A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

I was long drawn to the timeless charm of nineteenth-century New England villages: the stately homes, the village greens, the orderly landscapes, and the dominant white-steepled churches (sometimes sporting a large clock). Only over time did I learn that such villages were purposely contrived to assert regional identity (and racial superiority) during a period when America was actively inventing itself at both regional and national levels. Questions about America’s identity were debated with a passion and a deep sense of moral purpose among citizens at every level of society.

It is within this dynamic era that Thomas Allen places A Republic in Time. Allen seeks to convince readers that time and timekeeping played a crucial, and previously underrated, role in the shaping of America’s national identity. He explores the ways in which different people used and interpreted time to help create and affirm such identity. Drawing on political theory, literary narrative, art, and material culture, he makes the important point that opinions were rarely consistent, but then, neither were attitudes about the use of time, which were more akin to a heterogeneous series of “ongoing negotiations.” This perspective is in keeping with that of the “New Americanists” who reject the “mythos” of a single, homogeneous national state and embrace America’s heterogeneous impulses as the norm (p. 9).

Five chapters cover discrete topics relating to America’s sense of itself as a “republic in time.” The first investigates the political paradoxes of America as a nation in time as well as space. The next, “Material Time,” is of most interest to historians of technology. It focuses on timekeeping devices as key objects for exploring the richly layered and extremely diverse individual and local experiences with time and timekeeping—a blend of technology, nature, history, and the numinous realm of religion. The other three chapters rely primarily on literary and artistic sources: Catherine Beecher’s and Henry David Thoreau’s divergent approaches to time, the newly emerging concept of “deep time,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s attempts to link “deep time” to a reimagined sense of America’s political future.

A Republic in Time is not a quick read. The constant switch between disciplines can be difficult to follow, and I found Allen’s style to be somewhat dense. But I applaud his pioneering interdisciplinary approach, which is more likely to draw connections and reveal new insights than more standard works from a single field. By comparing different bodies of knowledge, he has created new knowledge, and he provides the groundwork for additional analyses. Recent scholars of time and timekeeping generally agree that Americans did not suddenly change their lives when clocks became available. The transition to “clock time” was both gradual and uneven. While not dismissing or discounting this scholarship, Allen makes a convincing argument that the national discourse about time was integrally connected with concurrent debates about national identity. By integrating time, politics, and national identity, he deepens and shifts the scholarship of time and timekeeping, adding new variations, subtleties, and dimensions.

In an era before the institution of standard time forced people to address their relationship with time more overtly, the ways in which people chose to incorporate time into their lives constituted a heterogeneous collection of local, individual, fragmentary, transient responses that slowly evolved into the “threads out of which the fabric of national belonging” were being woven (p. 11). In the final summation, it is this very heterogeneity that defines the American nation. The diverse points of view, the struggles and conflicts between different individuals and groups—this is our national culture. Although historical synthesis and consistency are perhaps more comforting, new scholarship like A Republic in Time reveals that differences, conflicts, and exceptions are the norm. And, when you think about it, isn’t that much more in keeping with human nature?