Sunday

This historical essay seeks to frame Sunday as a marker of time and a setting for memory. Although the article's examples come from nineteenth-century United States, its larger argument – that spaces of time function as settings for memory – can be applied to other geographic regions and chronological eras. The article opens and closes with Sunday at sea; the body addresses Sunday as a site for religious, domestic, and national memories

Time Balls: Marking Modem Times in Urban America, 1877-1922

This article describes time balls, a long forgotten technology for marking the time. It focusses on the period between 1877 and 1922, when several dozen time balls were erected around the United States and many more were requested. Additionally, the essay provides a history of time balls in the United States from their first appearance in 1845 to the final drop of one in 1936. It argues that time balls were primarily monuments to modernity, rather than navigational devices or instruments for public dissemination of the correct time. Résumé Cet article décrit les ballons horaires, une technologie depuis longtemps oubliée qui a jadis servi à marquer l'heure. Il y est surtout question de la période de 1877 à 1922, alors que plusieurs dizaines de ballons horaires ont été installés aux États-Unis et que l'on en réclamait davantage. L'article présente aussi l'histoire des ballons horaires aux États-Unis, de leur apparition en 1845 à la chute du dernier en 1936. On y explique que les ballons horaires étaient principalement des monuments à la modernité, plutôt que des instruments de navigation ou des mécanismes permettant de donner l'heure juste au public

The present: an "unknown time" in the German Kaiserreich around 1900

In her contribution, Rothauge focuses on assumptions of ‘the present’ in the German Kaiserreich around 1900. Historical sources reveal that many contemporaries considered present time(s) to be highly dynamic and heterogeneous, thus confusing and partly ‘unknown’. Rothauge links this to several official initiatives preoccupied with synchronising different time regimes. She argues that these attempts initially led to a yet again increased pluralisation of both the notions and uses of ‘the present’. According to this, the master narrative of (high) modernity as being characterised by just one specific temporal experience, namely that of an ever increasing acceleration, needs to be looked at in a more differentiated way, paying more attention to the fact that people actively take part in the construction of temporal discourses