The book of the famous American scientist A. Roger Ekerch “At the end of the day. The story of the night” turned people’s ideas about the dark time of day upside down. It would seem that what can happen to people after sunset, when they are resting or sleeping? But according to the author, it is at night that a lot of interesting, mysterious and funny things happen. Night is a refuge from everyday life, the time of lovers, the time of action of good and evil forces. Some people go to balls and masquerades to have fun, others rush to a tavern or tavern, and some prefer to devote the night hours to fervent prayer. Under the cover of darkness, various crimes are committed - from petty thefts to brutal murders. Members of secret societies and sects hold meetings by candlelight. They have sex at night, get sick, tell scary stories, write in a diary, write books, dream... The author describes in detail the night life of people of different classes in Europe and America in the period from the 16th to the mid-19th century, when artificial lighting came to the world, cutting through the darkness of the night. Along with documentary texts, the researcher cites many exciting, frightening and comic stories that remain in the memory of several generations.AT DAY'S CLOSE charts a fresh realm of Western culture, nocturnal life from the late medieval period to the Industrial revolution.

The book focuses on the cadences of daily life, investigating nighttime in its own right and resurrecting a rich and complex universe in which persons passed nearly half of their lives - a world, long-lost to historians, of blanket fairs, night freaks, and curtain lectures, of sun-suckers, moon-cursers and night-kings. It is not only the vocabulary that has disappeared, AT DAY'S CLOSE will replace many facts which have been either lost or forgotten. It is a significant and newsworthy contribution to social history, filled with substantial research, stories and new discoveries.

Ekirch uses a wide range of sources to reconstruct how the night was lived in the past : travel accounts, memoirs , letters, poems, plays, court records, coroner's reports, depositions and laws dealing with curfews, crime and lighting. He has analyzed working-class autobiographies, proverbs, nursery rhymes, ballads and sermons, and folklore, as well as consulting medical, psychological and anthropological papers.