America walks into a bar [electronic resource] : a spirited history of taverns and saloons, speakeasies, and grog shops / Christine Sismondo.

Cover image for America walks into a bar [electronic resource] : a spirited history of taverns and saloons, speakeasies, and grog shops / Christine Sismondo.

ISBN:

9780199753161

Title:

America walks into a bar [electronic resource] : a spirited history of taverns and saloons, speakeasies, and grog shops / Christine Sismondo.

Author:

Sismondo, Christine.

Personal Author:

Sismondo, Christine.

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xv, 314 pages) : illustrations

Contents:

1: A pilgrim walks into a bar -- A dissenter walks into a bar -- A rebel walks into the back room of a bar -- A revolutionary walks into a bar -- A Federalist walks into a bar -- 2: Keeping tabs -- The political machine invades a bar -- The crusader walks into a bar -- The radicals take over a bar -- The machine politician gets behind the bar -- Carry nation wields a hatchet in a bar -- 3: A woman walks into a speakeasy -- A French heel is hooked around a bar's brass rail -- Joe McCarthy storms into a bar -- Change strolls into the bar.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Subject Term:

Bars (Drinking establishments) -- United States -- History.

Drinking customs -- United States -- History.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

2011

Publication Information:

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
394.130973 22	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

When George Washington bade farewell to his officers, he did so in New York's Fraunces Tavern. When Andrew Jackson planned his defense of New Orleans against the British in 1815, he met Jean Lafitte in a grog shop. And when John Wilkes Booth plotted with his accomplices to carry out an assassination, they gathered in Surratt Tavern.In America Walks into a Bar, Christine Sismondo recounts the rich and fascinating history of an institution often reviled, yet always central to American life. She traces the tavern from England to New England, showing how even the Puritans valued "a good Beere." With fast-paced narration and lively characters, she carries the story through the twentieth century and beyond, from repeated struggles over licensing and Sunday liquor sales, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the temperance movement, from attempts to ban "treating" to Prohibition and repeal. As the cockpit of organized crime, politics, and everyday social life, the bar has remained vital--and controversial--down to the present. In 2006, when the Hurricane Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act was passed, a rider excluded bars from applying for aid or tax breaks on the grounds that they contributed nothing to the community. Sismondo proves otherwise: the bar has contributed everything to the American story. Now in paperback, Sismondo's heady cocktail of agile prose and telling anecdotes offers a resounding toast to taprooms, taverns, saloons, speakeasies, and the local hangout where everybody knows your name.

Author Notes

Christine Sismondo is a writer and lecturer in Humanities at York University in Toronto. She has written numerous articles about film, literature, drinking, and vice, as well as the book Mondo Cocktail, a narrative history of cocktails.

Reviews (1)

Library Journal Review

Breezy, anecdotal, and pun-laden yet complete with a selective bibliography of print sources, Sismondo's (humanities, York Univ., Toronto; Mondo Cocktail: A Shaken and Stirred History) book surveys a myriad of American drinking establishments, accenting their importance in social, political, and cultural history and discerning subtle differences over the centuries. (Her treatment of non-U.S. drinking customs and establishments is sparse.) The author writes that these venues served as community centers; places for self-definition, determination, and articulation; surrogate corporate boardrooms; and town halls. Replete with coverage both of those who favored and those who opposed the habit of communal drinking in America, the book also covers such topics as the Pilgrims' fondness for beer and the playing out in taverns of central dramas in the lives of figures as diverse as George Washington and John Wilkes Booth. VERDICT Joining a growing list of works, mainly by journalists, on alcoholic drinks and drinking (e.g., Eric Burns's Spirits of America and Daniel Okrent's Last Call), appealing to an apparently unquenchable thirst for information on the topic, this book treads ground familiar to many academic historians but may prove revelatory to popular history readers to whom it is primarily addressed. Recommended.-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.