People have gathered in public drinking places to drink, relax, socialize, and do business for hundreds of years. For just as long, critics have described taverns and similar drinking establishments as sources of individual ruin and public disorder. Examining these dynamics as Americans surged westward in the early nineteenth century, Kirsten E. Wood argues that entrepreneurial, improvement-minded men integrated many village and town taverns into the nation's rapidly developing transportation network and used tavern spaces and networks to raise capital, promote innovative businesses, practice genteel sociability, and rally support for favored causes—often while drinking the staggering amounts of alcohol for which the period is justly famous. 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 activists, who had their own stake in rethinking taverns and citizenship.

Bibliographies of local history are essential research tools for historians, genealogists, and book collectors. This volume is an attempt to bring together citations to all the books and pamphlets dealing with New York State history at the local or community level, which were published between 1900 and 1987; also included are some of the more important local history publications published prior to 1900, as well as a few works published as recently as 1989. It is not an attempt to compile a complete bibliography of the state which would undoubtedly require several large volumes, but rather, is directed more specifically to the needs of the local history and genealogy researcher. Material pertaining to the history of the major cities of the state has generally been excluded. Periodical articles and manuscript materials have also been excluded. About 2,500 publications are described in the listings which are arranged by county and town. This revised and enlarged edition updates the 1988 work with numerous additional citations, well-annotated for informative and entertaining reading, covering the following new subjects: Hudson Valley, Indians, maps, northern and western New York, reference books which include a substantial amount of New York material, Revolutionary War, Shakers and books with statewide coverage.

Abstract: This bibliography describes the research resources available in Eastern Massachusetts concerning culinary history. These materials include workbooks, farming manuals, works on nutrition and domestic management, collections of essays and poetry, diatribes and exhortations. The cut-off date for primary materials is 1920. This bibliography covers the collections of six Boston-Salem area libraries and library networks in addition to 23 various libraries/collections at Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges.