Event

Penn History Presents: 'Thinking with the Past'

Vanessa Ogle, University of Pennsylvania
The Invention of Global Time

DATE: Monday, April 4, 2016
TIME: 7:00pm-9:00pm
LOCATION: Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine Street Rooms 405/406

How did societies all over the world come to follow the same system of hour-wide time zones? And why did similar efforts to introduce a standardized worldwide calendar fail? Between the 1870s and 1950s,German and French government officials, British social reformers, colonial administrators, Indian nationalists, Arab reformers, Muslim scholars, and League of Nations bureaucrats were joined together in a prolonged, contested, and only partially successful quest to get everybody on the same clock time and on the same universally standardized “World Calendar.” Logistical complications and outright rejection of such plans meant that the invention of modern time only succeeded much later than commonly assumed, while calendar reform never came to pass at all. It was only in the 1940s and 1950s that finally a worldwide system of time zones was widely accepted.

Vanessa Ogle is the Julie and Martin Franklin Assistant Professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has been teaching modern European history since receiving her PhD from Harvard University in 2011. Her recently published book, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870 – 1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015), looks at European and American attempts to standardize clocks and calendars, and how such efforts succeeded or failed outside Europe and North America. She is currently writing a history of tax havens. 

Free and open to the public. To register, please visit:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-invention-of-global-time-tickets-22900103827