Benjamin Banneker’s letter to Thomas Jefferson was written August 19, 1791, to accompany a copy of the almanac that Banneker was to have published in the next 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 even poetry, therefore offering much more 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.