Raised on happy hours on Cape Cod, MA patios with my Irish-American relatives, I long have been fascinated by how alcohol can bring people together and facilitate bonds that traverse both hardship and joy. During my travels and research in Mexico, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, and Ecuador, I observed how alcohol could both render families asunder and unite communities. As addiction makes clear, alcohol could hold tremendous power over individuals. But it also marked the identities of even the most casual drinkers. Throughout my research on other topics—crime, gender, medicine—alcohol consistently emerges as a crucial avenue of inquiry. The books listed below offer innovative and insightful ways of centering alcohol in scholarly narratives.
Smith traces the historical arc of rum from local colonial consumption to becoming a major export by the nineteenth century.
I am amazed at how much history Smith captures by focusing his study on one type of alcohol. With his attention to how European and African drinking habits shaped rum consumption, he demonstrates how rum cut across gender, class, and race relations.
With their knowledge of distillation and introduction of resources new to the Americas, Europeans increased alcohol’s potency. Alcohol took on political as well as economic significance when colonial officials used alcohol revenue to govern. Without displacing fermented drinks, distilled liquor introduced new dynamics in the production and consumption of alcohol.
I love that he emphasizes how common consumption spurred taverns and other drinking establishments, which facilitated socialization that frequently contravened social norms, such as elite men who conversed with poor and working-class women and African and mulatto drinkers…
Christopher Columbus brought sugarcane to the New World on his second voyage. By 1520 commercial sugar production was underway in the Caribbean, along with the perfection of methods to ferment and distill alcohol from sugarcane to produce a new beverage that would have dramatic impact on the region. Caribbean Rum presents the fascinating cultural, economic, and ethnographic history of rum in the Caribbean from the colonial period to the present.
Drawing on data from historical archaeology and the economic history of the Caribbean, Frederick Smith explains why this industry arose in the islands, how attitudes toward alcohol consumption have impacted…
I have lived in Gettysburg, PA, all of my life, so I’m drawn to historical fiction, especially the Civil War era. The 1860s is the perfect setting for the enemies-to-lovers trope, and I am lucky enough to be surrounded by history all of the time. In doing lots of research, I have found that enemies fell in love more often than you might think during the Civil War. I hope you enjoy this list of books that got me interested in reading and continue to keep my attention to this day.
I love this book because it made me fall in love with books and reading! It was the first “historical romance” book I ever read, and it is still among my favorites of all time.
The strong, masculine lead character pitted against Shanna, who is equally stubborn and independent, makes a novel full of fireworks and passion. It’s also a long, meaty novel, which I love, and full of twists and turns throughout.
"Shanna" is a magnificent tale of freedom and passionate destiny from incomparable storyteller Kathleen Woodiwiss. In 1749, heiress Shanna Trahern marries convict Ruark Beauchamp, only to abandon her bridegroom to set sail to the Caribbean, with her determined bridegroom in pursuit.
Since I was old enough to read and watch screens, I’ve been fascinated by the promise of adventurous journeys. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Huckleberry Finn, the Starship Enterprise, Star Wars – all occupied valuable real estate in my consciousness. That thirst for journey took me to Eastern Europe after college, where I worked as a freelancer, and to Baghdad and other Middle East cities, where I was a correspondent during and after the Iraq War. My sense of adventure continues today in my writing, drawing me to stories in colorful places, such as the U.S.-Mexico border, to try to make sense of the world and our place in it.
The history of rum is, in so many ways, the history of Cuba. Bacardi shows this about as good as any book I’ve seen. I’m a first-generation Cuban-American (my parents left Cuba in the early ‘60s as teens and resettled to Miami).
So, it was particularly moving to follow the generational story of the Bacardis, the family from Santiago de Cuba who not only created what became the world’s best-known rum but whose patriarchs participated in or funded every coup, uprising, or political lurch in Cuba stretching back to the Spanish-American War.
I loved how Gjelten shepherds the reader from the horrors of the 19th-century war to the Cuban exodus following Fidel Castro’s ascent to power. It transported me to Cuba’s past and, more importantly, deepened my understanding of my own roots.
In this widely hailed book, NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten fuses the story of the Bacardi family and their famous rum business with Cuba's tumultuous experience over the last 150 years to produce a deeply entertaining historical narrative. The company Facundo Bacardi launched in Cuba in 1862 brought worldwide fame to the island, and in the decades that followed his Bacardi descendants participated in every aspect of Cuban life. With his intimate account of their struggles and adventures across five generations, Gjelten brings to life the larger story of Cuba's fight for freedom, its tortured relationship with America, the rise of…
Nightclubs and country clubs figured in my father’s business distributing snack foods in post-WWII “Steel City,” Pittsburgh, where I was served “Shirley Temple” cocktails in martini glasses alongside my parents’ Manhattans. (To my five- and six-year-old eye, the trophy was the maraschino cherry.) Decades later, teaching American literature in the university, my interest deepened in Jack London’s writing, and my book on him demanded close attention to the history of US cocktails and other drinks. London’s memoir, John Barleycorn, frankly details his drinking and eventual capture by alcohol. As a scholar-researcher, I was “captured” by the backstory of US cocktail culture.
Curtis reaches to bestselling author Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) for the song identified with sailors and pirates:
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—
...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Whiskey and gin are sidelined as rum takes first prize in this chronicle of Caribbean and South Seas pirates and privateers, sugar barons, and rum drinks from grog to the daiquiri and Cuba Libre (my Key West favorite).
This ten-cocktail capsule of New World history reshuffles history classroom categories to join recent accounts of turbulent times seen through commodities (Bananas, Cod, Salt), but a Bottle of Rum is the most fun, by far!
Now revised, updated, and with new recipes, And a Bottle of Rum tells the raucously entertaining story of this most American of liquors
From the grog sailors drank on the high seas in the 1700s to the mojitos of Havana bar hoppers, spirits and cocktail columnist Wayne Curtis offers a history of rum and the Americas alike, revealing that the homely spirit once distilled from the industrial waste of the booming sugar trade has managed to infiltrate every stratum of New World society.
Curtis takes us from the taverns of the American colonies, where rum delivered both a cheap wallop…
