Reviews for The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition

The average rating for The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-09-11 00:00:00 June Paul This is one of those books of a quality that only comes along once or twice a year. Easily one of the most perceptive works of social history I've ever read, in a way that is both ambitious and precise. Rorabaugh has clearly found one of the main threads to American history, and it's one that we all laugh at or ignore so we missed. Apparently Americans drank more from 1790 to 1840 than they ever have before or since, and the author sets out to explain why. He does a pretty good job on such an amazingly large topic in only 222 pages and some well-padded-out appendices. It isn't only that the trade in alcoholic beverages was the foundation of the great American marketplace or the tension between temperance and nontemperance set the pace for the Civil War. Rorabaugh attempts to deal with realities of American life so enormous that we don't even try to address them. Rorabaugh actually discusses the issue of loneliness to transappalachian society. This is something so obvious that I'm amazed I've never read it before. He deals with human motivation and the difficulty of realizing dreams in American society -- and how that leads to drink -- and exactly what kind of drink that leads to. At the very end, he brings the reader to the inescapable conclusion that America drank because it was lonely and feeling nervous, that it stopped because it was worried that it was interfering with work, that it really stopped when all the immigrants arrived and it became a low-class thing to do, and that temperance advocates chased industrialists in an ever-increasing spiral of "the reason the economy fails is that poors don't work hard enough/spend too much time drinking" until both ideas reached their apotheosis and natural collapse in Prohibition, Repeal, and the Great Depression. And he backs it up with numbers! And he's also got a wicked sense of humor. I can't list the ways this book transformed my understanding of the American soul and the American marketplace. I understand more about the War on Drugs than I ever have before -- and this book was written before Reagan took office! Can't recommend it highly enough.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-12-13 00:00:00 Martin Jungverdorben This book is an interesting read. One review put it best, "Scholarly and entertaining...The author succeeds in using one category of our material culture--drinking--as a window on the whole society. What we see is sometimes amusing and sometimes appalling..." The first chapter (a nation of drunkards) is very entertaining and the second and third wane a bit. Yet in the fourth (Whiskey feed) it picks back up as the author begins to delve into the root of the drinking problem for early Americans (Circa 1770's-1830's) which he defines as Anxieties. The Anxieties stem from a changing country that left many feeling uneasy and unsettled. Alcohol become the answer. Yet in later 19th century the imbibing turned into the race for material goods, and an almost obsessive nature in religious revival, which took the place of the anxiety reducer (alchohol) for the troubled citizens of the U.S.