Calendars exhibit

The Long View — Histories of Time and the Calendar

• A Brief History of Timekeeping

  A Brief History of Timekeeping

  Chad Orzel · 2022

  A physicist’s tour from solstice markers and sundials to atomic clocks, with side trips through Gregorian reform, the Maya Long Count, and relativity. The most readable recent overview.

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• Calendar

  Calendar: Humanity’s Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year

  David Ewing Duncan · 1999

  A narrative history of how the West ended up with the Gregorian calendar. Strong on personalities — Caesar, Bede, Aloysius Lilius, Pope Gregory XIII — and on the missing ten days of October 1582.

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• Marking Time

  Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar

  Duncan Steel · 2000

  Written by an astronomer; complements Duncan’s Calendar with more attention to the underlying astronomy and to modern reform proposals.

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• Time's Pendulum

  Time’s Pendulum: From Sundials to Atomic Clocks

  Jo Ellen Barnett · 1999

  A clear, chronological history of timekeeping technology and how each new instrument quietly reshaped daily life.

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• Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps

  Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time

  Peter Galison · 2003

  How the practical problem of synchronizing railway and telegraph clocks across continents fed directly into special relativity. Beautifully written.

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• Time Lord

  Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time

  Clark Blaise · 2001

  The biography of the Scots-Canadian engineer who pushed the world to adopt 24 standard time zones after missing a train in 1876.

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• The Story of Time

  The Story of Time

  Kristen Lippincott, Umberto Eco, E. H. Gombrich (eds.) · 1999

  Catalogue of the National Maritime Museum’s millennium exhibition: 300+ illustrated essays on how cultures from Babylon to Dalí have measured and depicted time.

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Time, Mind, and the Universe

• The Order of Time

  The Order of Time

  Carlo Rovelli · 2018

  A short, lyrical book by the loop-quantum-gravity physicist arguing that what we call “time” is much stranger, and much more local, than the calendar suggests.

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• Why Time Flies

  Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

  Alan Burdick · 2017

  A reporter visits chronobiologists, atomic-clock keepers and Antarctic researchers to ask why subjective time bends the way it does.

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• The Clock Mirage

  The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time

  Joseph Mazur · 2020

  A mathematician’s essay on the mismatch between the time we measure and the time we feel — sandglasses, telomeres, Olympic photo finishes, the Amondawa.

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• Eyewitness: Time & Space

  Eyewitness: Time & Space

  John & Mary Gribbin · 2000

  DK’s photograph-rich introduction to time, space and relativity for ages 8–12. Useful as a visual primer for adults too.

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Reference & Technical

• Calendrical Calculations: The Ultimate Edition

  Calendrical Calculations: The Ultimate Edition

  Edward M. Reingold & Nachum Dershowitz · 2018

  The standard technical reference: precise algorithms for converting dates among the Gregorian, Julian, Coptic, Islamic, Hebrew, Persian, Bahá’í, Maya, Aztec, Hindu, Chinese, French Revolutionary and other calendars. Replaces the 2001 Millennium edition.

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• Calendrical Calculations: Millennium Edition

  Calendrical Calculations: The Millennium Edition

  Edward M. Reingold & Nachum Dershowitz · 2001

  Earlier edition of the above; cheaper used and often the one cited in the WebExhibits articles.

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• Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History

  Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History

  E. G. Richards · 1998 (rev. 2000)

  Oxford’s mid-length reference: covers the astronomical basis, world calendars and the arithmetic of conversion in one volume. A good bridge between trade books and Reingold/Dershowitz.

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• The Book of Calendars

  The Book of Calendars

  Frank Parise (ed.) · 2002

  Conversion tables from sixty ancient and modern calendars to the Julian and Gregorian. Useful as a desk reference; some entries have known errata, so double-check critical dates.

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• Standard C Date/Time Library

  Standard C Date/Time Library: Programming the World’s Calendars and Clocks

  Lance Latham · 1998

  For programmers: a C library plus historical notes on why date arithmetic is genuinely hard. Dated in idiom but the algorithms remain useful.

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