—From “Building America” on the National Building Museum’s Web site: “The Car and Its Impact on the Built Environment: Disney Resort Guest Parking Garage, Anaheim, California.”

Designed by Wolf Architects, Disney's new parking garage in Anaheim, California, is the largest in the world—a structure as long as New York’s 77-story Chrysler Building would be if laid on its side. The building can hold 10,500 cars. Vehicles enter at a rate of 60 per minute, accessing the garage’s entrance ramp directly from Interstate 5.

—From “Colonial Origins and Growth: The Church of England Adapts to North America, 1607-1760” by Edward L. Bond. Published in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 115, No. 2 (2007): 187-188.

These men and women realized that English practice dictated that Christians should not own other Christians as slaves, and when enslaved in Virginia they often sued for their freedom in Virginia’s courts on the grounds that they were Christians, frequently winning their cases. This changed in the 1660s as black chattel slavery became law and the colony’s General Assembly acted to prevent Christianity from continuing as a means by which slaves might gain their freedom. Some white Virginians resisted Christianizing their slaves even then. One woman thought her bondspeople so beastly that religion could have no influence on them. Others believed that Christian slaves would think themselves too much like their white owners and thus refuse to work as hard. James Blair expressed the commonly held belief that slaves only wanted to become Christians because they thought it would lead to their freedom: “I doubt not some of the Negroes are sincere converts; but the far greater part of them little mind the serious part, only are in hopes that they shall meet with so much the more respect, and that some time or other Christianity will help them to their freedom.” Others objected to being in the presence of blacks and refused to attend integrated services, especially baptisms. The Rev. Alexander Rhonnald of Elizabeth River Parish in Norfolk County learned that evangelizing among blacks earned him abuse from his white parishioners: “they use Me with the most invidious Terms of Ill nature for my pains, & because I baptize more Negroes than other Brethren here & instruct them, from the Pulpit, out of common road, & encourage the Good among them to come to the Communion, after a due Sense of the matter, I am vilified & branded by such as a Negro
Parson. . . .” This conflict endured throughout the colonial period.

—From “Mapping Time” by Peter Baldwin. Published in Common-Place, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2005). Printed by permission.

Nineteenth-century urban time seemed to move in frighteningly unpredictable ways. This was especially so of those once-fixed temporal reference points: day and night. In the new chaos of urban life, these seemed to lose their reassuring permanence. A number of writers tried to make sense of this vexingly abstract force. From imaginary vantage points along major streets, they traced the life of the metropolis from its first vigorous stirrings before dawn through its murmurs and rustlings deep in the night. Like panoramic maps, these descriptions are caricatures, but they help us to glimpse the emerging structure of urban day and urban night. We can see people inching toward what we would now call the twenty-four-hour city.

Walt Whitman suggested as much in an 1856 article about activity on lower Broadway in New York. “Within this straight and confined stretch of narrow street surges to and fro, all day, all night, year in and year out, absolutely without intermission, an endless procession, which might furnish no bad representative of the vast procession of humanity.” From an imaginary perch along the street, Whitman diagrammed the passage of different classes of people hour by hour, from the predawn rumbling of butchers’ delivery carts to the midnight journeys of late hacks (the equivalent of cabs). The morning commute of pedestrians began around five o’clock, in Whitman’s telling, with “twos and threes, and soon full platoons, of the ‘industrial regiments’ . . . uniformed in brick-dusty shirts and overalls, battered hats, and shoes white or burnt with lime, armed with pick, spade, trowel or hod. . . .” As these men scattered to construction sites, shopgirls walked down Broadway toward the bookbinderies and tailor shops. “Mingling with them, and flocking closer, for it is now eight or nine in the morning, come the jaunty crew of the downtown clerks,” whose fashionable clothes covered physiques weakened by fast living. “Now their employers begin to crowd the sidewalks, and for an hour or two the way is full of merchants and money-traders-the ‘solid business community.’ A grim and griping generation they are; some fat and sturdy; most lean and dried up; all with close, hard faces. . . . Among them you may distinguish here and there a lawyer, by something of an intellectual expression.”

From eleven o’clock to three o'clock, Whitman continued, “the full sea of the city, eddying and roaring, with no distinct current, boils and surges this way and that, in an undistinguishable and hopeless confusion.” Brightly-dressed women shoppers can be seen amid the flood, particularly in the late afternoon, when many are promenading. Among them, “the experienced city observer may everywhere recognize, in full costume and with assured faces, even at this broad daylight time, one and another notorious courtezan.” After four o’clock, “the feminine promenaders gradually disappear, and the successive waves of the morning tide now begin to roll backward in an inverse order—merchants, brokers, lawyers, first; clerks next; shop-girls and laborers last.”

Whitman was describing a time when New York was still what had been called a “walking city,” where even the affluent traveled by foot. By the end of the nineteenth century, daily journeys had been altered by the physical expansion of cities and by their starker division into zones of production and residence, affluence and poverty. Often traveling greater distances than their predecessors, the daily procession of workers was now linked to the timetables of commuter railroads and streetcars. Commuters flowed down Broadway in discrete pulses carried by cable car, as Stephen Crane observed around the turn of the century. “In the grey of the morning they [the cable cars] come out of the up-town, and bearing janitors, porters, all that class which carries the keys to set alive the great downtown. Later, they shower clerks. Later still, they shower more clerks.” Crane hurries through the chaotic morning rush and the brief ten o’clock lull, to reach the onslaught of “feminine shoppers” who try the patience of cable-car operators.

—Marilynne Robinson, delivering the 2007 McBride Lecture at Oklahoma Christian University, with support from the Oklahoma Humanities Council.

“An interesting part of the experience of publishing Gilead has been to discover how surprised people are that other people like the book. There is assumed to be a sort of hostility to religious characters and subjects, at least among those who read and publish books, that should have doomed it to obscurity at best. I’ll admit that the reception of Gilead startled me a little, too, because it is quiet as fictions go and set in a time and place that might not seem compelling to everyone. I've always told my students to write the book they want to read. And that is advice I give myself, since any novel is an intense labor, years in duration, and I can't imagine anything much worse than putting in that kind of time, trying to appeal to tastes or interests I don't share. If I had any doubts about the book’s finding readers, this was true not because the book is about religion, but because it is about theology. In fact, it is being published in about thirty languages and countries, including Turkey and Vietnam. On several occasions, people have told me, Gilead proves that you really can write about anything. That is a lesson I am very happy to have a hand in teaching if everything is understood to include those things a writer loves and believes. We tell our students to trust the reader, to respect the reader, and that does include speaking truly from one's own experience, which for most of us does include love and belief.”