Can we teach undergraduates the history of time?

I begin with a confession: I did not pay much attention to time in my undergraduate studies. In my physical and social science courses, I encountered it as a “variable” or “factor,” the x-axis underneath graphs of compounding interest and thermodynamic reactions. It hovered there in the background for 4 years, unexamined. Even in my courses on history, ostensibly dealing with “change over time,” the emphasis was on “change” rather than “time.” I memorized timelines without ever thinking much about temporality itself. Later, when I became a professional historian and developed a research interest in the history of time, I decided to teach an undergraduate course on the topic. I was excited by the prospect of presenting a subject missing from my own education. I hoped that an inherently global subject might resonate well with my students in Singapore, most of whom specialize in Southeast and East Asian history and do not take a single history course in my area of specialization, North America.

Unfortunately, I did not find many models for the course I had imagined. To get a sense of how the subject was taught, I visited Open Syllabus, a website developed at Columbia University that analyzes nine million English-language syllabi. What I learned convinced me that my own undergraduate experience was rather typical. Of the 20 most commonly taught history titles to mention “time,” only one actually examines it: E.P. Thompson’s classic “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967). By contrast, the other 19 texts invoke “time” merely as a synonym for “period.” For all its canonicity, Thompson’s article appears far more often alongside histories of industrialization than of temporality. Similarly, one of the texts I thought especially accessible to undergraduates, David Landes’ Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, appeared on only five syllabi in 2018 (the last year analyzed by Open Syllabus), only a tenth as many as the author’s next book (1998).

In this essay, I share my experience developing and teaching a third-year undergraduate course on the subject, which I have taught three times since 2018. My approach has been somewhat unconventional in comparison to most history courses offered by my programme, including the one I teach on the politics of popular culture. As is usual, the latter is organized almost exclusively around written and audiovisual “texts” and follows a neat arc (in this case, from the early 19th century to the Internet era). The history of time, which predates capitalist modernity, and structures all human experience, is not so easily bracketed into a 13-week semester. The history of time varies with, yet also transcends, the particularities of any given society. It is global history in the first instance, and global history is notoriously difficult to teach. In its scale and multiplicity, the history of time does not lend itself easily to chronology. When does it begin, and when does it end? Similarly, what belongs? What does not?

Yet there are problems even more basic than content or periodization. How do we teach a subject that, despite its universality, we so rarely analyze or describe? During the first session I asked students to describe what time was. Without exception, they talked only about how time is kept: the progression from sundials to atomic clocks, the development of faster digital communications, or the problems solved by time standards. They felt convinced that this progression toward precise and accurate time-keeping mattered but were generally unable to say why. Like my undergraduate self, the students in my history programme had not thought much about their own experiences of time beyond its modern methods of measurement. They had yet to consider how it has been culturally represented or politicized, industrially managed, or scientifically imagined in the past.

The course’s thematic organization is designed to solve the first problem, of scope. The thematic approach makes it possible to discuss ninth-century water clocks in the Song Dynasty alongside those of classical Greece a millennium earlier. To answer the second difficulty, of discussing what time is, the course incorporates a large number of experiential and autoethnographic exercises: undergoing time fasts, building time clocks, and curating time capsules. It also involves much in-class discussion of the basic disciplinary question never asked in my own undergraduate history courses: what do historians mean by “time”?

One way that my students learn to think more critically about clock time is by recreating one of its historical forms. Borrowing an experiential exercise from the mathematics classroom (Plofker 2011), I provide students with a set of cheap objects (cups, corks, needles, and straws) with which to construct water clocks developed thousands of years ago. The team whose water clock most accurately measures the length of Ravel’s Bolero wins the challenge. Witnessing the limitations of such devices firsthand, we then discuss some of the activities that water clocks managed to facilitate in antiquity: the equal apportionment of oration and testimony, the regulation of torture, the division of nocturnal guard duty, the regulation of monastic schedules, etc. These questions help set up a key debate: did the invention of time-keepers spur, or result from, the desire to make time-keeping more precise? I assign a sampling of Western historians’ views on this question—Landes (1983), Le Goff (1980), and Dohrn-van Rossum (1996)—and ask students to assess the degree of time-consciousness supposedly evident within the Rule of Saint Benedict (516). While building water clocks does not advance students’ engineering skills, it does help students relate to a world that once relied upon them, and sets up our screening of Longitude, based on Dava Sobel’s account (1995) of the invention of the marine chronometer.

As we gather from our readings on the development of time standards in the nineteenth-century United States (McCrossen 2013) and early twentieth-century Mumbai (Ogle 2015), the history of time is often closely linked to urbanization. With its dense geography, Singapore is an ideal place to ask how urban space affects the experience of time. My students gain a more direct appreciation of that relationship by carrying out an autoethnographic exercise, inspired by a “technology fast” task Hoop (2012) designed to help students engage with questions of social theory. In our course’s version, students spend a weekend refraining from checking or asking the time, while moving about the city on their errands, recording their observations in a journal.

Several themes emerge from these journals: the difficulty of avoiding time-keepers at home (one student reported finding two dozen); the ease with which we can infer the time of day from activities in the dormitories; the relative paucity of such cues in places one might expect (a park) or might not (the mall); and the difficulty of escaping the sense that one knows, or should know, the time. One lesson that students take from their autoethnographies is how difficult it is to put the changing feeling of time into words. Asked to describe their experience, students usually cannot get much further than the dichotomies between free and unfree time, punctuality and lateness, hurry and leisure. Nevertheless, they recognize that the phenomenological experience of time for themselves—and presumably for our historical subjects—is far richer than these simple oppositions suggest.

To further build our temporal lexicon, we read passages from well-known novels and television shows that center temporal experience: disorientation in Robinson Crusoe (1719), déjà vu in Russian Doll (2019), and “nowness” in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), for instance. Then, with this vocabulary, students revise their autoethnographies. While this improves their written expression, it also makes them more attentive to the traces of temporal experience found in primary sources. With help from excerpts of Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983), students come to better appreciate how difficult it is to connect their own experience of time with its objective study. These experiential exercises deepen the student’s temporal reflexivity, allowing the course to progress onto more conventional pedagogical terrain. One student compared her experience during the Covid-19 lockdown to the protagonist’s predicament in Russian Doll. She felt herself moving in “a sort of spiral” around her daily routine, as we crept slowly toward the planned end of the lockdown. She wondered if people had felt this way during plagues in the past.

Having developed some comfort with talking about time, we move onto the course’s main themes: labor, politics, science, and culture. The labor history unit begins, perhaps inevitably, with the E.P. Thompson article earlier mentioned (1967). Thompson’s article is useful both for its novel insights as well as its metropolitan bias. Our discussion of it examines the parallels between British efforts to impose time-discipline on its working class at home and its Chinese, Indian, and Malay colonial subjects in Malaya. We also examine a short excerpt of a discussion of time-discipline on an American slave plantation (Smith 1997), and in the clerical professions (Clark 2020). Providing students with examples of British authorities’ descriptions of Chinese as punctual and fast-working, and Malays undisciplined, I ask students to consider how particular economic developments shaped these stereotypes in our part of the world. While these particular examples may not resonate as well outside Southeast Asia, there are similar temporal stereotypes to be found everywhere. These discussions sometimes begin in uncomfortable silence, since race is not typically discussed in the classroom here, but more than one student has told me the discussion is cathartic.

The course turns next to the political uses of historical time. Normally, I would consider The Machiavellian Moment (1975), J.G.A. Pocock’s influential history of republican ideology, too difficult for undergraduates. But after learning about telos in Abrahamic religions through our discussion of the Rule of Saint Benedict, students are well-prepared to understand how thinkers from the Renaissance and the Age of Revolutions used classical political thought, Christian eschatology, and contemporary events to re-shape their understanding of the birth and death of republican societies. The discussion becomes concrete when we locate the tropes Pocock describes in political speeches that students have already read, such as Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” (1947) and Lee Kuan Yew’s “Proclamation of Singapore” (1963). We also look at equivalent examples from imperial China (Struve 2005).

This unit especially produces remarkable historical insights from students. When I began teaching the course, many Singaporeans had begun to ask why the 200th anniversary of Singapore’s founding as a British colony in 1819 was being treated as the nation’s starting point, despite its earlier history. One student connected this problematic historiographical conceit with “the conception of time as linear and episodic” in Singaporean history education. Another wrote a paper about the peculiar position of Singapore in historical time. On the one hand, the nation-state is relatively young (having only declared independence in 1965); on the other, its populations claim ancestry with some of the oldest civilizations (China and India) in history.

To help segue from political and historical time to deep time, from the imagined future to the deep past, we embark after the midterm on another unconventional task: designating an object for internment in a time capsule, to be opened in a century’s time. Along with an image of the object, students submit short explanations of their choices—often a piece of consumer electronics, monetary currency, or documentation of a recent cultural event. Our choices are informed by Nick Yablon’s fascinating history of the time capsule (2019), which traces its development to late 19th-century Americans’ fears of an impending class war. One student’s final essay connected these fears to a time capsule launched in Singapore shortly after its independence from Malaysia, when the nation was gripped by anxieties about its survival as a small city-state. This helps the class reflect on how our own current anxieties (mostly to do with climate change) have informed our designation of certain objects as ephemeral and/or worthy of preservation. This exercise is especially useful for history students, many of whom intend to pursue careers in historic preservation.

At my STEM-centric university, the unit on deep time proves the easiest to teach. Students enter the classroom knowing all that might be required about the discoveries of Darwin and Wallace (especially the latter, who collected many of his specimens from Singapore.) What they tend not to know is how much theories of natural selection depended upon the recent recognition of geological time, or how we might reconcile deep time with shallow time (the challenge of the Anthropocene). To provoke thought on this subject, we use Jo Ellen Barnett’s discussion (1998) of the geological time revolution in the 19th-century British Isles. We continue with Daniel Lord Smail’s On Deep History and the Brain (2007), a readable extended essay that examines how deep time and shallow time were divided up between the disciplines: into evolutionary human psychology and sociobiology on the one hand, and history and other humanities subjects on the other. Smail urges evolutionary psychologists and socio-biologists to reconsider the powerful influence of culture on physical evolution, and conversely, the influence of the brain’s evolution on human history. By the end of the discussion, students come away with a sharper understanding of the temporal perspectives that implicitly underlie (and fracture) the disciplines. As an interdisciplinary moment, Smail’s book is a highlight.

The final unit of the course—my favorite, as a specialist in the topic—examines the evolving technology and language of visual narrative. Consistent with the findings of visual literacy educators (Brumberger 2016), I have found that despite daily immersion in visual images and frequent familiarity with digital photo and video editing applications, my students generally begin with little prior knowledge of the history of visual media, or of the formal grammar of visual storytelling. I give a short lecture on the history of modern visual storytelling, with attention to the development of the daguerreotype and proto-cinematic technologies, the emergence of instantaneous photography, the development of the comic strip, and the invention of silent film storylines, before concluding with a discussion of how cuts—perhaps the most distinctive feature of cinema as a temporal art-form—operate.

Happily, I can report that the course has worked; at least, it is positively reviewed and oversubscribed. It has also produced some fascinating student research papers and group presentations. Topics have included the Hong Kong Countdown Clock in Tiananmen Square, the unique rhythms of cricket matches, a time capsule interred 40 years ago at a local junior college, comparisons of Daoist and Confucian concepts of time, and the temporal experiences of prisoners-of-war held on the island during World War II.

Still, I have lingering doubts about how truly “global” it is. The course devotes substantial attention to gendered, colonial time, and includes case studies from imperial China, South Asia, and the Upper Nile. It does not however cover much of the work on temporality that I find interesting in American Studies on queer (Freeman 2010, Luciano 2007), Afrofuturist (Yaszek 2006; Zamalin 2019) and Afropessimist (Wilderson 2020), and indigenous temporalities (Rifkin 2017). I plan to introduce some of this scholarship into the unit of the course dealing with political and historical time. At the same time, I am mindful that the aforementioned literature implicitly assumes more interest or familiarity with the European or American past than my students have. As already mentioned, most of my students do not study North American history (which has been superseded by interest in China), and lack contextual knowledge of Anglo-American settler colonialism, North American indigeneity, and African-American experience. Some of my students have opined that the discussions of race on American campuses are irrelevant to Singapore, which prides itself on racial harmony. Discussions of queer time presents its own difficulties in Singapore, where homosexuality remains illegal and circumscribed as an academic subject.

Put differently, the challenge is not simply in diversifying the history of time, but in a way that is locally meaningful and possible. In this regard, I am more confident about incorporating newer scholarship on the history of temporality in Southeast Asia, some of which has only appeared since I first developed the module (Sastrawan 2020). I was already aware when I developed the course that the history of time itself is plural. What I have learned in the process of offering the course in Singapore is that neither is there a single history of time that can be taught everywhere. And yet I remain convinced that the subject deserves more coverage in undergraduate history programmes everywhere.