The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are by David M. Henkin

Author:David M. Henkin [Henkin, David M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300263060
Google: 8ghMEAAAQBAJ
Published: 2021-11-16T09:45:28.523026+00:00

FIGURE 3. Calendar and entries from the diary of Pastor Franz Julius Biltz, 1862. Image courtesy of Concordia Historical Institute, St. Louis, Missouri.

Because journal manuscripts from this era are so ubiquitous and voluminous, it would be nearly impossible to plot with meaningful precision the appearance of day names at the head of their daily entries.15 Nonetheless, a few broad patterns emerge from any sustained encounter with nineteenth-century U.S. diaries. First, the overwhelming majority of blank-book diaries identify their entries as days in a week as well as dates in a month. To be sure, some surviving diaries (especially from earlier in the century) use Gregorian dates exclusively; other diaries note the weekdays only on Sunday.16 But such exceptions grew rare over the course of the antebellum period. The drift toward naming weekdays appears even in the course of particular journals. Whereas very few diaries start by noting the weekday and then stop, the opposite shift appears frequently. Hiram Kellogg Northway began keeping a journal in his late twenties, while working for a merchant in Stewartsboro, Tennessee, in 1851. He wrote frequently and methodically, indicating the date, month, and year of each entry, as well as the weather. A few weeks into the diary, he began to note the weekday as well and then never looked back. Ferdinand Hercher, an Iowan serving in the Union army, began noting Gregorian dates exclusively in his wartime “daybook,” but several months into his service he too began tracking weekdays. A more famous diarist, the Virginia secessionist leader Edmund Ruffin, identified Sundays but no other weekdays atop his regular daily entries from his journal’s beginning in 1856. Then suddenly, in December 1862, he writes: “Dec. 15. Monday. Edmund [his son] left us for Marlbourne.” Every subsequent entry names the day of the week, conforming to the general practice. Other journals, typically short-term ones like that of John Evans Brown, an overland migrant to California during the gold rush, used only weekdays at the head of most of their daily entries.17 For the most part, the ritual of keeping a diary entailed naming and distinguishing weekdays.

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