What’s every week? A single unit that helps keep track of progress through the yr—or a shorthand to explain seven distinct days, each with different qualities? An obsolete religious relic—or an intuitive span of time that has wired itself into humanity’s essence? And above all, why is the week the one basic unit of time that has no basis in astronomical rhythms? David M. Henkin, a professor of history on the University of California, Berkeley, explores these questions in The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are. Within the means of doing so, he also seeks to grasp how the week developed what he considers to be an outsized presence in American history.
Inside The Week, Henkin’s biggest contribution to the evaluation of weekly consciousness is his granular research into the ways through which extraordinary people of yesteryear conceptualized time. A complete chapter is devoted to examining the diaries and correspondence of a various cross-section of Nineteenth-century Americans: freed slaves, a Yankee physician transplanted to the South and even “an elite preteen living in Revolutionary Boston.” With the trove of archival materials that he brings to light, Henkin provides readers with a glimpse into the day-to-day lives of Americans during this time period and tries as an example their different attitudes toward weekly timekeeping.
One among Henkin’s most compelling observations is that industrial work played an instrumental role in entrenching the week into American public consciousness.
One among Henkin’s most compelling observations is that industrial work played an instrumental role in entrenching the week into American public consciousness. He suggests, as an example, that the introduction of the weekly payday in the course of the Industrial Revolution tightened the connection between time and money. Using literature from the temperance movement, Henkin demonstrates how employees, after being paid on Saturday, steadily spent much of their newly earned money on drinks; even beyond this sudden rush of spending, as a employee’s available money levels decreased over the course of every week, it acted as a form of monetary hourglass. Henkin also digs into the ledgers of pawn shops to point out how Saturdays were related to the repaying of debts. The evidence he presents shows that employees would rush over, paycheck in hand, to gather the products they’d pawned the week before as a way to get quick money.
But much more fundamental than the Industrial Revolution, Henkin also proposes that the weekly calendar is so deeply embedded in American culture due to the influence of the Puritans. The settlers of Latest England thought the Church of England’s abundance of feast days (tied to months and dates) reeked of papism and as a substitute selected to prepare their weeks across the weekly observance of the Sabbath. This isn’t a primary argument of the book, nevertheless it is an interesting remark all the identical.
Henkin often presents ideas in a way that gives words for the intuitive experiences and knowledge of readers, including those outside of the academy. On this respect, The Week exemplifies the most effective of what scholarship might be.
But in lots of other instances, Henkin’s argumentation might have been clearer, his objectives more explicit and his mental itinerary less meandering. It isn’t clear what central position Henkin sets out to argue within the book, neither is it obvious what mental debate the writer is participating in. Henkin briefly cites the work of Henri Lefebvre and Eviatar Zerubavel, each sociologists, but he neglects to explain the contours of their studies and, more necessary, how The Week matches into them. By the top of the book, readers might know what “hebdomadal” means, but they’re left wondering what to make of the brand new information concerning the week’s history in the USA.
By the top of the book, readers might know what “hebdomadal” means, but they’re left wondering what to make of the brand new information concerning the week’s history in the USA.
And while Henkin’s work of sifting through diaries and other documentary ephemera is impressive, the evidence he marshals from these records only vaguely suggests that Nineteenth-century Americans considered their time in weeks relatively than months. Plus, any notion of argument gets drowned in a morass of quotations and biographical anecdotes.
Henkin yearns to talk more broadly about how people perceive time, beyond just the week. In several instances, Henkin struggles to exhibit that the week as a unit of time is kind of so extraordinary or unique compared with a timekeeping system centered on months and days. Perhaps as a type of overcorrection, Henkin doubles down on the hegemony of the week, pitting it against the month as if the 2 systems are necessarily in competition to explain the timekeeping mentality of historical Americans. If a diarist seems to have conceptualized time on a weekly basis, based on this view, heaven forbid she also considered time in months and days.
Some groups or individuals can have subscribed to this sort of calendrical dualism. But for most of the historical situations sketched within the book, the dichotomy is artificial and comes across as confirmation bias. Henkin seems to interpret many records in light of his week-centric scholarly framework, relatively than drawing conclusions strictly from the evidence.
Toward the top of the book, Henkin writes that for thinkers of the late 1800s, a proof for the strange phenomenon of the seven-day week was “never thoroughly mastered by philosophical or scholarly inquiry”; even for the shrewdest and most progressive minds of the Gilded Age (including William James, the daddy of recent psychology), “weeks remained mysterious entities.” While Henkin must be commended for reintroducing the subject to the mainstream of historical conversation, his exhaustive research continues to be not enough to remove the enigmatic shroud from the week.
