A01=Kirsten E. Wood
Author_Kirsten E. Wood
Black Americans in the early United States
Black citizenship in the early United States
Category=JHBD
Category=NHK
Category=WB
citizenship in the early United States
cultural entrepreneurs
democratization in the early United States
drinking and alcohol in the early nineteenth century
eq_bestseller
eq_food-drink
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
hospitality in the early United States
market revolution
refinement and gentility in the early United States
small town America
Taverns in the early republic
temperance and prohibition in the early nineteenth century
transportation revolution
travel and transportation in the early United States
vernacular citizenship
women and travel in the early United States
women's citizenship in the early United States
women’s citizenship in the early United States
Product details
- ISBN 9781469675541
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 155 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 05 Dec 2023
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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People have gathered in public drinking places to drink, relax, socialize, and do business for hundreds of years. For just as long, critics have described taverns and similar drinking establishments as sources of individual ruin and public disorder. Examining these dynamics as Americans surged westward in the early nineteenth century, Kirsten E. Wood argues that entrepreneurial, improvement-minded men integrated many village and town taverns into the nation's rapidly developing transportation network and used tavern spaces and networks to raise capital, promote innovative businesses, practice genteel sociability, and rally support for favored causes—often while drinking the staggering amounts of alcohol for which the period is justly famous. White men's unrivaled freedom to use taverns for their own pursuits of happiness gave everyday significance to citizenship in the early republic. Yet white men did not have taverns to themselves.
Sharing tavern spaces with other Americans intensified white men's struggles to define what, and for whom, taverns should be. At the same time, temperance and other reform movements increasingly divided white men along lines of party, conscience, and class. In both conflicts, some improvement-minded white men found common cause with middle-class white women and Black activists, who had their own stake in rethinking taverns and citizenship.
Sharing tavern spaces with other Americans intensified white men's struggles to define what, and for whom, taverns should be. At the same time, temperance and other reform movements increasingly divided white men along lines of party, conscience, and class. In both conflicts, some improvement-minded white men found common cause with middle-class white women and Black activists, who had their own stake in rethinking taverns and citizenship.
Kirsten E. Wood is associate professor of history at Florida International University and the author of Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War.
