in campaigns and have a role that might be well out of proportion to their actual political experience. i mean, are there professional campaigns here? no question about it. but it's still a place where the citizen can take a part, and we take pride in that. >> booktv is in concord, new hampshire, to learn more about its literary scene. up next, we speak with author howard mansfield about his book that explains how the concept of time zones came about. >> time first meant where the sun was in the sky. noon is where the sun is exactly overhead at that time. in your field, in your town, in your place that's it. so time is very local. time is nature. time is the course of the sun across the sky, it's the course of the moon, it's the seasons. and what happens is that clocks come along.

our first clocks represent time. clocks represent nature. clocks mimics the passages. and then by the end of the 19th century, clocks are time and nature is forgotten. and this happens for a lot of different reasons; industrialization, the railroad plays a huge role in this. you're no longer just on a little hillside in your little village. you need more accurate time if you're taking the train, because now you're going from one local place to another local place to another local place. you might get off, and there'll be two different clocks on the train platform. and that's when the railroads, essentially, actually create time zones, in 1883. it's the railroads that do it, not the government, not congress. the other thing to understand about the railroad is in the 19th century the railroad is everything. i mean, it is the shaping technology. people look to it to get rich, people look to it to unite our

bands, hold this union together, it's going to do god's work, it's going to bring progress out, you know, to the wilderness. it's going to do everything. so the railroad or is a tremendously powerful force in the 19th century. and in the early days, this is kind of peculiar, but there were trains before there were really developed telegraph systems. yeah, which is -- so if it wasn't precisely at that spot with a coordinated clock, accidents happened. so there's that. getting passengers on the trains, getting their trains arriving correctly, safety issues. trains have to be exactly same -- the right place on the tracks at the right time. first before the time zones it was really confounding to people, because the railroad might have one time, the local people might have another time, there might be a different time on the courthouse from the church or the jeweler. it just was not standardized. and if you're not going from place to place, it doesn't matter. but when you are, then there's no way for people to communicate. let's say whatever noon is, it's

a different time at that one time in detroit, from chicago, from any little city in between, it's a different time every place because the sun's really in a different place. and then like 1872 there were 70 different time standards being used by the railroads. so they've got to straighten this out. time zones were decided by the railroads pretty much having to do with the railroads' own territory, and that's how they came about. and that's why they break the way they do pretty much. and it's still pretty much close to that way today. so it's the railroads that shaped our ideas of time which is appropriate because when people got on trains for the first time, they were just totally spun around. they couldn't believe they were moving this fast, they wondered about the consequences of everything being closer together. they thought this was going to change the view of everything in the world. it was quite the technology that turned the world upside down. so when the time zones are declared, you know, people have to move their clock sometimes by as much as, like, nine minutes,

eighteen minutes. it really throws people off. and what's happening, again, time -- a local possession -- becomes this national thing. and then there's great talk in the world about coordinating all clocks and make one universal clock, perhaps. so just the very idea of time changes. progress changes the idea of time, progress changes the way we feel time is passing. so when the railroads create these time zones in 1883, there's a pretty big protest in a lot of places. people say how could you defuate the truth from the sun, moon and stars, how could you deviate from god's time? augusta, maine, doesn't want to be on philadelphia time, as they call it, and they have a referendum, and three-quarters of augusta, maine, votes against accepting this philadelphia time. and there's places in indiana that don't adapt, some factories do and some don't. so it's a very close idea to people. there's, right now, in maine, new hampshire an attempt to try

and move the states out of the eastern time zone to the atlantic time zone which, have you heard about this? which they use in, is it newfoundland or nova scotia thinking that would be better. even montana looked at in this, because -- even massachusetts looked at this, because the daylight would match up. you can tell it's still with people. the more i read about it, the more it doesn't make much sense to me. the idea that you would just move maine or new hampshire out of the ian time zone and -- eastern time zone because there was more corresponding with the rising and setting of the sun shows there's still that lingering disquiet or not quite comfort with this whole notion. it almost goes right back to the editorials of 1883 saying, you know, how dare you ime pose this foreign time on -- impose this foreign time on us. one of the key consequences of industrialization and progress is our very relationship to time itself, and that has changed. in the book, in "turn and jump,"

there's an example i give about continuous vaudeville. this is very interesting. vaudeville starts out, it's a series of acts, jugglers, musicians, 15-minute acts, maybe 20-acts. and there's this fellow, b.f. keith. we eventually know him as the k in rko, he's a new hampshire boy. eventually he starts these vaudeville theaters. one of them in boston, i think 14% of the population, the entire population of boston went through this one theater, conservative estimate. keith is a showman, he's trying to fill his theater all day long. it empties out, it fills, empties out, it fills, driving him nuts. he says let's run the show continuously. you could sit there all day if you want, which it turns out only 2% of the audience did. but when people come in, people stay. but to get people to leave, there'll be acts that are good enough to see once but not twice. and those acts are called chasers. and their purpose is to turn

over the theaters. so they would spend their whole careers knowing they're going to be seeing people stand up, seats empty and walk out. but this idea of the continuous is a very industrial idea. production is continual, election cycles are continual. so continuous to vaudeville is a perfect match for urban time, for industrial time, and very different than seasonal time. and that's an example of our sense of time getting right into the way we entertain ourselves. >> c-span visited concord, new hampshire, to learn more about the city's literary scene. up next, we visit the new hampshire state library, one of the oldest state libraries in the country. >> the new hampshire state library is the oldest state library in the country. it dates from 1717 when we were