| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861–1865. By Cheryl A. Wells. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. xii, 195 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8203-2657-7.)

This slim volume rests on the premise that the Civil War disrupted Americans' growing dependence on clock time as the arbiter of modernity. What Cheryl A. Wells calls "battle time" necessarily trumped the clock, forcing citizens and soldiers to recalibrate their daily lives (p. 5). The author heeds sectional differences, observing that Southern planters, attuned to natural rhythms or "seasonal time" (p. 3), were effecting a transition to agrarian labor by the clock in order to maximize productivity and profit—an agenda that had already smitten Northern industrialists. That is, of course, until a war intervened and wrought havoc on orderly temporal progression. The author posits that as volcanic as battle time was, postwar society re-embraced the clock and its promise of a well-heeled future.

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