The weekend is a recent invention. A continuous seven-day cycle with a fixed day of rest was practised in Judaism by the 6th century BC at the latest, but the modern weekend began in the industrial north of Britain in the early 19th century. Factory owners and workers agreed on a voluntary Saturday afternoon off, starting at two, so that staff would return on Monday sober and rested. The term weekend appeared in the British magazine Notes and Queries in 1879. In the United States, a New England cotton mill introduced a five-day week in 1908 so Jewish workers could observe the Sabbath, and Henry Ford closed his factories on Saturday and Sunday from 1926. The two-day weekend became national only in 1940, when a 40-hour maximum workweek took effect.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.