Full Description
In popular memory the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol's decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Lisa Jacobson reveals, alcohol's respectability and mass market success were neither sudden nor assured. It took a world war and a battalion of public relations experts and tastemakers to transform wine, beer, and whiskey into emblems of the American good life. Alcohol producers and their allies—a group that included scientists, trade associations, restaurateurs, home economists, cookbook authors, and New Deal planners—powered a publicity machine that linked alcohol to wartime food crusades and new ideas about the place of pleasure in modern American life. In this deeply researched and engagingly written book, Jacobson shows how the yearnings of ordinary consumers and military personnel shaped alcohol's cultural reinvention and put intoxicating pleasures at the center of broader debates about the rights and obligations of citizens.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE. CHARTING ALCOHOL'S PATH TO REDEMPTION
1 The Potent Politics of Weak Brews
2 A New Deal for Alcohol?
3 Fermented Beverages and the Gospel of Moderation
4 Spiritous Beverages and the Muddled Meanings of Moderation
PART TWO. THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE
5 Beer Goes to War
6 Whiskey, Weapons, and the Wartime State
7 Wine and Culinary Innovation on the Kitchen Front
8 Rank Privilege: The Politics of Intoxicating Pleasures in the US Military
Epilogue: The Power and Limits of Reinvention
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
