Objects and Rituals of Time in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract

Objects and Rituals of Time in the Nineteenth-Century United States Justin T. Clark (bio) Alexis McCrossen, Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. xvi + 271 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.00. David M. Henkin, The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. xix + 288 pp. Appendices, notes, and index. $21.99. Nick Yablon, Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. xix + 384 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Wendy Bellion, Iconoclasm in New York: Ritual to Reenactment. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. xvii + 280 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $120.00. In studying change over time, historians have tended to pay more attention to the former than the latter. Since the mid-twentieth century, and especially in recent decades, a rich interdisciplinary scholarship has investigated the histories of timekeepers and time standards, diaries, calendars, Sabbath observances, commemorations, "free" and labor time, as well as the science, philosophy, and art of time. Yet instead of establishing an independent identity, the history of time has mostly surfaced across disparate subfields, in the guise of the history of technology, labor, leisure, religion, memory, material and visual culture.1 Conversely, history remains notably less represented than other disciplines in interdisciplinary venues for time studies, such as the Temporal Belongings network and the journal Time and Society. One impediment to a more coherent history of time is the subject's inherent difficulty. Time is a frustratingly fluid and ambiguous concept, even in comparison with other social constructions. Time exists at a multitude of seemingly incommensurate scales, complicating the scholarly synthesis of everyday mechanical timekeeping with more purely ideological temporal conceptions, [End Page 183] such as national or historical time. Nor can historians take something as seemingly straightforward as clock time for granted. Until and even beyond the adoption of national and global time standards in the late nineteenth century, members of the same communities in North America and elsewhere relied on contradictory methods to determine the hour. Interpreting qualitative records of temporal experience is still more challenging. While a diarist's description of a winter as "frigid" can be indexed against climatological records, what are we to make of Americans' persistent observation, from the nineteenth century onward, that time seemed to be "accelerating"? To what does such a description—commonly, if often vaguely, applied to modernity—even refer? Perhaps because of time's plurality, its disparate scales of measurement, and its troublesome subjectivity, its conceptual framework has never been secure. In the mid twentieth century, historians approached time through a vocabulary imported from sociology, anthropology, and critical theory. Lewis Mumford and E.P. Thompson thus described a transition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from qualitative, "natural time" to quantitative, "industrial time" and from "task orientation" to "timed-labor orientation," while Benedict Anderson predicated the emergence of national consciousness on Walter Benjamin's notion of "empty, homogenous time." As a whole, these thinkers tended to imagine modern time consciousness as singular rather than plural, shaped and driven to adoption by a dominant social institution: the monastery, for Mumford; the factory, for Thompson; print, for Anderson. Since the 1990s, however, such grand narratives have been criticized for oversimplifying the nature of time and its development everywhere, including North America. Labor in "preindustrial time," as Michael O'Malley has observed, could be just as "regimented, regular, and intense" as in any factory today.2 Time consciousness is more pluralistic than historians once recognized: multiple forms of sacred time, national time, factory time, settler time, and indigenous time co-exist uneasily. Moreover, abrupt shifts and radical interruptions continue to take place within American time consciousness, as exemplified by the recurrent invocations of an exceptional war time.3 In the absence of a grand unifying narrative, the history of time has developed less as a contiguous mass of topics than as an archipelago. Nevertheless, one recurrent theme is the importance of the nineteenth century as a period of transition. Many of the ways in which society has kept and used...