For the American living 200 years ago, life was very different from today. One of the best ways to learn what life was like in early America is to examine the many almanacs published during that time. These books include a broad range of information that was of central importance to daily life in late 18th-century America, such as cures for common diseases, recipes for food, instructions for preparing many of the items that modern Americans would expect to buy at a store, agricultural advice, tables for computing interest and currency depreciation, church and court schedules, and lists of...

Early American almanacs are fascinating resources for insight into the life, attitudes, and culture of the new nation. Along with calendars and maps, political events, agricultural advice, medicinal cures, and other information, many almanacs printed tales, stories, and jokes designed to entertain. Never before systematically organized, most of this narrative material has remained obscure for two hundred years. Here a literary scholar and a folklorist combine skills to catalog and index this material from over a thousand almanacs according to the standard methodology established by the...