Debunking Denominationalism in Early American Religious History

Almanacs dominated the early American printing industry.  Other than the Bible, a handful of sermons, and perhaps a few schoolbooks, an almanac was the only printed item most people owned in America before the middle of the nineteenth century.  Used primarily as calendars and diaries, almanacs also contained astrological advice, weather predictions, medical remedies, moral axioms, essays, poetry, and humorous anecdotes.  In terms of printed pages, almanacs outnumbered all other printed sources combined in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  As a result, they were immensely lucrative for those who created and printed them, bringing in annual profits as high as 400%.

This paper relies on the religious content of almanacs printed across the colonies between 1740 and 1820 to argue that printers, by successfully reaching a broad and diverse audience, placed early America’s prevailing religious sensibility at the center of its most popular form of print.  This sensibility, while broadly Protestant, focused more on living well and doing good than on doctrinal specifics and denominational identity.  By demonstrating how a varied collection of ideas about the sacred were printed and made accessible through almanacs, this paper will be of interest to cultural historians and book historians.  Its central argument suggests that by focusing their efforts on the denominational reconfiguration associated with the “Awakenings,” historians of American religion have overlooked a profoundly interdenominational and flexible strand of America’s religious past.