Marking Modern Times

Marking Modern Times
Author: Alexis McCrossen
Publsiher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2013-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226014869

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In Marking Modern Times, Alexis McCrossen relates how the American preoccupation with time led people from across social classes to acquire watches and clocks, and expands our understanding of the ways we have standardized time and have made timekeepers serve as political, social, and cultural tools in a society that not merely values time, but regards access to it as a natural-born right.

Marking Modern Times

Marking Modern Times
Author: Alexis McCrossen
Publsiher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2013-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226015057

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“Tells a story of a period when the quest for accurate timekeeping became an obsession in the US.” —Choice 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. And 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. “A precise, acute, and well-measured monograph.” —Journal of Social History “Important and engaging.” —Journal of American History “ An innovative contribution on a key historical shift in modern life.” —Urban History “An authoritative narrative of how and where time and timepieces were distributed in the period.” —Reviews in American History

Marking Time

Marking Time
Author: Duncan Steel
Publsiher: Turner Publishing Company
Total Pages: 499
Release: 2007-08-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780470245088

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"If you lie awake worrying about the overnight transition from December 31, 1 b.c., to January 1, a.d. 1 (there is no year zero), then you will enjoy Duncan Steel's Marking Time."--American Scientist "No book could serve as a better guide to the cumulative invention that defines the imaginary threshold to the new millennium."--Booklist A Fascinating March through History and the Evolution of the Modern-Day Calendar . . . In this vivid, fast-moving narrative, you'll discover the surprising story of how our modern calendar came about and how it has changed dramatically through the years. Acclaimed author Duncan Steel explores each major step in creating the current calendar along with the many different systems for defining the number of days in a week, the length of a month, and the number of days in a year. From the definition of the lunar month by Meton of Athens in 432 b.c. to the roles played by Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, and Isaac Newton to present-day proposals to reform our calendar, this entertaining read also presents "timely" tidbits that will take you across the full span of recorded history. Find out how and why comets have been used as clocks, why there is no year zero between 1 b.c. and a.d. 1, and why for centuries Britain and its colonies rang in the New Year on March 25th. Marking Time will leave you with a sense of awe at the haphazard nature of our calendar's development. Once you've read this eye-opening book, you'll never look at the calendar the same way again.

Marking Time

Marking Time
Author: Nicole R. Fleetwood
Publsiher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2020-04-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780674919228

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"A powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America’s prison system. More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of deprivation and abuse and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America’s prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them. Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author’s own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions—including solitary confinement—these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender. The impact of their art, Fleetwood observes, can be felt far beyond prison walls. Their bold works, many of which are being published for the first time in this volume, have opened new possibilities in American art. As the movement to transform the country’s criminal justice system grows, art provides the imprisoned with a political voice. Their works testify to the economic and racial injustices that underpin American punishment and offer a new vision of freedom for the twenty-first century."

English in Modern Times

English in Modern Times
Author: Joan C Beal
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2014-02-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781134664092

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English in Modern Times describes the development of the English language from 1700 until 1945, and argues that it is in the course of this later modern English period that the characteristics of 'modern' English evolved. This is the first undergraduate text to cover the whole of this important period, which has been called the 'Cinderella' of English historical linguistics because of its lack of representation in scholarly literature. This book is sociohistorical in orientation, arguing that social changes in the Anglophone world need to be taken into account if we are to understand the linguistic changes that occurred during this period. Further chapters deal with changes in vocabulary, syntax and morphology and phonology and with the attempts of lexicographers, grammarians and elocutionists to arrest and control these changes by codifying the language. Unlike many earlier histories of English, 'English in Modern Times' does not define 'English' as confined to Standard (English) English, but also considers the development of extraterritorial Englishes and non-standard varieties of British English in the Later Modern period.

Marking Time

Marking Time
Author: Rev. Barbara K. Lundblad
Publsiher: Abingdon Press
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2010-09-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781426721014

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The preacher is too often caught between biblical and contemporary time. Residing first in one, then in the other, the preacher must somehow find a way to bring the two times -- separate as they might seem -- together. The temptation of course is to capitulate to one side or the other of this tension. The preacher can reside solely in the biblical time, offering the congregation what amounts to weekly lectures on history and archeology, spiced up with the occasional moralistic conclusion. Or, setting up shop permanently in contemporary time, she or he can offer commentaries on society and culture that occasionally tip their hats in the direction of Scripture. A third way, contends Barbara Lundblad, lies in marking time, a way of allowing biblical time to speak to the contemporary world and vice versa. When the preacher marks time, he or she admits that there can be no one-to-one correspondence between the world of the text and the world of the congregation. Nevertheless, the preacher demonstrates that when the biblical text is let loose upon our day to day existence, it challenges and judges, redeems and sanctifies it, infusing it with new meaning. Likewise, contemporary situations, needs, and experiences open up new possibilities within Scripture, allowing the congregation to see truth in the text they had never before discovered there, allowing them to discern the leading of the Spirit through the text and into the present moment. In this volume, which grows out of Lundblad's 2000 Beecher Lectures delivered at Yale Divinity School, the author presents both an argument for the ongoing intersection of the biblical and contemporary worlds, and examples of how that intersection might take place.

Untimely Democracy

Untimely Democracy
Author: Gregory Laski
Publsiher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2017-09-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780190642808

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From the abolition era to the Civil Rights movement to the age of Obama, the promise of perfectibility and improvement resonates in the story of American democracy. But what exactly does racial "progress" mean, and how do we recognize and achieve it? Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress After Slavery uncovers a surprising answer to this question in the writings of American authors and activists, both black and white. Conventional narratives of democracy stretching from Thomas Jefferson's America to our own posit a purposeful break between past and present as the key to the viability of this political form--the only way to ensure its continual development. But for Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, Callie House, and the other figures examined in this book, the campaign to secure liberty and equality for all citizens proceeds most potently when it refuses the precepts of progressive time. Placing these authors' post-Civil War writings into dialogue with debates about racial optimism and pessimism, tracts on progress, and accounts of ex-slave pension activism, and extending their insights into our contemporary period, Laski recovers late-nineteenth-century literature as a vibrant site for doing political theory. Untimely Democracy ultimately shows how one of the bleakest periods in American racial history provided fertile terrain for a radical reconstruction of our most fundamental assumptions about this political system. Offering resources for moments when the march of progress seems to stutter and even stop, this book invites us to reconsider just what democracy can make possible.

Marking Time

Marking Time
Author: Fred Brown
Publsiher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 1572333308

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The roadside historical markers of East Tennessee highlight the fascinating personalities and significant events of a culturally and historically rich region. Forthree years, Knoxville News Sentinel columnist Fred Brown presented the storiesbehind the local markers placed by the Tennessee Historical Commission. He searchedthe highways and back roads of East Tennessee, tracking down markers with directionsthat were sometimes no more specific than ?Highway 11, Greene County.'Arranged by county, the entries link East Tennessee's past and present and highlightthe enormous diversity of the state's history from its prehistoric past through its involvement in World War II. The markers detail bitter struggles with Native Americans in the eighteenth century, but also explain the unique contribution of Cherokee culture and civilization, such as Sequoyah's development of the Cherokee syllabary. Brown commemorates the numerous Civil War sites throughout the region, but he also includes the service of East Tennesseans in later wars. One marker commemorates Kiffin Yates Rockwell, a founding pilot of the Lafayete Escadrille, a famed squadron of aviators in World War I. Another marker details the achievements of Sgt. Elbert L. Kinser of Greene County, who was posthumously decorated for his leadership of a First Marine Division Rifle Platoon on Okinawa.The markers also showcase East Tennessee's unique political history. They tell thestory of the ?lost state? of Franklin in the 1780s and record the region's efforts to secede from the state when Tennessee left the Union in 1861. Brown's narrative also explains the nature of opposing political factions throughout the decades through the biographies of their leaders, such as Elihu Embree, a Quaker abolitionist who founded an antislavery paper in East Tennessee.From the vantage of the armchair or out on the road, Marking Time is a surprisingand engaging trip on the byways of East Tennessee's politics, culture, and history through the stories of the men and women who shaped the state.