Now that I work at an academic publisher, I sometimes have the opportunity to get my hands on books I might otherwise not know about. My most recent read, Taverns and Drinking in Early America, falls squarely in that category.

I occasionally go through a non-fiction phase and might embark on that sort of journey after reading this. No just because I can’t really decide what to read next but because I have not read a ton about colonial America. This book may have whet my appetite.

Friends might find it funny that I start this quest with an examination of drinking habits. While it is a topic close to my heart, I ended up learning a lot about colonial society in this book, which weighs in at a perfect 250-ish pages. There’s a lot of history to retain so I’m glad Sharon V. Salinger did not get in depth too much more.

The book examines a number of facets of tavern life prior to the Revolutionary War. From licensing to prosecuting offenses to general attitudes about drinking, Salinger covers almost every base.

In the end, I think the main thing I took from the study is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The law turned a blind eye to many abuses back then as inconsistencies plagued pretty much every aspect of an enterprise which most people saw as crucial to all levels of society while continually worrying about how drinking culture signalled the low end of the moral spectrum.

Today, people sometimes complain that alcohol has become too central to culture and children will surely head down a bad road because of this. In reality, this has been the refrain for more than three hundred years. I’m not saying there should be no rules, but it was fun to see how many themes of drinking life in the late 1600s and early 1700s mirrored modern-day issues. Even back then the rich wanted a place to drink among like-minded people while the disenfranchised congregated in their own taverns to complain about their station in life.

Like I said, this may spark wider reading in colonial studies for me, but I’m not sure. Even if I don’t, I feel better knowing that the guy sitting down the bar from me complaining about his wife and his boss is not doing anything new. He’s just honoring the past.