Happy Birthday to agricultural knowledge and publishing innovator Robert Bailey Thomas (b. April 24, 1766, in Grafton, MA), who created the Farmer’s Almanac is 1793. It is still published to this day. Unlike many other almanac publishers of this period, he rejected astrology in his work. As historian Peter Eisenstadt writes, “Thomas argued that the new and thoroughly non-astrological understanding of nature had its roots in older theories of approaching nature. Starting with his first almanac, Thomas helped perfect the image of the sagacious New England farmer, mistrustful of book learning and abstractions, who grounded his wisdom in hard-earned empirical verification of recipe knowledge.” He continues, “The Farmer’s Almanac was about farming and scientific agriculture, directed at people with their feet on the ground, and not at those with their heads in the stars . . . Thomas’ almanacs represent the triumph of the popular disenchantment, presenting a vision of forward-looking New England folk culture that was rational, scientific, and free of entanglements with astrology or the occult.”
Citations: Peter Eisenstadt, “Almanacs and the Disenchantment of Early America,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 65, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 160, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27774098; Robert B. Thomas, *THE FARMER’S ALMANAC,” no. 1 (Boston: Belknap and Hall, 1793), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/rul.39030017054646.
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