Curriculum Materials: Ann Butler’s Copybook
Ann Butler’s Copybook
From: American Stories Curriculum
Learning by Doing: Math and Measurement – Then and Now
This Copybook belonged to Ann Butler and is dated 1797. No information is available about Ann Butler herself – her age or where she lived, for example but she has written “New Jersey” in the Copybook under her signature on more than one page, indicating that this is probably where she lived. Ann’s copybook was a cipher book, a book in which arithmetic problems were copied and computed. The verb to cipher means to “use figures in a mathematical process.”