[This post is part of The Recipe Project’s annual Teaching
Series. In this post, Dr. Gabe Klehr asks us to think carefully about
the ways that we talk and teach about the historical experience of
“drunkenness.”] By Gabe Klehr An
early example of temperance propaganda, depicting the many excuses
Colonial Americans found for drinking binges. “Apologies for Tippling,”
Woodward, G.M, 1798, Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Last spring, I taught a new class on the role of alcohol in American
history. I usually find that I can spend a lot of time setting up a
class, but it takes actually teaching it to really figure out what the
themes of the class are going to be. Obviously, any history class
involves questions of historical identification and difference, but
talking about historical use of alcohol brought these questions to the
fore in interesting and surprising ways.
I was in the middle of a lecture about American drinking habits in
the eighteenth century when the issues of understanding the effects of
alcohol in the past became particularly clear. I had started the lecture
with a discussion of the drinking habits American colonists had brought
with them from early modern Britain. This was a world in which a
British physician wrote “Water is not wholesome solely by itself for an
Englishman.”[1]
Given the levels of pollution in most water sources in early America,
this might have been sound advice. Jamestown, for example, had
brackish, possibly poisonous water, and colonists stopped drinking it
almost as soon as they were able to produce enough alcohol.
I laid out this background and then discussed what this meant.
Eighteenth century residents of British North America drank alcohol at
all meals from morning to night. On top of this regular daily drinking
there were frequent communal binges on holidays and other public
gatherings. As I was describing all of this, a student asked “so,
basically early Americans were drunk all the time?” It wasn’t a bad
question, but as I tried to answer it, it occurred to me how many other
questions it raised about our relationship with people from the past.
Not all early Americans had access to alcohol. And early modern beer
and wine and spirits might not have had as much alcohol as we might
assume: in their post earlier this week, “Jolly Good Ale and Old: Or, Were Early Modern People Perpetually Drunk?” Angela McShane and James Brown of the Intoxicants Project talked about their research into early modern ABV numbers.
It was easy enough to get students to understand the biological
perspective, but I wanted them to see it as only part of the puzzle.
Alcohol tolerance can be a biological metaphor for trying to understand
the subjectivity of historical actors. Colonial Americans didn’t feel
the effects of alcohol the way most of us do. It isn’t just that
people processed alcohol differently, but also that they understood it
differently, and this understanding changed the effect of alcohol. In
the metaphor, this could almost be considered a form of cultural
tolerance. For historians, of course, this is a familiar perspective,
but as many of us know from experience, getting undergraduates to think
of the past as a different country with different standards and values
can be quite difficult. The
suggestion in this 19th century cartoon that moderate drinking put men
on the road to ruin would have been novel to Americans in the 18th
century. Alcohol was almost universally viewed as a positive good. “The
Drunkard’s Progress, or the Direct Road to Poverty Wretchedness and
Ruin,” Barber, John Warner, 1826. Image courtesy of the American
Antiquarian Society.
As the class progressed, these problems continued. On one hand, much
of the energy and interest of the class came because students could
personally relate to the class material about alcohol and attitudes
about it. I want students to feel invested in the course material, but
it was very difficult to get many of them to consider what it meant that
people in the past thought about alcohol very differently than
contemporary Americans do. It was also often difficult to get them to
consider what all this meant about our contemporary medicalized and
therapeutic understandings of alcohol, or even to consider those
approaches to be historically contingent rather than simply the
“correct” approaches that historical actors were unaware of.
To come back to the question the student asked, I’m not sure it is
possible to know if colonial Americans were drunk most of the time. I
tend to think that such a vast gulf separates us from them that it is
very hard to know how they felt. Some things in the past might be lost
forever and perhaps nothing is more fleeting and subjective than a
physical state caused by an intoxicating substance. However, how I would
answer the question isn’t really the point. What I wanted was to get
students to pose the question and to try to use sources and their
historical imagination to think about it.
I’ll be teaching the course again next spring and have been
considering how I can encourage students to consider these questions.
I’m planning to spend the first week of class examining how historians
approach the history of food, drink and alcohol. I’m hoping that an
approach that brings questions of methodology and theory to the fore
will set the tone for the rest of the class. I’d appreciate any
suggestions on readings. I don’t want to be prescriptive in telling
students how they should think about the relationship between past and
present understandings. I do, however, want to give them some frameworks
for understanding the questions. I think tackling questions about
historical imagination head on will help to make it a theme rather than a
stumbling block in the class. Talking about something that students
have a visceral and personal understanding of (in this case, alcohol)
can often be an excellent way to address historical imagination, and I’m
hopeful that the students and I can do that together. [1] Quoted in John Burnett, Liquid Pleasures, A Social History of Drink in Modern Britain, p. 9. Routledge, 2012.
*****
Gabe Klehr is an adjunct professor at the University of North
Carolina Charlotte. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University.
He is currently working on a book examining black Baptists in biracial
churches in Virginia from 1780-1865.
