Originally published in 1984 this book provided the first German case study of a prototypical 19th Century social problem, combining a discussion of popular drinking behaviour with analysis of efforts to reform it on the parts of both middle class temperance reformers and the socialist labour movement. The book links the study of popular drinking behaviour and organized responses to it to larger themes in Germany’s social and political development, providing an important window on topics such as working class dietary standards to the political mentality of the Bildungsbügertum.

Books about Drink, Temperance and the Working Class in Nineteenth-century Germany

Books about Drink, Temperance and the Working Class in 19th Century Germany

Books about Drink, Temperance and the Working Class in 19th Century Germany

This book examines the local manifestation of the global temperance movement in the Balkans. It argues that regional histories of social movements in the modern period could not be sufficiently understood in isolation. Moreover, the book argues that broad transformations of social movements – for example, the power centers associated with moral/religious temperance and the later, scientifically based anti-alcohol campaigns – are more easily identifiable through a detailed regional study. For this purpose, the book begins by sketching the historical development as well as the main historiographical themes surrounding the worldwide temperance movement. The book then zooms in on the movement in the Balkans and Bulgaria in particular. American missionaries founded the temperance movement in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The interwar period, however, witnessed the proliferation of new, professional organizations. The book discusses the various branches as well as their international and political affiliations, showing that the anti-alcohol reform movement was one of the most important social movements in the region.

This collection of essays covers the representation and practice of drinking a variety of beverages across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and North America. The case studies in this volume cover drinking culture from a variety of perspectives, including literature, history, anthropology and the history of medicine.

This edited collection, first published in 1991, focuses on the commercial relations, marketing structures and development of consumption that accompanied early industrial expansion. The papers examine aspects of industrial structure and work organisation, including women’s work, and highlight the conflict and compromise between work traditions and the emergence of a market culture. With an overarching introduction providing a background to European manufacturing, this title will be of particular interest to students of social and economic history researching early industrial Europe and the concurrent emergence of a material, consumer culture.

A collection of essays examine the social histories of drinking in Europe, America, and Africa

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book is about alcoholic drink, political parties, and pressure groups. From the 1870s into the 1920s, excessive drinking by urban workers frightened the major political parties. They all wanted to reduce the number of public houses. It was not easy to find a way that would satisfy temperance reformers, many of them prohibitionists, and the licensed drink trade. Brewers demanded compensation when pubs were closed, but temperance reformers were vehemently opposed to this. The book highlights a prolonged struggle of vested interests and ideologies in this regard, showing that a Royal Commission in 1899 helped break the stalemate. In a controversial deal, brewers got compensation, but they had to pay for closing some of their own pubs. Later, during the First World War, the government experimented with an alternative to closing public houses, disinterested or non-commercial management, and considered State Purchase of the entire drink trade.

This book explores the rise of the aesthetic category of addiction in the nineteenth century, a century that saw the development of an established medical sense of drug addiction. Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature focuses especially on formal invention—on the uses of literary patterns for intensified, exploratory engagement with unattained possibility—resulting from literary intersections with addiction discourse. Early chapters consider how Romantics such as Thomas De Quincey created, with regard to drug habit, an idea of habitual craving that related to self-experimenting science and literary exploration; later chapters look at Victorians who drew from similar understandings while devising narratives of repetitive investigation. The authors considered include De Quincey, Percy Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Marie Corelli.

Adding a new dimension to the history of mentalites and the study of popular culture, Thomas Brennan reinterprets the culture of the laboring classes in old-regime Paris through the rituals of public drinking in neighborhood taverns. He challenges the conventional depiction of lower-class debauchery and offers a reassessment of popular sociability. Using the records of the Parisian police, he lets the common people describe their own behavior and beliefs. Their testimony places the tavern at the center of working men's social existence. Central to the study is the clash of elite and popular culture as it was articulated in the different attitudes to taverns. The elites saw in taverns the indiscipline and exuberance that they condemned in popular culture. Popular testimony presented public drinking in very different terms. The elaborate rituals surrounding public drinking, its prevalence in popular sociability and recreation, all point to the importance of drink as a medium of social exchange rather than a drugged escape from misery, and to the tavern as a focal point for men's communities. Professor Brennan has elucidated the logic of both elite and popular systems of meaning and found new dignity and coherence in the culture and values of the populace. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.