In antebellum America, both North and South emerged as modernizing,
capitalist societies. Work bells, clock towers, and personal
time-pieces increasingly instilled discipline on one's day, which
already was ordered by religious custom and nature's rhythms. The
Civil War changed that, argues Cheryl A. Wells. Overriding
antebellum schedules, war played havoc with people's perception and
use of time. For those closest to the fighting, the war's effect on
time included disrupted patterns of sleep, extended hours of work,
conflated hours of leisure, indefinite prison sentences, challenges
to the gender order, and desecration of the Sabbath. Wells calls
this phenomenon ""battle time."" To create a modern war machine
military officers tried to graft the antebellum authority of the
clock onto the actual and mental terrain of the Civil War. However,
as Wells's coverage of the Manassas and Gettysburg battles shows,
military engagements followed their own logic, often without regard
for the discipline imposed by clocks. Wells also looks at how
battle time's effects spilled over into periods of inaction, and
she covers not only the experiences of soldiers but also those of
nurses, prisoners of war, slaves, and civilians. After the war,
women returned, essentially, to an antebellum temporal world, says
Wells. Elsewhere, however, postwar temporalities were complicated
as freedmen and planters, and workers and industrialists,
renegotiated terms of labor within parameters set by the clock and
nature. A crucial juncture on America's path to an ordered
relationship to time, the Civil War had an acute effect on the
nation's progress toward a modernity marked by multiple,
interpenetrating times largely based on the clock.
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