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Our American Almanac
If you’re reading this from, say, New York or Los Angeles, you may have a knee jerk reaction to “America is an agrarian society.” Because, yeah. It seems a long way away from here in the inner suburbs of Washington, D.C., too.
But the fact is that America is very much still an agrarian society. In pre-pandemic times, the total attendance of the Minnesota State Fair was over 2 million, with peak attendance being on the last Sunday, where 245,243 people attended the fair. (COVID-19 dropped 2021 attendance to about the 50% I’ve seen with other large events).
The Midwest is still farm country and people still care about it being farm country. So is Central California. Cows still roam on the high range in Wyoming.
We are still a nation of farmers, and that lies at the heart of many of our divisions. And nowhere is the evidence of this clearer than in our calendar. Let’s take a look.
School Summer Holidays
In the U.K., we had year round school. We got one measly month for summer. (I will note we did get more breaks through the year).
Most U.S. kids get 10–11 weeks. That’s a huge difference. Why?
Welp, actually, it’s a myth that it’s to work on the farm. It’s actually because southern cities get too hot and kids couldn’t focus before air…