| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Alexis McCrossen. Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2000. Pp. xiii, 209. $39.95.

This book by Alexis McCrossen is a complicated, ambitious study of Sunday as a symbol and an institution. In one sense, the book is about how the concepts of work, rest, and leisure changed from the early nineteenth century to the present. But the book is also a study of the way a whole host of groups—especially the Sabbatarian movement—jockeyed for power to impose their definition of Sunday, or "the Sabbath," on the whole culture. Since the goal was usually legislation about what citizens could and could not do on Sunday, the book also provides an unusual perspective on the way freedom of religion affects the American democracy. 1

The structure of the book reveals the extent to which the meaning of Sunday turns on changing meanings of "rest." The first and last chapters examine the meaning of rest as it expands, contracts, and finally becomes so ambiguous as to be almost meaningless by the late twentieth century. By mapping out associations of "rest" from the work-rest contrast of preindustrial America to associations of rest with various forms of leisure and entertainment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, McCrossen finds that religious connotations of the word slowly become only one of many meanings. "Religious, didactic and commercial meanings for Sunday joined rather than replaced religious meanings. In doing so, they bridged the gap between rest and leisure" (p. 16). . . .

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