This social history documents the great 'alcoholic binge' that occurred between 1790 and 1840, when Americans drank more alcoholic beverages--nearly a halt pint of hard liquor per man per day--than at any other time in American history. American men were taught to drink as children--even as babies. However, alcohol usages crossed sexual, regional, racial and class lines.

Rorabaugh has written a well thought out and intriguing social history of Americas great alcoholic binge that occurred between 1790 and 1830, what he terms a key formative period in our history....A pioneering work that illuminates a part of our heritage that can no longer be neglected in future studies of Americas social fabric. A bold and frequently illuminating attempt to investigate the relationship of a single social custom to the central features of our historical experience....A book which always asks interesting questions and provides many provocative answers.

Berkeley, California, was the bellwether of the political, social, and cultural upheaval that made the 1960s a unique period of American history--a time when the top-down methods of a conservative establishment collided head-on with the bottom-up, grass-roots ethos of the civil rights movement and an increasingly well-educated and individualistic middle class. W.J. Rorabaugh, who attended the graduate school of the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1970s, presents a lively and informative account of the events that overtook and changed forever what had once been a quiet, conservative white suburb. The rise of the Free Speech Movement, which gave a voice to disfranchised students; the growth and increasing militance of a black community struggling to end segregation; the emergence of radicalism and the anti-war movement; the blossoming of "hippie" culture, with its scorn for materialism and enthusiasm for experimentation with everything from sex and drugs to Eastern philosophies; the beginnings of modern-day feminism and environmentalism--and how all of these coalesced in the explosive conflict over People's Park--are traced in a meticulously researched and authoritative narrative. At issue was the question of power, and the struggle between the establishment and the powerless led to developments that the advocates of a freer society could scarcely have foreseen: Ronald Reagan, elected governor of California in reaction to the events at Berkeley, and Edwin H. Meese III, who battled against the student movement and People's Park, rose to national power in the 1980s (without, however, gaining any popularity in Berkeley, where Walter Mondale won 83 percent of the vote in 1984). An invaluable account of its time and place, this book anchors the '60s in American history, both before and since that colorful decade.

This book has been replaced by Introduction to Addictive Behaviors, Fifth Edition, ISBN 978-1-4625-3922-2.

By surveying the religiously pluralistic setting of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Shenandoah Valley, Longenecker reveals how the fabric of American pluralism was woven. Calling worldliness the "mainstream" and otherworldliness, "outsidernesss," Shenandoah Religion describes the transition certain denominations made in becoming mainstream and the resistance of others in maintaining distinctive dress, manners, social relations, economics, and apolitical viewpoints.