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Sarah H. Meacham - Every Home a Distillery, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2009

Every Home a Distillery

Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake

Av Sarah H. Meacham

Del i serien Early America: History, Context, Culture

537 kr

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Beskrivning
In this original examination of alcohol production in early America, Sarah Hand Meacham uncovers the crucial role women played in cidering and distilling in the colonial Chesapeake. Her fascinating story is one defined by gender, class, technology, and changing patterns of production. Alcohol was essential to colonial life; the region's water was foul, milk was generally unavailable, and tea and coffee were far too expensive for all but the very wealthy. Colonists used alcohol to drink, in cooking, as a cleaning agent, in beauty products, and as medicine. Meacham finds that the distillation and brewing of alcohol for these purposes traditionally fell to women. Advice and recipes in such guidebooks as The Accomplisht Ladys Delight demonstrate that women were the main producers of alcohol until the middle of the 18th century. Men, mostly small planters, then supplanted women, using new and cheaper technologies to make the region's cider, ale, and whiskey. Meacham compares alcohol production in the Chesapeake with that in New England, the middle colonies, and Europe, finding the Chesapeake to be far more isolated than even the other American colonies.She explains how home brewers used new technologies, such as small alembic stills and inexpensive cider pressing machines, in their alcoholic enterprises. She links the importation of coffee and tea in America to the temperance movement, showing how the wealthy became concerned with alcohol consumption only after they found something less inebriating to drink. Taking a few pages from contemporary guidebooks, Every Home a Distillery includes samples of historic recipes and instructions on how to make alcoholic beverages. American historians will find this study both enlightening and surprising.
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Sarah Hand Meacham teaches early American history at Virginia Commonwealth University.

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Meacham's Every Home a Distillery is a well-composed, clearly written, highly informative study that significantly contributes to our understanding of how alcohol was brewed, distributed, and consumed in the colonial Chesapeake area. -- Susan C. Imbarrato Journal of American History 2010 This exceptionally well-researched book provides important new information about alcohol practices in colonial America. -- W. J. Rorabaugh North Carolina Historical Review 2010 Meacham's style is eminently readable, informative, and entertaining. Her detailed 'Essay on sources' is particularly useful. This work would appeal to students of early American studies, American history, and women's history. -- M. Susan Anthony Journal of American Culture 2010 Meacham has studied and interrelated a broad variety of primary sources for this book: diaries, letters, account books, probate inventories and wills, cookbooks, court and local government records. The result is an eminently insightful, readable, and usefully annotated history. -- Carolyn Cooper Technology and Culture 2011 She counters our images of Madeira-sipping gentlemen with English woodcuts of prosaic housewives baking cakes and distilling brandy. She reminds us that women, in the form of middling wives and prominent widows, dominated the tavern trade, even if men's names were inscribed on the legal papers. This book does a real service in putting free women's work (enslaved women receive far briefer attention) at the center of colonial experience. Common-Place 2011 Every Home a Distillery will appeal to anyone interested in early business history. -- Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor Common-Place 2011 Meacham offers an engaging, thoughtful analysis of the gendered nature of alcohol production, using original sources and challenging historians to think in more complex ways about colonial men, women and gendered labor. -- Monica D. Fitzgerald Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 2010 This book provides an important look at the gendered production of alcohol. It is useful to anyone interested in colonial history, women's history, or the history of alcohol. -- Gina Hames Journal of Social History 2011

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