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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.3 | The History Cooperative
40.3  
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Spring, 2007
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REVIEWS

SECTION 1
SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

At Day's Close: Night in Times Past. By A. Roger Ekirch (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005. xxxii plus 447 pp. $25.95).
At Day's Close is a social history of night in pre-industrial Europe and America, with particularly deep coverage of English sources. In this attractively illustrated and very accessible book, A. Roger Ekirch paints a picture of nighttime as a magical landscape full of "opportunity and promise" for the disenfranchised. But this alternative realm is also characterized by fear of the treacherous unknown. The dark of night could conceal wolves, demons, thieves and arsonists and, perhaps worst of all in urban areas, destructive, upper-class rakes. Ekirch covers uncharted territory here—night has not previously been considered a worthy topic of study in and of itself—but his sources and conclusions are, in many cases, comfortably familiar. Generations of historians have explored evening phenomena like bundling, charivaris, spinnestube, storytelling, witchcraft, fear of fire and fear of the dark. The plentiful anecdotes that form the base of Ekirch's evidence reveal pre-industrial people doing pretty much what we always thought they did at nighttime. Nonetheless, when all of these cases are put together with Ekirch's insights and his path-breaking conclusions about pre-industrial sleep patterns, we have a work that makes a major impact on our understanding of the social history of this era. . . .
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