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Columbia Dissertations and Theses > Doctoral Dissertations
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| Author(s): | Weisman, Raymond J. |
| Title: | Night in America: Staying awake, sleeping and dreaming from colonial to modern times. |
| Advisor(s): | Jackson, Kenneth T. |
| Physical Description: | 799 p. |
| Issue Date: | 2008 |
| Description: | Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4841. Adviser: Kenneth T. Jackson. Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2008. |
| Bookmark as: | http://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:18338 |
| Full Text (ProQuest): | /ac/proxit.jsp?url=http://gateway.proquest.com/ope... |
| Abstract: | Night history achieved significance long before electricity, and requires a holistic approach: wakeful, sleeping, and dreaming experience. Solar dependence, primitive lights, and dawn rising, made early American nights quiet and slumber-devoted. Privation and terror, however, often dominated, deriving from pratfalls, predators, assailants, reputedly toxic air, the supernatural, boredom, loneliness, depression, domestic squabbles, insomnia, sleep disorders, nightmares, illness, psychosis, and death. Storm, flood, earthquake, fire, and riotous upheaval also tormented in greater-than-daytime ways. Wartime contributed unique misery. Night existed as a baneful psycho-cultural entity or gestalt. Yet night had a mundane, often beneficent face, increasingly hosting travel, toil, and associative life. It gifted relaxation, filial affection, camaraderie, communal fetes, aesthetic joys, solitude, intimacy, sensuality, and love. Other delights were sublime horror, thrill-seeking, pranking, underworld slumming, and secret peeping. Commercial entertainments expanded pleasure, and sleep proffered oblivion, rejuvenation, and good dreams. Night's remarkable polarities made it abhorred, yet embraced and even venerated. Night activity had many catalysts, ranging from natural rhythms, to morning urban requisites and enduring desires--for earnings, travel, amusement, edification, secrecy and intimacy. Early activities were sustained by dark adaptation, star and moonlight, multi-sensory seeing, and diverse psychological coping mechanisms. An 1800-1930 revolution in artificial lighting catalyzed change but failed to transform night. Rather, daily life's increasing complexity effected modernization. A conservative anti-nocturnal ideology failed to check expanding after dark life. Night modernization commenced gradually in the mid-1700s, accelerated between 1830 and 1880, and raced to a climax around 1930. It spawned a matrix of urban associations and amusements, "owl" work centers, later hours of rising and retiring, a pro-nocturnal ideology, and mollified insomnia, sleep, and bad dream-related suffering. The ancient evil gestalt disintegrated. Although night had improved, remnants of its old gestalt and polarity yet linger. Night played a remissive, subversive, and increasingly therapeutic and enriching historical role. Something mysterious and wondrous, however, may have been lost. |
| Collection(s): | Doctoral Dissertations |
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