“The most famous of American almanacs, Benjamin Franklin‘s Poor Richard’s Almanack, which was published annually from 1732 to 1758, begins each edition by invoking its year’s distance from both the birth of Christ and the year of Creation as calculated by varying ancient cultures,” says historian Jill Spivey Caddell.
“While it was common for almanacs to employ this device to, for instance, mark the year’s distance from the beginning of a monarch’s reign, Franklin’s title page features an unusual onslaught of numbers. These figures situate the almanac’s colonial American readership within both an international and interdenominational context (differing creation dates are given for the Eastern Greeks, the Latin Church, the Roman Chronology, and the Jews),” according to Spivey Caddell.
The author, co-director of Commemorative Cultures (civilwarmonuments.org), a digital project that maps and interprets Civil War monuments funded by St. Andrews University, explores a unique aspect of almanacs from the Civil War Era in a new article in JSTOR Daily.
“Just over a century after Franklin published his last issue of Poor Richard’s, almanacs continued to enjoy massive popularity in the United States. Yet the nation that Franklin had helped to forge, ideologically and diplomatically, was under threat of dissolution,” she writes.
“An 1862 almanac published in Nashville, Tennessee, employs calculations on its title page to very different ends than Franklin. It states it will cover “the year of our lord 1862 — being the second after bissextile, or leap year, the eighty-sixth of American Independence, and the second of the Confederate States.”
You can read more about the role of almanacs in Confederate attempts to legitimize their claims to statehood at JSTOR Daily here.
JSTOR Daily contextualizes current events with scholarship found on JSTOR, the nonprofit digital library of scholarly journals, books, images, audio, research reports, and primary sources. You can subscribe at https://daily.jstor.org/newsletter/.
Illustration: The Confederate States almanac for 1862 (via JSTOR).
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