Time Tribes: How the Railways Made Communities (1840-1900)
When it comes to modern loyalties, scholars of various disciplines have predominantly looked at class, profession, region or nation. While these no doubt represent important sources of identity, in the long nineteenth century TIME emerged as a significant source of individual and collective self-definition. Increasingly, how people related to and made use of their own time marked out their actual and desired status. Time, that most elusive of matters, became instrumental for the making and unmaking of communities that sometimes transcended regional and national contexts. Much of this can be attributed to the railways and the temporal innovations they facilitated, above all standard time and railway timetables. This paper approaches the phenomenon in question – time tribes – through an investigation of British and German railway passengers.
Date: 30 January 2018, 17:30 (Tuesday, 3rd week, Hilary 2018)
Venue: St Anne's College, Woodstock Road OX2 6HS
Venue Details: Seminar Room 3
Speaker: Professor Oliver Zimmer (University of Oxford)
Organising department: Faculty of English Language and Literature
Part of: Science, Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Laura Spence