Harper’s Index

Number of the 155 U.S. magazines published in 1850 that are published today: 13¹

Number of years Karl Marx spent writing opinion pieces for the New-York Daily Tribune before publishing Das Kapital : 10²

Portion of the 19th century it took Russia to conquer the Chechens: 1/2³

Number of “psychological operations” specialists that the U.S. Army sent to work for CNN last year: 5⁴

Average number of U.S. news stories about Elian Gonzalez published or aired each day of the first 5 months of his stay here: 222⁵

Estimated ratio of immigrants arriving in the U.S. in the 1890s to the number returning home during that period: 3:2⁶

Points by which the percentage of U.S. residents born abroad has changed since 1850: -0.4⁷

Points by which the percentage of Americans of African descent has changed since then: -2.8⁸

Estimated percentage change in the Native American population of California during the 1850s: -65⁹

Portion of California's revenue between 1852 and 1870 composed of taxes paid by Chinese laborers: 1/2¹⁰

Estimated number of “river pirates” operating on New York City's waterfront in 1850: 500¹¹

Portion of rivers in the mid-Atlantic U.S. whose water levels set record lows last summer: 3/4¹²

Minimum number of aquatic species carried in ship ballasts to new ecosystems on any given day: 3,000¹³

Estimated acres of topsoil eroded worldwide each year: 3,700,000,000¹⁴

Hours of cooking required to remove the “toxins” from tomatoes, according to an 1860 women's magazine: 3¹⁵

Ratio of the amount Americans spent on potato chips in 1996 to spending on federal political campaigns that year: 2:1¹⁶

Years after the Great Potato Famine began that Britain loosened its land-ownership requirements for Irish voters: 5¹⁷

Number of times that U.S. president Zachary Taylor had ever voted in a presidential election before taking office in 1849: 0¹⁸

Number of years after the term “confidence man” was coined in 1849 that the word “industrialist” was introduced: 15¹⁹

Percentage change since 1992 in the average household income of the lowest-paid fifth of Silicon Valley workers: -2.7²⁰

Number of residents of India without access to fresh drinking water for every Internet user there: 115²¹

Number of immigrants Japan would require in order to maintain its present workforce through the year 2050: 30,450,000²²

Weeks before Peru's national election last April that President Alberto Fujimori raised the minimum wage by 18 percent: 4²³

Number of Japanese couples who used Dolly the cloned sheep in their wedding photo before researchers ended the practice: 1²⁴

Number of “marriage studies” majors learning “the art of getting and staying married” last term at a Pennsylvania college: 8²⁵

Number of condoms to be requisitioned per day to each U.N. peacekeeper deployed in Congo and Sierra Leone this year: 1²⁶

Estimated minimum value of the diamonds sold to De Beers by Angolan rebels since 1992: $1,000,000,000²⁷

Estimated barrels of oil illegally exported by Iraq last year: 8,100,000²⁸

Price of a gallon of gas in the United Kingdom last April: $4.84²⁹

Price a year earlier: $3.87³⁰

Amount Shell Oil paid last year to sponsor the wedding reception of the King of Buganda, Uganda: $3,000³¹

Ratio of the average 1850 price in Texas of a healthy male slave to that of 200 acres of prime farmland: 1:1³²

Price an Illinois company charges for a pen embedded with Abraham Lincoln's “genetic essence”: $1,650³³

Years after becoming a priest that Gregor Mendel completed the work that would earn him the title father of genetics: 16³⁴

Number of Charles Darwin's children who became eugenicists: 1³⁵

Rank of Father's Day among days on which the largest number of collect calls are made in the U.S.: 1³⁶

Chance that the husband in a two-income U.S. household earns less than his wife: 1 in 3³⁷

Chances that a 19th century “opium-eater” in Albany, New York, was a woman: 4 in 5³⁸

Average amount spent on direct advertising to U.S. children in 1983 and 1998, respectively, per child: $2.68, $36.60³⁹

Year in which “sold down the river” entered the American lexicon: 1850⁴⁰

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