San Antonio College Library

"In this engaging look at the classic cocktail, Lowell Edmunds traces the history of the Martini back to its American origins in the nineteenth century. Exploring literary and dramatic works as well as newspapers, magazines, cartoons, bartenders' manuals, distillery brochures, and other documents of popular culture, Edmunds finds in the Martini's image the same ambiguities that characterize American life."--Jacket.

"This book looks at alcohol consumption across cultures and what drinking means to the people who consume or, equally tellingly, refuse to consume, From Ireland to Hong Kong, Mexico to Germany, alcohol plays a key role in a wide range of functions religious, familial, social and even political. Drinking Cultures situates its consumption within the context of these wider cultural practices and reveals how class, ethnicity and nationalism are all expressed...

La Fee Verte (or "The Green Fairy") has intoxicated artists, poets, and writers ever since the late eighteenth century. Stories abound of absinthe's druglike sensations of mood lift and inspiration due to the presence of wormwood, its infamous "special" ingredient, which ultimately leads to delirium, homicidal mania, and death. Opening with the sensational 1905 Absinthe Murders, Phil Baker offers a cultural history of absinthe, from its modest origins...

"An examination of sociocultural nation-building processes in Mexico between 1810 and 1910"

In The spirits of America, Burns relates that drinking was "the first national pastime," and shows how it shaped American politics and culture from the earliest colonial days. He details the transformation of alcohol from virtue to vice and back again and how it was thought of as both scourge and medicine. He tells us how "the great American thirst" developed over the centuries, and how reform movements and laws sprang up to combat it. Burns brings...

Although many books have studied writers and alcohol in modern American literature, the rich culture of drinking and the many poems and narratives about it in the Romantic period in England have been entirely neglected. Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink 1780-1830 is the first study to describe the bulk and variety of writings about drinking to set these poems, novels, essays, letters and journals in a historical, sociological, and medical...

Examines the effects of alcohol on the life and work of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and O'Neill, tracing how the initial positive benefits of the drug were lost as drink eventually took its toll on the writers.

Spirits of America is the first book-length study of intoxication as represented in nineteenth-century American literature. Emphasizing the writings of such major figures as Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Alcott, and Stowe, Nicholas O. Warner combines literary analysis with sociohistorical perspectives to examine social and literary discourses of intoxicant use. Warner analyzes the literary treatment of alcoholism, drunkenness,...