People have gathered in taverns to drink, relax, socialize, and do business for hundreds of years. For just as long, critics have described taverns as sources of individual ruin and public disorder.
In Accommodating the Republic: Taverns in the Early United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) Dr. Wood argues that men integrated taverns into the nation’s growing transportation network and used them to raise capital, promote businesses, practice genteel sociability, and rally support for favored causes — often while drinking staggering amounts of alcohol.
White men’s unrivaled freedom to use taverns for their own pursuits of happiness gave everyday significance to citizenship in the early republic. Yet white men did not have taverns to themselves.
Sharing tavern spaces with other Americans intensified white men’s struggles to define what, and for whom, taverns should be. At the same time, temperance and other reform movements increasingly divided white men along lines of party, conscience, and class.
In both conflicts, some improvement-minded white men found common cause with middle-class white women and Black American activists, who had their own stake in rethinking taverns and citizenship.
Kirsten E. Wood is a specialist in the social and political histories of the early United States. In addition to exploring taverns, she has written about Peggy Eaton and Andrew Jackson’s presidential sex scandal, enslaving widows’ social and economic power, the harmonic ideal in patriotic music, and the opportunities for joy and pleasure in the young nation’s public places.
She is a professor of history at Florida International University and earned her PhD and MA from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Princeton University and the author of Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War (2004)
Upcoming Event
An online program, “Taverns in the Early United States” by Author Kirsten Wood will be held on Sunday, January 18 at 2 pm.
Admission to this virtual only program is free for Museum Members and $5 for non-members. To join the program, register by email at info@timeandthevalleysmuseum.org and put “Tavern Talk” in the subject line, or call (845) 985-7700. A link will be sent to you.
Non-members are asked to please first make a donation on the Museum’s website.
Time and the Valleys Museum is open Memorial Day through September, Saturday and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m., and other times by appointment. Located at 332 Main Street in Grahamsville (State Route 55) in Sullivan County, NY.
Read more about the history of taverns in New York State.
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