Taverns and the Post-Revolutionary Republican Experiment

Kirsten Wood, professor of History at Florida International University, explored how Americans' use of taverns in their pursuits of happiness helped flesh out the evolving meaning of citizenship in the young United States in her book, "Accommodating the Republic: Taverns in the Early United States." In this talk, she looks at the years following the Revolutionary War, when Americans continued to use their neighborhood taverns as sites for gathering and political mobilization. Join us in person or via Zoom (see above).

The scope and significance of practices that had been so central to the revolutionary struggle shifted in the early republic, as Americans wrestled with the promise and problems of republican self-government.  Although the mid-nineteenth-century temperance movement would soon frame tavern-going as the habit of dangerously shiftless men, in the republic's early decades, entrepreneurial, improvement-minded men — and some women! — went to taverns to raise capital, promote innovative businesses, practice genteel sociability, and put republican self-government into practice.

The William L. Clements Library; the University of Michigan Library, Special Collections Research Center; and the U.S. at 250 program invite you to join this third and final lecture in a series titled "Drinking the Revolution," exploring the role of beverages in Revolutionary America and the Early Republic.