Alcohol : a history / Rod Phillips.

  • Phillips, Roderick
Date:
[2014]
  • Books

About this work

Description

In this innovative book on the attitudes toward and consumption of alcohol, Rod Phillips surveys a 9,000-year cultural and economic history, uncovering the tensions between alcoholic drinks as healthy staples of daily diets and as objects of social, political, and religious anxiety. In the urban centers of Europe and America, where it was seen as healthier than untreated water, alcohol gained a foothold as the drink of choice, but it has been more regulated by governmental and religious authorities more than any other commodity. As a potential source of social disruption, alcohol created volatile boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable consumption and broke through barriers of class, race, and gender. Phillips follows the ever-changing cultural meanings of these potent potables and makes the surprising argument that some societies have entered "post-alcohol" phases.

Publication/Creation

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2014]

Physical description

370 pages ; 24 cm

Contributors

Contents

Alcohol in ancient worlds: nature and the human hand -- Greece and Rome: the superiority of wine -- Religion and alcohol: the paths of Christianity and Islam -- The Middle Ages, 1000-1500: the birth of an industry -- Early modern Europe, 1500-1700: alcohol, religion and culture -- Distilled spirits, 1500-1750: threats to the social order -- European alcohol in contact, 1500-1700: non-European worlds -- Europe and America, 1700-1800: alcohol, enlightenment, and revolutions -- Alcohol and the city, 1800-1900: class and social order -- The enemies of alcohol, 1830-1914: temperance and prohibition -- Alcohol and Native Peoples, 1800-1930: race, order and control -- The First World War, 1914-1920: the battles against alcohol -- Prohibitions, 1910-1935: noble experiments, ignoble failures -- After Prohibitions, 1930-1945: normalizing alcohol -- Alcohol in the modern world: trends in regulation and consumption.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Languages

Subjects

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    DFWR.U
    		Open shelves

Permanent link

Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9781469617602
  • 1469617609