All of the other three modes of weekly timekeeping were well entrenched in the US by the beginning of the 19th century. Antebellum American society was infamous among European visitors for the extent and rigidity of its Sabbath observance, and Sunday rest was unusually widespread, even among the enslaved. Moreover, the festivity or sanctity of Sundays stood out brightly in a calendar that was remarkably light on annual commemorations and holidays. Astrological associations with the weekly cycle remained quite common as well during this period, and even those who dismissed popular superstitions about auspicious and ominous weekdays often accepted the proposition that the seven-day calendar was linked to cosmological forces and part of the fabric of the natural order. Meanwhile, the Puritan practice of weekly stocktaking provided many ordinary literate men and women in the US with a powerful tool for assessing, planning and imagining their affairs as they took up the proliferating practice of keeping a diary.
Some of these older weekly rhythms reverberated even more loudly as the 19th century progressed. With the rise of wage labour in the northern and western US, for example, Saturday night became more than just the end of the working week; it was also payday, generating patterns of consumption, commercial leisure and material security that shaped the distinctive feel of each of the intervening days of the cycle. Saturday itself also became a kind of half-holiday in the US over the course of the century. Teachers and students often had Saturdays entirely off, as did many office workers. Other Americans, both free and enslaved, often worked shorter hours on Saturday compared with other days of the week. Bumper stickers today credit labour unions with inventing the two-day weekend, but it would be more precise to say that those unions succeeded, in the early 1900s, in demanding as a matter of principle on behalf of all labourers those benefits of Saturday reprieve that had been enjoyed or claimed by various sectors of the US workforce over the previous century. The doubling of the weekend probably sharpened the tick-tock rhythm of special days and mundane ones, especially since the formal expansion of Sunday to include Saturday replaced the informal bleeding of Sunday into Monday that had characterised many preindustrial work cultures.
The link between diary-keeping and weekly stocktaking also grew more conspicuous during the first half of the 19th century, following the spread of mass-market, preformatted diary books, which typically arrayed periods of approximately a week, as opposed to the monthly spreads that had been featured in earlier almanacs. The new calendar formats reinforced the habit of assessing one’s obligations, accomplishments and shortcomings in weekly increments.
But something even more significant was happening alongside those entrenched uses of the weekly calendar. Increasingly and pervasively, Americans were applying the technology of the seven-day count to the project of scheduling. Some of these schedules emerged in work settings, specifically schools and housekeeping. As daily school attendance became a normative activity outside the southern US in the early 19th century, masses of schoolchildren learned early and often to expect certain regular activities (examinations, early recesses, special classes) to take place on the same day of the week. And as new norms of hygiene and respectability took hold in middle-class households, domestic manuals began prescribing weekly schedules for core housekeeping tasks: washing on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays, baking on Wednesdays.