| Before Thomas Edison, light and fire were thought to be one and the same. Turns out, they were separate things altogether. This book takes a similar relationship, that of time and place, and shows how they, too, were once inseparable. Before the railroads necessitated the creation of Standard Time zones in 1883, time keeping was a local affair. Small towns set their own pace according to the rising and setting of the sun. Our sudden interconnectedness, both physically and through inventions like the telegraph, changed our concept of time and place forever. Here, historic preservationist Howard Mansfield looks at a few of the clocks we carry. He explores time in a once common, now-vanished dry-goods store, in the invention of Continuous Vaudeville, in an old mill family defending water rights, in an 1880s Broadway hit that is still performed annually, and in the lingering effects of a bloody war that one historian calls the fi rst American Revolution-a war many Americans don't even know happened. |
