Session Abstract

Historians routinely use numbers as data, but they rarely historicize the impulse to quantify or document ordinary people’s calculations. We propose a panel that studies the many ways historical actors counted in early America. Challenging persistent assumptions that forms of mathematical thinking like arithmetic or accounting were uniform in practice and caused people to act in more abstract, less ethical ways—in short, that calculation made people calculating—our papers will explore the varieties of numerical reasoning in the marketplace settings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Rather than telling a macro story of a vertical rise to increasingly complex kinds of mathematical thinking, our papers follow the halting and unpredictable horizontal spread of commercially-oriented quantitative skills. We pay attention to the less obvious ways that individuals cobbled together workable day-to-day methods of counting, and we look for the counterintuitive results of everyday numerical reasoning.

Four papers will each provide a fresh perspective on the role of commercial calculation in early American life. Jennifer Egloff looks at the surprisingly eclectic array of approaches to computation among merchants, discussing how instrument literacy could compensate for deficiencies in straightforward mathematical literacy. Caitlin Rosenthal compares versions of book-keeping, as developed and taught at common schools, urban commercial colleges, and slave plantations, offering close analysis of printed artifacts like accounting manuals and blank forms and providing an important meditation on the contributions of early American accounting to the formation of modern management. Besides featuring the likely protagonists such as merchants and slaveholders, two papers also provide a glimpse of the uses of numbers for marginal Americans.  Molly McCarthy uses annotated almanacs to recover computations among small-time farmers. And Tom Wickman gathers evidence about the ways slaves and former slaves used numbers in the practical and symbolic pursuit of freedom.  Following the theme of this year’s conference, the papers show how different settings produced different kinds of calculating communities. 

In celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of her pathbreaking history of numeracy, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (1982), Patricia Cline Cohen will chair the panel and offer commentary. The occasion provides a unique opportunity to set direction for a growing field of study. Our insistence on viewing numeracy as embedded in specific cultural contexts follows the lead of the more mature field of literacy studies, and we hope to push the nascent field of “numeracy studies” toward similar complexity. Cultural historians and literary critics including Cohen, Keith Thomas, Deborah Harkness, Margo Anderson, and Mary Poovey have begun this work, as have historians of science like Lorraine Daston, Ted Porter, and Ian Hacking. By combining exciting new work on everyday counting with an analysis of this historiography, we hope to persuade historians that the cultural and social history of numerical reasoning can be nuanced, artful, and seamlessly integrated into the stories we tell about America’s past.