History Of Clocks Research Articles

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

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...

Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life, written by Alexis McCrossen

Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life, written by Alexis McCrossen

これまでの時計の歴史と科学技術の進歩

1．はじめに

Non-Industrial Faces of Modern Times

Non-Industrial Faces of Modern Times Yulia Frumer (bio) Alexis McCrossen, Marking Modern Times On Barak, On Time It has been almost fifty years since E. P. Thompson published his famous article on time, work discipline, and industrial capitalism, in which he asserted that temporal modernity arrived with the industrial world order. Although the historiographical trend it was part of has changed over and over since then, Thompson’s thesis is still often taught as a base-line assumption, as a fact. Alexis McCrossen, in Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013; pp. 272, $48), and On Barak, in On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013; pp. xiii+341, $29.95), join a handful of scholars who challenge Thompson’s thesis, and show how far removed the ideal of temporal modernity, imagined by both contemporaneous ideologues and by later historians, is from reality. Both authors dispute the claim that capitalist industry brought about the emergence of temporal modernity. Both disagree with the notion that modern technologies forced people into obedience to an oppressive time discipline. And both focus on the same historical period critical to the emergence of modern time—the early nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, their approaches are strikingly different. McCrossen shows that industrial developments did not, in fact, achieve what we regard as temporal modernity, and claims that the roots of modern time lie elsewhere. Barak, on the other hand, shows how modern technologies did affect temporal experience but demonstrates that these effects were the opposite of what we associate with the modern temporal order. McCrossen claims that the growing ubiquity of timepieces increased the possibility of time orientation and thus made timekeeping less—not more—oppressive. [End Page 965] Barak argues that the potential oppressiveness of modern time discipline has actually been resisted by people in a range of ways. Finally, Barak attempts to complicate the narrative of an industry-induced modern temporality by showing how different the historical reality was in Egypt. McCrossen, for her part, shows that this narrative is not a good representation of the evolution of temporal modernity in the West, either. McCrossen describes the evolution of modern American time by addressing several layers of factors that shaped the cultural meanings attached to timekeeping. In her account, individual clockmakers produced timepieces that were influenced by cultural and historical currents. These timepieces in turn shaped the ways people thought about time and timekeeping. The intricate and ever-evolving temporal landscape that emerges in McCrossen’s book undermines unidimensional portrayals of the Western world of the second half of the nineteenth century as characterized by industrial time discipline. She demonstrates that the process of achieving what we imagine to be temporal modernity was gradual and was not completed with the emergence of modern transportation and communication technologies. She shows that even after the 1883 announcement of standard time, timekeeping practices in America were highly variable and the act of timekeeping itself was perceived as malleable. Moreover, in spite of explicitly stated aspirations for synchronicity, the desired degree of synchronization was not achieved until well into the twentieth century when technology caught up with the ideal. Synchronicity, at that time, was more aspirational than factual. But if factories and railroads did not bring temporal modernity, what did? What caused the longing for synchronicity that took decades to achieve and that eventually brought about changes in temporal practices? McCrossen’s answer is that it was the growing ubiquity of timepieces—first watches and then gigantic public clocks—that provoked the impulse to follow their temporal guidance. She agrees that railroad clocks captured the public imagination, but she also tells us that in reality railroad clocks comprised fewer than six percent of all public clocks. Consequently it was other public timepieces that solidified standard time as a reality. The growing visibility of time-measurement manifested on public time-telling devices encouraged the aspiration to standardization and synchronization. These public time-telling devices were civic and commercial clocks erected by jewelers and merchants, as well as by the federal government, which used magnificent clock-faces adorned with...

Alexis McCrossen, Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 272pp. 66 halftones. 2 tables. £31.50; $45.00.

Alexis McCrossen, Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 272pp. 66 halftones. 2 tables. £31.50; $45.00. - Volume 42 Issue 3

Modern Time as Historical Artifact

Modern Time as Historical Artifact David E. Nye (bio) Alexis McCrossen. Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 255pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $45.00. Molly McCarthy. The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 302pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $90.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper). These two excellent books explore different aspects of how Americans have understood and used time since the late eighteenth century. Alexis McCrossen charts the rise and decline of public clocks, installed on churches, town halls, office buildings, railroad stations, or other prominent sites. She sees these clocks as “markers of modernity.” First at a local level and then with the standardization of time at the national level, bells, clocks, and falling balls not only divided time into shared units of experience but also encouraged Americans to internalize mechanical rhythms, replacing a sense of time based on natural observation. At the apex of public-clock installation between 1871 and 1911, 15,000 were added to the thousands that had been put up in previous decades (p. 189). If increasing numbers of people owned watches, they nevertheless checked and adjusted them against public timekeepers. Molly McCarthy tackles the related subject of daily planners. At roughly the same historical moment that public clocks became prominent, planners emerged from the back pages of almanacs to become a profitable publication in their own right, and even in the digital present they continue to be sold to millions of Americans. While a daily planner ostensibly helps keep track of future appointments and present expenses, in practice their owners often have used them to record retrospectively the events of each day. These volumes are fascinating in themselves, but both also can be viewed as studies of the historical transition that has led to the present 24/7 world, where timekeeping is built into a myriad of devices that record and, to some degree, direct our actions. Well before these two studies, the cultural history of time was explored by anthropologists interested in the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis that each language structures a sense of space/time relations1 and by [End Page 54] labor historians following the groundbreaking works of E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman.2 Much important work has been done since, seemingly all of it referenced in the books under review. A short list of important studies published since 2000 includes books by David Landes, Anthony Aveni, Carlene Stephens, and Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift.3 In addition, Michael O’Malley’s Keeping Watch, a fine overview focused on the United States, appears to have been a touchstone for both McCarthy and McCrossen.4 Neither author provides a bibliography, an omission presumably dictated by the publisher. McCrossen argues that modernity had been achieved “when time and space ceased to pose meaningful barriers to circulation of news, ideas, goods, and people” (p. 18). Establishment of public time was crucial to breaking down these barriers, making it possible, for example, for railroad timetables to be harmonized or for stock-market trading to be synchronized through the telegraph system. She begins with the story of a magnificent six-ton Elgin clock erected in 1928 on the exterior of the new Jeweler’s Building in Chicago. It was meant to symbolize both the professional skill of jewelers, who had long sold and repaired clocks and watches, and the success of the Elgin National Watch Company that had its headquarters on several floors of the building. Forty years later, however, the jewelers had vacated the building and Elgin had gone out of business. Its rivals had either moved to Switzerland (Hamilton, Waltham, Gruen) or had disappeared (E. Howard and Seth Thomas). The era of large American public clocks had ended, and a Chinese company owned the Elgin name. These transformations of the clock and watch industry after 1930 are not McCrossen’s concern, however. She has written not a business history but a cultural history, and accordingly the following chapter turns the clock back to the introduction of bells in colonial Philadelphia and to the nation’s first public clocks, followed by...

Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life. By Alexis McCrossen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. xvi plus 255 pp. $45.00)

Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life. By Alexis McCrossen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. xvi plus 255 pp. $45.00)

Alexis McCrossen. Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life.

Alexis McCrossen. Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life.

Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life

Journal Article Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life Get access Alexis McCrossen. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. xvi, 255 pp. $45.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 1, June 2014, Page 279, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau316 Published: 01 June 2014

Marking modern times: a history of clocks, watches, and other timekeepers in American life

The public spaces and buildings of the United States are home to many thousands of timepieces - bells, time balls, and clock faces - that tower over urban streets, peek out from lobbies, and gleam in store windows. And in the streets and squares beneath them, men, women, and children wear wristwatches of all kinds. Americans have decorated their homes with clocks and included them in their poetry, sermons, stories, and songs. As political instruments, social tools, and cultural symbols, these personal and public timekeepers have enjoyed a broad currency in art, life, and culture. In Marking Modern Times, Alexis McCrossen relates how the American preoccupation with time led people from across social classes to acquire watches and clocks. While noting the difficulties in regulating and synchronizing so many timepieces, McCrossen expands our understanding of the development of modern time discipline, delving into the ways we have standardized time and describing how timekeepers have served as political, social, and cultural tools in a society that doesn't merely value time, but regards access to time as a natural-born right, a privilege of being an American.

The History of Clocks and Watches

The History of Clocks and Watches