72 ANARCHIST CALENDRICS
Byron Ellsworth Hamann
What calendar system should date the masthead of
an anarchist newspaper? In late nineteenth-century
Kansas, editor Moses Harman experimented with
several possibilities.
Harman was born in West Virginia on 12
October 1830. Over the next few years, his parents
slowly moved the family west, finally settling in
Crawford County, Missouri, in 1838. Harman would
stay in this part of the country (the tristate area
of Missouri, Illinois, and Kansas) for the next seven
decades, until a winter spent in Los Angeles
convinced him to move to southern California. He
spent the last two years of his life there, and died
in 1910.
After graduating from high school in 1851, Harman
tried a number of professions: farmer, teacher, circuit-
riding preacher, and, during the Civil War, hospital
nurse. (Problems with one of his legs prevented him
from enlisting for the Union.) Married in 1866, and
widowed in 1877, Harman left Missouri for Kansas
in 1879. There, in the riverside town of Valley Falls,
he embarked on a new career as radical journalist and
chronological agitator.1
Three years earlier, in 1876, the National
Liberal League was founded in Philadelphia. A
coalition of various organizations across the United
States, its initial aim was the total separation of state
from church, including a repeal of Sunday laws and
an end to religious instruction in public schools. Soon
after moving to Valley Falls, Harman became involved
in the local League chapter. In 1880, he was elected
coeditor of the chapter's new monthly periodical, the
Valley Falls Liberal. The paper's goals were outlined in a
front-page prospectus: "To support the cause of LIBER-
ALISM in its effort to break the chains which have
been riveted upon the minds and souls of men and
women by that religion of Fear and Hate, misnamed
Christianity..."
Inspired by this manifesto, Harman quickly moved
to replace the paper's Anno Domini dating with a new
chronology, apparently of his own design. Starting in
November 1880, the masthead of the Valley Falls Liberal
carried the American Nation (A.N.) count, its Year 1
corresponding to 1776. As Harman explained in the
January, A.N. 10 5 issue:
1881.
The year 1880 since the Christian Era, came, and is now just
gone to keep company with the "years beyond the Flood."
But when that Flood was, and when that Era commenced,
authentic history does not inform us. Christian scholars are
very much divided on these questions. It is pretty generally
admitted, however, that the Chronology with regard to the
latter is wrong-some placing the error at four, and some
at eight or nine years. Thus we ought to call the year now
commencing i885 or 1889 instead of 1881. Then again, it
is conceded generally that Jesus of Nazareth was not born in
winter but in spring; and hence the year should commence,
not in January but in April or May. In view of these difficul-
ties and for other reasons that will readily present themselves,
we prefer to reckon time from a date concerning which there
is no dispute: and, as Americans, we choose to date our little
paper from our National Birthday.
Readers of the Januq.ry issue might have been surprised
that its AN. date was still 105, as it had been in
December-but this was because the new year in
Harman's system did not begin until July. And so
when midsummer arrived, the masthead (finally) read:
"Valley Falls, Kansas, July, A.N. 106."
Two months later, in September-having just
celebrated the paper's one-year anniversary-
Harman changed its name from the (local-sounding)
Valley Falls Liberal to the (statewide) Kansas Liberal.
He also updated the masthead mission statement:
"Total Separation of the State from Supernatural
Theology. Perfect Equality before the Law for all Men
and Women. No privileged classes or orders-No
Monopolies." The renamed paper continued to be
dated with the A.N. system for the next seven months.
But in April 1882, at the same time the Kansas Liberal's
headquarters were temporarily moved to Lawrence,
Harman reverted to mainstream chronology: April 13,
1882. The paper was back in Valley Falls by October,
and early in 1883 chronological experimentation also
returned. The 12 January issue was dated E.M. 283: in
the Era of Man.
This system had been promulgated the previous
fall at the sixth annual National Liberal League conw!1
tion. Held in St Louis from 29 September to l Octob•''
1882, the convention turned to the topic of calendar
73 ANARCHIST CALENORICS
reform on its third and final day. A detailed article on
the proceedings appeared in the 25 October 1882 issue
of the Boston Investigator:
After this business was concluded, Mr. George Chainey, of
Boston, arose and said that several resolutions and sugges-
tions relative to a new secular calendar had been referred to
the Committee on Resolutions, and that they desired him to
report the following, which he read: -
THE MODERN ERA.
Whereas, The uncertain and mythical origin of the
Christian calendar now in general use commits
those who use it, to some extent, at least, to the
Christian theology; and,
Whereas, It would be relief to many and a
great convenience to have a more certain, modern,
and purely secular date for recording time,
Resolved, That we earnestly recommend
all those who do not wish so [to] express their
adherence to the Christian theology to unite in
all parts of the world upon a common, secular,
universal date as the year one of a modern era;
and,
Whereas, Three great events common to the
whole human race, and which gave mankind a new
heaven and new earth, point to the year known as
"A.D. 1600," making our present year 282; as the
proper beginning of the modern era, we call special
attention to those facts, viz.:-
1. The general publication and acceptance of the
new or Copernican system of astronomy.
2. The discovery of the unity of the human race
(i.e., humanity in its solidarity and continuity) by
the extension of commerce and European civi-
lization to Asia, Africa, and Australia, and the
recognition of progress in the success of the ages
and generations of the human race.
3. The foundations of International Law by
Hugo Grotius (begun in 1600 and published in
1625); and,
Whereas, These events, which changed the face
of the world, are fitly consecrated by the martyrdom
of the great Liberal of his age, Giordano Bruno,
who was burned to death by the Christian Church
at Rome, on the 16th day of February, 1600, for
proclaiming the new astronomy, the true solar
system, the infinity of the heavens and of worlds; and,
Whereas, This modern date may be most
conveniently used to succeed the old era, having
its last two figures the same, and being capable of
a familiar contraction to '82 for 282, just as the old
date, 1882, is contracted to '82; therefore,
Resolved, That the National Liberal League
adopt this date, and earnestly recommend its
general use.
The resolution was adopted unanimously and with
applause.
Then followed a discussion of what to name the
new chronology. The system's creator, George N. Hill
(secretary of the Investigator Hall Society in Boston),
pushed for Anno Scientia-the Era of Science, or E.S.
Another proposal was for "Age of Reason." But in the
end, "Era of Man" (E.M.) won out, "passed by so large
a majority that it was almost a general consent."
Back in Kansas, in late August i883 (E.M.
283)-eight months after introducing Era of Man
dating-Moses Harman rebooted the Kansas Liberal.
He changed its name to Lucifer the Light-Bearer ("the
name applied by the ancients to the morning star, the
Herald of Dawn") and expanded its content. An ad for
Lucifer printed in the u June 1884 issue of Liberty (a
radical paper from Boston) announced a wide range
of controversial topics-and Harman's interest in
anarchism, which he had already voiced in the Kansas
Liberal, was asserted at the start:
A fortnightly free thought, anarchistic journal, devoted to
the fearless discussion of all questions of human interest,
including the land question, the money question, the question
of the relations of the State to the Individual, the question of
prohibition vs. temperance, the marriage question, heredity,
etc., etc. LUCIFER discusses all these and other subjects
from the standpoint of Individualism, holding that no true
Socialism is possible where the rights of the individual man
and woman are not regarded as the only rights there are, and
respected accordingly.
LUCIFER repudiates the imposed authority alike of gods
and states, and holds in infinite scorn the prurient meddle-
someness of society.
LUCIFER carries with it the sparkling light and invigo-
rating breezes of the wide-sweeping prairies of the West.
It preaches the gospel of reciprocal Rights and Duties, and
sounds a trumpet-call to ACTION.
74 BYRON ELLSWORTH HAMANN

TOJ'F,K.\, XA.NSAS. i'RID.U. Dl!CllllHE:R 19. It. ll. 9'lel. W.110LJ: No 8-ri

N..w BHID, Voi... IX, No. 18..

Two mastheads from Moses Harman's newspaper Lucifer

the Light Bearer-one giving the year as E.M. 290 (top)
and the other noting both the E.M. year, 292 , and the C.E.
year of 1892.
75 ANARCHIST CALENDRICS
Throughout these changes of title and themes-and
across various updates in design-the E.M. system
stayed in the masthead. Not all of Harman's readers
understood what the abbreviation meant, and so
from time to time he offered them an explanation.
The 8 January E.M. 286 issue included this extended
commentary:
OUR CALENDAR
A St. Louis correspondent (whose name we have mislaid)
asks:
"What do you mean by 'E.M. 285' at the head of
your title page?"
To save trouble and time in answering this
frequently recurring question, we will here give a brief
resume ofwhat we have frequently before stated in these
columns, in regard to the matter.
The abbreviations "E.M." mean Era of Man, and
are used instead of, or in contradistinction from ''.A.D." -
Anno Domini, or Era of Christianity; and for these
among other reasons:
1st. We object to the popular or Christian
Chronology because of its lack of historical foundation,
or starting point. In other words, we object to it because
it bears upon its face an acknowledged falsehood. No
scholar, be he Christian or non-Christian, will dare to
maintain that Jesus of Nazareth was born on the 25th of
Dec., eighteen hundred and eighty-five years ago. Every
historian of any note agrees that the true date of the
Nazarene's birth, both as to day and year, is shrouded
in the obscurity of tradition; and, if candid, he will also
agree that the very existence of the man Jesus, as an
historical personage, cannot now be established.
2d. As Rationalists we object to the use of A.D.
(year of our Lord) because we acknowledge allegiance
to no lord or master, whether temporal or spiritual. The
so-called Christian Era began during what may be aptly
be termed the theologic era, or Era ofgods and supersti-
tions. It was the age of belief in the supernatural-of belief
in the subordination of man to the arbitrary will ofa deity
or of many deities. Man, as such, had no rights that the
gods were bound to respect. Rights belonged to the gods
and to their representatives, the kings, princes and priests.
3d. The revolt against the rule of the gods as repre-
sented by priests and kings is of comparatively recent
date. Not until about three hundred years ago-not
until the circumnavigation of the globe had determined
the true shape of the earth-not until modern science,
telescope in hand, turned her gaze upon the dome of
heaven and showed to mortals that there is no dome
there! no thrones there! no gods there!-Not till the new
cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo began to take the
place of the mythological cosmogony, did the true Era of
Man begin.
4th. The immediate and necessary result of this
destruction of the old cosmogony-the cosmogony which
made the earth the center and chieffact of the universe-
was a radical reconstruction of the methods of thought
and investigation. Instead of referring to Authority for
the truth of any theory-in morals, in government, in
religion-all theories were subjected to the remorseless
crucible ofscientific investigation, which takes nothing for
granted. The result of this investigation, thus Jar, is that
there is nothing outside ofor beyond Nature, and that chief
fact or product of nature is MAN. And though kings and
priests, in the name of their gods, still hold sway over the
greater part of humankind, they no longer refer to their
deities alone as the source of their power. They are now
willing to admit that the people have rights that must be
respected, even by the viceregents of the gods themselves.
The number 286 that we place on our title page to
represent the year now just begun, refers to the death
of Giordano Bruno, a distinguished martyr to science,
which event took place in Rome, Feb. 1601; of the
Christian chronology. 2 We use this number,
(a) Because it records a well-known fac t in modern
history, and for this reason there is not likely to be any
dispute in regard to the initial point of the new calendar.
(b) The martyrdom of Bruno was a most memorable
event in the history of the struggle between Science and
Theology-between Reason and Superstition-between
the Rights of Man and the assumed rights of gods, kings,
and priests.
(c) The centuries reckoned from the death of Bruno
correspond with the centuries of Christian chronology.
Hence the two calendars are easily referable to each other.
For these reasons, besides others that might be
named, we place E.M. at 286 at the mast-head of
LUCIFER to designate the current year.
Overleaf: The so-called Biccherna 72, 1582-1583. Th e
image, one of a series created to decorate the registers
of the treasury (the biccherna) of the Republic of Siena,
depicts Pope Gregory XIII presiding over the council
considering the reforms that wou ld result in the institution
of his eponymous calendar in the autumn of 1582.
78 BYRON ELLSWORTH HAMANN
Harman's last foray into chronological experi-
mentation took place at the start of 1892, when he
adopted a dual-dating system for Lucifer's masthead.
The day of the week, month, and day were still followed
immediately by the E.M. year. But that number was
now followed by a bracketed C.E. date. The inaugural
example read: "Friday, January 1, E.M. 292 [C.E. 1892]."
We might be tempted-following twenty-first
century conventions-to interpret this abbreviation as
an early appearance of the "Common Era" or "Current
Era" phrasing that exploded into popularity circa 1989.
Ironically, however, this is not what C.E. meant for
Moses Harman. Instead, C.E. meant "Christian Era."3
It is certainly true (as Early English Books Online
reveals) that the phrases "common Aera" and even
"before the common Aera" had been around since the
1600s. But they were often qualified by an appended
"of Jesus" or "of Christ." And they do not seem to have
been linked to any abbreviations: the use of a phrase is
one thing; the baptism of a chronological system quite
another. The chronological markers C.E. and B.C.E.
emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century-and
when they did, their C stood for "Christian." Moses
Harman's apparently perverse insistence on stressing
the Christian origins of the C.E. was not idiosyncratic:
it was a common interpretation of a new abbreviation.
Perhaps the earliest and highest-profile use of these
twin abbreviations was in the title of Morris J. Raphall's
Post-Biblical History of the Jews; From the Close of the Old
Testament, about the Year 420 B.C.E. Till the Destruction of
the Second Temple, in the Year 70 C.E. This two-volume
work was a bestseller. First published in Philadelphia in
1855, it was reprinted the next year in both New York
and London, followed a decade later by another New
York printing in 1866. Vexingly, Raphall never provides
a "Note to the Reader'' explaining how to interpret
his titular B.C.E. / C.E. abbreviations. But a look at his
prose is revealing. Across nine hundred pages, Raphall
never uses the phrases "Common Era" or "Current
Era." Instead, like Harman, he refers to the Christian
era: "It must be borne in mind that, from Josephus, who
wrote in the first century of the Christian era"; "others
assume the third century of the Christian era as the
probable date..."4 Raphall was a rabbi at New York's
Greene Street Synagogue in Greenwich Village, and
so was well aware that the Anno Domini system was
provincially Christian: neither common, nor neces-
sarily current.
All of which raises rather devastating problems for
current uses of B.C.E. I C.E. dating. As abbreviations
their full-length referents are open to interpretation. '
Attempts to use these abbreviations as secularized
alternatives to B.C. and A.D. propose that their strings
of letters be read as ''[before the] Current Era" or
"[before the] Common Era." But those same B.C.E.
/ C.E. strings of letters had been around for over a
century before they became fashionable in the late
1980s, and in that earlier history, the C was neither
"Common" nor "Current," but "Christian." Tragically,
recent attempts at historical secularization were
doomed from the start by their own historical naivete.
This naivete extends to the very rereadings of C
as "Common" or "Current." Asserting the renamed
Anno Domini system as "Common" throughout the
world ignores the violent history by which this system
became global: the conquests and missionizations that,
over the past five centuries, imposed the Christian-
Julian and (after 1582) Catholic-Gregorian calendar on
people throughout the world-often demanding that
their own calendars be forgotten. At the same time, it
is important to remember that the Catholic-Gregorian
calendar never became truly Common to all people
everywhere, something quickly revealed by newspaper
mastheads in many parts of today's world, from Tehran
to Pyongyang to Taiwan to, say, Chicago, where the
Chinese-language World Journal is dated with multiple
non-Gregorian calendar systems.5 A few months
ago, Bolivian president Evo Morales even called for a
national revival of pre-Hispanic Andean calendars. Are
people who do not use the C.E. calendar trapped in the
past-excluded from the "Current Era" like the living
fossils of nineteenth-century evolutionism?
Early in this millennium, anthropologist Michel-
Rolph Trouillot diagnosed something he called North
Atlantic universals: "Words that project North Atlantic
experience on a universal scale that they themselves
have helped to create.... North Atlantic universals are
always prescriptive inasmuch as they always suggest a
correct state of affairs-what is good, what is just, w hat
is sublime or desirable. That prescr iption is inherent
in the very projection of a historically limited experi-
ence on the world stage. North Atlantic universals are
always seductive, at times even irresistible, precisely
because they manage to hide their specific-local-
ized, and thus parochial-historical location."6 Moses
Harman's attempts at calendrical reform were, of
79 ANARCHIST CALENDRICS

course, just as political as more recent attempts to

assert a Current or Common Era. Yet despite living
in late nineteenth-century Kansas, Harman's chrono-
logical radicalism was not provincial. The American
Nation system was explicit about its limited, nationalist
framework for time. The Era of Man was grounded
in an early modern horizon of European expansion
well aware of religious conflicts within Europe itself.
And Harman's last experiment for Lucifer-the use of
multiple calendars, one of them explicitly Christian-
was far more sophisticated than simply renaming
the Christian Era as Common or Current, and then
proclaiming it a secular and (North Atlantic) universal
standard for world history.

The last issue of Lucifer the Light-Bearer was published

on 6 June E.M. 307 [C.E. 1907]. A month later, it was
redesigned and launched as the American Journal of
Eugenics, a word defined on the front cover as "the
doctrine of progress or evolution, especially in the
human race, through improved conditions in the rela-
tions of the sexes." Moses Harman was still editor,
and the new journal continued to explore themes that
had been central to Lucifer. Articles in the premiere
issue included "Opposition to Freedom of the Press,"
"Marriage as a Business Proposition," and "Medical
Interest in Sexual Problems." But chronological radi-
calism had been abandoned. The new masthead
featured a disappointingly singular, unmarked date:
July 1907.

I On Moses Harman, see
William LemorWest, "The
Moses Harman Story," Kansas
Historical Quarterly, vol. 37, no.
1 (Spring 1971). Available at
<kshs.org/p/the-moses-harman·
story/13209>. Also see Philip
Ray Michael, "Moses Harman,
Lucifer, th e Ugh t Bearer, and the
Trials of Kansas Free Thought at
th e End of th e Nineteenth Cen ·
tury• (master's thesis, Emporia
State University, 2009). For
publication details on Harman's
newspapers, and their rel ation
to other radi cal newspapers in
the United States, see Ern esto
A. Lo nga, Anarchist Perio dica ls
in English Published in the
United States (1833-1955): An
Annotated Guide (London: The
Scarecrow Press, 2010).
2 Harman here revises the
Liberal League's starting date of
1600 (the actual year of Bruno's
death) to 1601. Technically, if
1600 were counted as Year 1 of
the E.M. system, the E.M. syst em
would always be one year 'off"
from the Anno Domini system :
1600would be E.M. Year 1, 1601
would be E.M. Year 2, and so on.
3 Harman's dual-dating system
was explain ed for rea ders on
page two of every issue starting
(at least) from 15February1895 :
'OUR DATE: A correspondent
asks, 'What do you mean by E.M.
294, and C.E. 1894?' Ans. The
first means Era of Man, and dates
from the Burning of Bruno in
1601. 'C. E.' means Christian Er a.•
4 Morris J. Raphall, Post-
Biblical History of the Jews; From
the Close of the Old Testam ent,
about the Year 420 B.C.E. Till
the Destruc tion oUhe Second
Temple, in the Year 70 C.E.
{Philadelphia: Moss and Brother,
1855). The quotations are on
page 14 of volume one and page
75 of vol ume two, resp ectively.
5 For details , see my " How
to Chronologize with a Hamm er,
Or, The Myth of Homogeneous ,
Empty Time," HA U: Journal of
Ethnographic Theory, vol. 6, no. 1
( Summer 201 6).
6 Mic hel· Rolph Trouillot ,
"North Atlantic Universals: Analyt·
ical Fi cti ons, 1492-1945," South
Atlantic Q u arterly, vol. 101, no. 4
(Fall 2002), pp. 847-848.