History
In cultures with a seven-day week, the day of rest derives from the main religious tradition: Sunday (Christian), Saturday (Jewish), or Friday (Muslim).
The American concept of the weekend has its roots in labor union attempts to accommodate Jewish workers who took Saturday instead of Sunday as their Sabbath. The first five-day work week was instituted by a New England cotton mill for this reason.
In 1926 Henry Ford began shutting down his automotive factories for all of Saturday and Sunday. In 1929 the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was the first union to demand a five-day work week and receive it. After that, the rest of the United States slowly followed, but it wasn't until 1940 that the two-day weekend began nationwide.
Read more about this topic: Workweek And Weekend
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Don’t you realize that this is a new empire? Why, folks, there’s never been anything like this since creation. Creation, huh, that took six days, this was done in one. History made in an hour. Why it’s a miracle out of the Old Testament!”
—Howard Estabrook (1884–1978)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)