Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday - Softcover

McCrossen, Alexis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801487870 ISBN 13: 9780801487873

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2001

Synopsis

The mass protests that greeted attempts to open the 1893 Chicago World's Fair on a Sunday seem almost comical today in an era of seven-day convenience and twenty-four-hour shopping. But the issue of the meaning of Sunday is one that has historically given rise to a wide range of strong emotions and pitted a surprising variety of social, religious, and class interests against one another. Whether observed as a day for rest, or time-and-a-half, Sunday has always been a day apart in the American week.Supplementing wide-ranging historical research with the reflections and experiences of ordinary individuals, Alexis McCrossen traces conflicts over the meaning of Sunday that have shaped the day in the United States since 1800. She investigates cultural phenomena such as blue laws and the Sunday newspaper, alongside representations of Sunday in the popular arts. Holy Day, Holiday attends to the history of religion, as well as the histories of labor, leisure, and domesticity.

About this title

Review:

"McCrossen's fine new book gives us a solidly synthetic history of the American Sunday.... Her work is made all the more rewarding by her use of a valuable breadth of primary material, ranging from sheet music to diary entires to Currier and Ives illustrations to bicycle periodicals such as Bicycle World and The Wheel.... McCrossen offers an engaging treatment of changing notions of American rest, leisure, and religious devotion."

--Paul Gutjahr "Journal of American History "

"This book by Alexis McCrossen is a complicated, ambitious study of Sunday as a symbol and an institution.... The book is engagingly written and fun to read. Most readers will find threads of their own history in this melange of 'acceptable' Sunday activities. Quite likely, the threads will include both holy day and holiday."

--Janet Forsythe Fishburn "American Historical Review "

"This compact, elegant, and thoroughly researched volume is the first full-scale cultural history of Sunday observance in the United States. Holy Day, Holiday conveys a vivid sense of the diversity of meanings attached to Sunday throughout American history.... The book's strength lies in the richness of its narrative."

--Michael J. McClymond "Journal of the Early Republic "

"Alexis McCrossen offers the most accessible account available of Sunday's transformation in America from a day of rest to a day of leisure."

--Douglas A. Sweeney "Religious Studies Review "

"As Americans enter the 21st century working and playing harder than ever, Holy Day, Holiday offers much needed historical perspective on the shifting boundaries between labor, leisure, and rest. With great originality and erudition, Alexis McCrossen takes us on a journey through three centuries of American Sundays, and along the way we learn about a great deal more than that."

--Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University

"Holy Day, Holiday excels as a cultural history of Sunday's remaking amid modern forms of domesticity, labor, leisure, and consumption. Alexis McCrossen offers a compelling view of the shifting conflicts over Sunday observance in American culture as the day became an ever-more-complicated mix of rest, recreation, and devotion."

--Leigh Eric Schmidt, Princeton University

"Illuminating Americans' shifting perceptions of work and rest, high and popular culture, the sacred and the secular, Alexis McCrossen's book offers insights aplenty--enough to fill a month of Sundays."

--Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester, author of The Making of Middlebrow Culture

"Ms. McCrossen's fascinating cultural history of Sunday in America mainly covers the 19th-century struggle between conservative Sabbatarians who wanted to keep Sunday as the Lord's day-- as a day of Christian worship-- and liberal Protestants who wanted to turn it into a day of cultural uplift."

--Adam Wolfson "Wall Street Journal "

"Whether it is a day for rest, worship, family time or work overtime, Sunday has distinguished itself on the American calendar. McCrossen considers blue laws and the Sunday paper, and much more in this evocation of 200 years of highly emotional social, religious and class disputes over the meaning of the day."

--Publishers Weekly

About the Author:

Alexis McCrossen is Assistant Professor in the Clements Department of History at Southern Methodist University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0801487870
• ISBN 13: 9780801487873
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224