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

Abstract

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,