Benjamin Banneker: Letter to Thomas Jefferson

Benjamin Banneker’s letter to Thomas Jefferson was written August 19, 1791, to accompany a copy of the almanac that Banneker planned to publish the following year. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, almanacs were not simply catalogs of information providing calendars, astronomical and seasonal predictions, weather forecasts, and agricultural ideas; they also included entertaining and educating stories, commentaries, and poetry, thereby offering a great deal in the way of reading material at a time when such things were scarce. And since almanacs were common to most households, a wide variety of people were likely to have read Banneker’s Almanac.