Et tu, Denmark?!

I've been reading through a sizable collection of old American (and a few British) Almanacs lately, a trove of stuff my wife recovered some 30 years ago from the dumpster behind the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where she used to work (in the education department, not in the dumpster, of course). The FI Librarians, for some reason, tossed them out. We are both veteran dumpster divers, and it was a no-brainer to save these. There are about 50 of them altogether, stretching from 1828 to around 1887. The years 1838-1859 are pretty complete for the American Almanac.

Over the years I have taken them out, one here and there at random, now and again for no particular reason. But now I decided to go through them systematically, just for the heck of it. It has been a very rewarding little evening's activity, I must say--lots more fun than watching the idiot box, and less demanding on my fingers and brain than trying to get the right sounds out of my old F-4 mandolin. I have learned a lot. It's like finding little treasures lying about on the rug, that quite apart from the tactile pleasure of reading through books so old that anyone who had anything to do with them when they were new, whether as author, publisher, binder, merchant or reader, has been dead for more than a century.

I've learned, for example, about the origins of Groundhog's Day (see post of January 26, below....or above, or wherever and however it works on a blog). I've learned who created the Julian Calendar (no, not someone named Julian -- but someone named Joseph Scalinger, in the 16th century) and why. I've learned, or re-learned, how American presidents were elected before around 1824 -- NOT by any popular vote..... I've learned a lot about the American economy, largely from the census data of 1840. From the 1842 edition, which was published in late 1841 of course, one notes that the big news is the death of President Harrison. Also a series of bank failures, particularly in Pennsylvania. There were no bail-outs. And President Tyler subsequently vetoed legislation aiming to create a new national bank. Someone should go study this stuff; one gets the feeling it's not entirely irrelevant to some of today's concerns.

I've learned more about how deeply racist the country was, too, from sketches of various then-contemporary incidents -- about Elijah Parrish Lovejoy and his press in Illinois; Lucretia Mott and the burning of Pennsylvania Hall; and race riots--Irishmen-led anti-black pogroms, really--in Cincinnati. The Almanac from 1860 has a pretty interesting account of what happened at Harper's Ferry on October 16-18, 1859. It says nothing about John Brown's motives. It does mention that the Governor of Virginia called upon the citizens of the state not to wander far from home on the day of Brown's hanging in December, to protect their property. Earlier Almanacs, like the 1842 item, suggest why: The number of white people and free "colored" just about equaled (not quite) the number of slaves in the Old Dominion. (One learns, too, that some free colored people also owned slaves, but we're not supposed to know or talk about that.....)

But last night I learned something I never knew about at all. I was perusing the data on world population (it had yet to reach one billion in 1841) and noticed an entry for Danish colonies in Africa. That stopped me short; I never knew there were any Danish colonies in Africa. There were, and in southern India as well. They go back to the 17th century, and were very much involved with the slave trade before it was made illegal. So that subject comes around again....

They were small and ultimately unsuccessful efforts, these Danish outposts. The Danes ultimately sold most of their holding to the British in the middle of the 19th century, just as they sold the Virgin Islands to the United States during World War I. Their African holdings were centered in what is today Ghana. It turns out that a fort of sorts the Danes built in 1811 or thereabouts is used still today, as the official residence of the Ghanaian president! I did not know that. Now I do, and you do, too.

Tonight I'll go through 1844 and 1845 I guess. And if it really snows a lot this weekend, as predicted, heck, I may make it all the way to the Hayes Administration. Such fun....