Almanack for 1792. As an early American bestseller, both the pamphlet's weather predictions and the monthly calendar were features of critical importance to its customers. But what most people don't realize is how steeped the colonial annual was in numbers. There were numbers everywhere, served up in lists, tables, and conversion charts, all intended to help users with matters involving time and money.

Long before the establishment of common schools in the nineteenth century, almanacs provided a foundation for numeracy among a broad readership that included not only the educated elite but also the lowliest farmers. Almanacs set the bar for the kinds of financial calculation and knowledge one might need to negotiate the economic terrain of early America. Taking the lead from all of this financial data, many customers converted their almanacs into portable account books. And even those who did not take that logical step often peppered the almanac's margins with financial graffiti in fits of addition and subtraction. This paper will examine just what kind of instruction consumers might expect from their almanacs and what their own manuscript additions tell us about the extent of numeracy among the colonial populace.

Although the accounting was hardly sophisticated, such uses demonstrate a level of numeracy that Patricia Cline Cohen writing in A Calculating People did not assume until the early decades of the 19th century. It is time to give the almanac its due. The lowly annual laid the groundwork for the obsession with statistics and calculation attendant with the market revolution in the post-Revolutionary generation.