I also describe the sophisticated accounting practices that supported harsh labor regimes on slave plantations in the American South, a finding that provided the impetus for my first book project. I use a wide array of quantitative and partially quantitative records to show how accounting evolved from a system of recordkeeping into an instrument of control and analysis-from an aid to memory to an instrument of mastery. As novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe reflected in 1853, numbers could increasingly be “found on all sides of every subject to an extent that is really very confusing.” My interest in information technologies grew out of my recently completed doctoral dissertation, “From Memory to Mastery.” The project charts the transformation of numerical reasoning in America between 17. Today numbers are everywhere, occupying a privileged rhetorical status that began to emerge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. I study the ways legal and social institutions shape these practices and the impact of calculation on political and moral reasoning. Numeracy-which is to mathematics what literacy is to reading-includes all kinds of quantitative practices, from everyday arithmetic to sophisticated financial reporting, information technology, and accounting. My research explores the history of numeracy and its relationship to American capitalism and democracy.
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