Alcohol

Drinking in America: A History

Mark Edward Lender & James Kirby Martin

A social history of American alcohol consumption, showing that in the premodern era drinking was universal, accepted, and socially integrated in the US, but that social changes at the turn of the eighteenth century ushered in an era of unregulated drinking that presaged the rise of the Temperance Movement. The Temperance Movement, in turn, was not opposed to the modern disease movement, but was actually its precursor.

Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason

Jessica Warner

Jessica Warner here deals with the original "drug craze" - gin in early-eighteenth-century London. Gin was a cheap, mass-produced form of alcohol imported to England from the continent that became immediately popular in some working-class districts of London. As depicted in the famous Hogarth painting, "Gin Lane," this led to ceaseless drunkenness, brawling, child neglect, prostitution, etc. Sound familiar? Like opium, heroin, marijuana, crack, etc., gin became identified with out-of-control behavior among society's dispossessed. Warner makes clear the social meanings of gin, its consumption by those in lower British social brackets, and the view of this by the guardians of social control, who wanted less drunkenness to guarantee a hard-working labor force. Although Craze is full of social data, the reader remains to choose among three possible hypotheses: (1) gin really led to widespread debauchery and ruin in the lives of gin drinkers, (2) the drunkenness so vividly depicted by social reformers existed mainly in the perceptions of disapproving upper-class English, (3) the working class was intentionally thumbing its nose at upper-class blue noses by drinking gin and getting/ acting drunk. How one views the entire (brief) episode can be critical for one's approach to drug/alcohol control policy. In a relatively short period, in any case, the gin craze ran its course, and gin consumption either disappeared as a major social phenomenon, or was integrated into the English drinking scene.

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