America's obsession with its own history has resulted in innumerable bestsellers. Like baseball and the Civil War, Prohibition is one of the grand American topics, and now it is the subject of Daniel Okrent's masterful, prize-worthy tour de force. Last Call is a narrative history of one of the most puzzling and most exciting eras in American history, the years 1920 to 1933, when the Constitution was amended to restrict human social behavior. Beginning...

"Most American college campuses are home to a vibrant drinking scene where students frequently get wasted, train-wrecked, obliterated, hammered, destroyed, and decimated. The terms that university students most commonly use to describe severe alcohol intoxication share a common theme: destruction, and even after repeated embarrassing, physically unpleasant, and even violent drinking episodes, students continue to go out drinking together. In Getting...

From hooliganism to commerce, from advertising and sponsorship to health and fitness, if there is one thing that brings athletes, fans and financial backers together it must be beer. This cultural history of drinking and sport examines the roles masculinity, class and regional identity play in alcohol consumption at a broad range of matches, races, courses and competitions.

Overview: Russia is famous for its vodka, and its culture of extreme intoxication. But just as vodka is central to the lives of many Russians, it is also central to understanding Russian history and politics. In Vodka Politics, Mark Lawrence Schrad argues that debilitating societal alcoholism is not hard-wired into Russians' genetic code, but rather their autocratic political system, which has long wielded vodka as a tool of statecraft. Through a...

A look into the role of public houses, taverns, alcohol consumption in colonial American society. Sharon V. Salinger's Taverns and Drinking in Early America supplies the first study of public houses and drinking throughout the mainland British colonies. At a time when drinking water supposedly endangered one's health, colonists of every rank, age, race, and gender drank often and in quantity, and so taverns became arenas for political debate, business...

This is a story of 14 years in American history, the story of prohibition.

In Teaching 'Proper' Drinking?, the author brings together three fields of scholarship: socio-historical studies of alcohol, Australian Indigenous policy history and social enterprise studies. The case studies in the book offer the first detailed surveys of efforts to teach responsible drinking practices to Aboriginal people by installing canteens in remote communities, and of the purchase of public hotels by Indigenous groups in attempts both to...