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400 Years of Drinking in America
America’s relationship with alcohol is a fraught and inconsistent one. While many other nations and cultures have stable attitudes toward drinking, the American perspective on alcohol has been volatile, vacillating wildly from the gallon-a-day beer rations on the Mayflower to nationwide prohibition and back again. Why are Americans so ambivalent about alcohol? What can we learn about the past and the American character through these extreme fluctuations between alcoholism and sobriety across the centuries?
Join author Susan Cheever to explore 400 Years of Drinking in America. Across six lectures, Susan will trace the ever-changing attitudes toward alcohol in the United States, beginning with the colonists and tracing the patterns of habits and opinions to the rise of a thriving rehab industry in the 21st century. As you explore the ebb and flow of drinking in America, you’ll revisit moments that were deeply impacted by our complex relationship with alcohol.
The Pilgrims embraced beer while the Puritans wrestled with the sin of excessive drinking. The major wars fought on American soil were sometimes fueled as much by alcohol as by patriotism. Prohibition produced a generation of famously drunken writers and artists. From “the drunkest country in the world” to Alcoholics Anonymous, you’ll see what America’s love-hate relationship with booze can tell us about the growing pains of a young nation and the complexities of a diverse and ever-changing society.
Join author Susan Cheever to explore 400 Years of Drinking in America. Across six lectures, Susan will trace the ever-changing attitudes toward alcohol in the United States, beginning with the colonists and tracing the patterns of habits and opinions to the rise of a thriving rehab industry in the 21st century. As you explore the ebb and flow of drinking in America, you’ll revisit moments that were deeply impacted by our complex relationship with alcohol.
The Pilgrims embraced beer while the Puritans wrestled with the sin of excessive drinking. The major wars fought on American soil were sometimes fueled as much by alcohol as by patriotism. Prohibition produced a generation of famously drunken writers and artists. From “the drunkest country in the world” to Alcoholics Anonymous, you’ll see what America’s love-hate relationship with booze can tell us about the growing pains of a young nation and the complexities of a diverse and ever-changing society.
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Published October 16, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
November 3, 2025
לסקירה מפורטת בעברית ואנגלית, קישור לבלוג שלי -
https://sivi-the-avid-reader.com/400-...
https://sivi-the-avid-reader.com/400-...
December 11, 2025
3/5 ⭐️
Nothing too life changing but definitely learned something new. I do love a book that dives into history while also having a personal touch!
Nothing too life changing but definitely learned something new. I do love a book that dives into history while also having a personal touch!
October 28, 2025
A decent amount of topical history info in 6 short chapters.
1 - Pilgrims & Purtains
2- American Revolutionary War
3- US Presidents
4- American Prohibition era 1920 to 1933
5 - Drinking and US Writers (during and after Prohibition mainly)
6 - Temperance ( background and highs/lows)
1 - Pilgrims & Purtains
2- American Revolutionary War
3- US Presidents
4- American Prohibition era 1920 to 1933
5 - Drinking and US Writers (during and after Prohibition mainly)
6 - Temperance ( background and highs/lows)
November 26, 2025
2.51 hours on Audible.
December 2, 2025
Meh, not exactly what I thought it was going to be. Not as much about the history and more so about patterns and specific examples
Read
December 9, 2025Enjoyed this more than i was expecting to. Felt like a seminar and I so jived with that
November 15, 2025
Memory-Jogger Review: 400 Years of Drinking in America, by Susan Cheever
1. Core Concepts
- Alcohol as a constant social presence in American life, from colonial settlements through the present, woven into work, worship, politics, and leisure.
- Repeating cycles of heavy drinking followed by moral reform: indulgence, temperance, prohibition, backlash, and new forms of normalized consumption.
- The tavern, saloon, bar, and cocktail party as stages on which class, gender, ethnicity, and power relations are played out.
- Alcohol as an often-unseen historical actor shaping decisions about settlement, labour, voting, war, and law.
- A corrective thesis: standard U.S. histories downplay the role of alcohol, and recovering that story changes how familiar events look.
2. Quick Reference Takeaways
- Colonial and early national Americans drank at levels that would be considered extreme today, with beer, cider, and rum integrated into daily calories and hydration.
- Taverns were often among the first public buildings in new towns, functioning as inns, post offices, job markets, courtrooms, and political clubs as much as drinking spaces.
- The 19th century temperance movement grew out of social damage from industrial-era drinking: urban slums, workplace accidents, domestic violence, and the burdens on women and children.
- Temperance activism overlapped with other reform movements (abolition, women’s rights, religious revival), making anti-alcohol politics a key part of wider social transformation.
- Prohibition emerged from decades of organizing, but its enforcement failures, corruption, and black markets demonstrated the limits of trying to legislate private morality.
- Mid-20th century culture re-domesticated drinking through suburban cocktails, advertising, and gendered rituals, even as public tolerance for obvious drunkenness shrank.
- Late-20th and early-21st century debates shift toward public health and externalities: drunk driving, workplace safety, healthcare costs, and addiction framing.
- Compared with many European societies, the U.S. trajectory is sharper and more moralized: abrupt swings between near-licence and aggressive restriction rather than a stable “wet” culture.
3. Key Quotes
“The Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on a cold November day in 1620 because they were running out of beer.” — Susan Cheever
“On the voyage from England, beer was their everything. Beer was their fruit and their vegetables in a diet that otherwise consisted of bread, cheese, and meat. Beer was their yogurt with its healing enzymes, and beer was their medicinal spirit. Beer was their water, and beer was their, well, beer.” — Susan Cheever
“There was a feeling that voters should be repaid in booze for the effort of voting.” — Susan Cheever
“Seven thousand arrests for alcohol possession in New York City between 1921 and 1923 (when enforcement was more or less openly abandoned) resulted in only seventeen convictions.” — Susan Cheever
“The interesting truth, untaught in most schools and unacknowledged in most written history … is that a glass of beer, a bottle of rum, a keg of hard cider, a flask of whiskey … was often the silent, powerful third party to many decisions that shaped the American story from the 17th century to the present.” — Susan Cheever
4. Key Figures / Case Studies
- Pilgrims and early colonists:
- Beer shortages and provisioning shape when and where ships make landfall.
- Taverns knit together scattered settlements and carry news, credit, and politics.
- 18th and early 19th century farmers and workers:
- Rum, cider, and later whiskey as part-payment for labour; drinking embedded in wage systems and harvest rituals.
- Saloons and grog-shops as working-class institutions where employers, political machines, and workers all compete for loyalty.
- Temperance activists:
- Middle-class and religious reformers, often women, targeting saloons as sites of family ruin and political corruption.
- Mass organizations, pledge-taking rituals, and moral suasion as tools to reshape everyday habits.
- Urban political machines:
- Parties and ward-heelers using free drinks to mobilize voters, with saloons doubling as political HQs.
- Elections and patronage tied to the liquor trade, making Prohibition a direct threat to machine power.
- Bootleggers, speakeasies, and federal agents under Prohibition:
- Organized crime and informal distribution networks filling the gap left by legal closure.
- Courts and juries reluctant to convict ordinary drinkers, undermining enforcement.
- Postwar middle-class America:
- Martini hours, business lunches, and advertising-driven brand identities for beer and spirits.
- Quiet normalization of daily drinking alongside rising concern about alcoholics and “problem drinkers.”
- Contemporary public-health institutions:
- Drunk-driving campaigns, workplace testing, treatment programs, and changing norms about visible intoxication.
- Alcohol recast as a regulated risk rather than solely a moral failing.
5. Central Metaphors & Symbols
- The tavern as America’s first civic center:
- A place where news, mail, credit, and political talk circulate in the same air as alcohol.
- Symbol for how drinking is fused with communication and collective decision-making.
- Alcohol as a “silent third party”:
- Present at negotiations, elections, land deals, and domestic conflicts without being named as an actor.
- A way to remember that many historical choices were made under the influence.
- The pledge and the saloon door:
- Temperance pledges, smashed bar fixtures, and “dry” towns as images of struggle over who controls public space.
- The saloon door as a boundary between respectable and disreputable behaviour, constantly renegotiated.
- Prohibition as a pressure cooker:
- Liquor goes underground but doesn’t disappear; pressure leaks through speakeasies, bootlegging, and official corruption.
- The image helps explain why repeal was almost inevitable once enforcement legitimacy collapsed.
- The suburban cocktail glass:
- From saloon to living room, alcohol remains central, just rebranded as sophistication, hospitality, or masculinity/femininity.
- A reminder that “respectable” settings do not necessarily reduce risk; they just change who is visible as a problem drinker.
6. Author’s Purpose / Intellectual Context
- To restore alcohol to the center of U.S. social history:
- Standard narratives minimize the role of drunkenness, taverns, and liquor economies.
- By foregrounding them, Cheever reframes events from settlement decisions to party politics.
- To connect macro-history with intimate, ordinary behaviour:
- Decisions about where to land, how to vote, when to work, and how to celebrate are all filtered through a culture of drinking.
- The course tracks how those patterns shift as industrialization, urbanization, and new technologies arrive.
- To trace the moral and political oscillation around alcohol:
- From early acceptance through evangelically infused temperance to Prohibition and then to regulatory compromise.
- Shows how alcohol debates encode anxieties about class, gender, immigration, and modernity.
- To situate the U.S. in a broader drinking world:
- Implicit comparison with European societies that maintained “wet” cultures without a full Prohibition.
- Suggests that American tendencies toward absolutism and moral crusades made the U.S. trajectory unusually volatile.
7. Challenges / Gaps / Counterarguments
- Episodic, anecdotal structure:
- The narrative moves through vivid episodes more than through systematic data.
- Excellent for memory of stories but weaker as a comprehensive statistical account of consumption trends.
- Limited quantitative and economic analysis:
- The role of the alcohol industry, taxation, and fiscal dependence on liquor revenues could be pushed further.
- Readers seeking deep engagement with price, supply chains, or comparative per-capita consumption may find these underdeveloped.
- Underexplored groups and perspectives:
- Women appear strongly as temperance activists but less often as drinkers with their own cultures and spaces.
- Indigenous and immigrant drinking histories are touched on but not fully unpacked in their own right.
- U.S.-centric lens:
- Comparisons to other nations’ alcohol regimes are suggestive but brief.
- A more systematic cross-national view would sharpen whether U.S. trajectories are truly unique or just more extreme in degree.
- Interpretive risk:
- Emphasizing alcohol as an often-unseen factor can tempt over-ascription of causal weight.
- The strongest use of the course is as a reframing lens: to remember that alcohol was there, not to treat it as the sole driver of events.
1. Core Concepts
- Alcohol as a constant social presence in American life, from colonial settlements through the present, woven into work, worship, politics, and leisure.
- Repeating cycles of heavy drinking followed by moral reform: indulgence, temperance, prohibition, backlash, and new forms of normalized consumption.
- The tavern, saloon, bar, and cocktail party as stages on which class, gender, ethnicity, and power relations are played out.
- Alcohol as an often-unseen historical actor shaping decisions about settlement, labour, voting, war, and law.
- A corrective thesis: standard U.S. histories downplay the role of alcohol, and recovering that story changes how familiar events look.
2. Quick Reference Takeaways
- Colonial and early national Americans drank at levels that would be considered extreme today, with beer, cider, and rum integrated into daily calories and hydration.
- Taverns were often among the first public buildings in new towns, functioning as inns, post offices, job markets, courtrooms, and political clubs as much as drinking spaces.
- The 19th century temperance movement grew out of social damage from industrial-era drinking: urban slums, workplace accidents, domestic violence, and the burdens on women and children.
- Temperance activism overlapped with other reform movements (abolition, women’s rights, religious revival), making anti-alcohol politics a key part of wider social transformation.
- Prohibition emerged from decades of organizing, but its enforcement failures, corruption, and black markets demonstrated the limits of trying to legislate private morality.
- Mid-20th century culture re-domesticated drinking through suburban cocktails, advertising, and gendered rituals, even as public tolerance for obvious drunkenness shrank.
- Late-20th and early-21st century debates shift toward public health and externalities: drunk driving, workplace safety, healthcare costs, and addiction framing.
- Compared with many European societies, the U.S. trajectory is sharper and more moralized: abrupt swings between near-licence and aggressive restriction rather than a stable “wet” culture.
3. Key Quotes
“The Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on a cold November day in 1620 because they were running out of beer.” — Susan Cheever
“On the voyage from England, beer was their everything. Beer was their fruit and their vegetables in a diet that otherwise consisted of bread, cheese, and meat. Beer was their yogurt with its healing enzymes, and beer was their medicinal spirit. Beer was their water, and beer was their, well, beer.” — Susan Cheever
“There was a feeling that voters should be repaid in booze for the effort of voting.” — Susan Cheever
“Seven thousand arrests for alcohol possession in New York City between 1921 and 1923 (when enforcement was more or less openly abandoned) resulted in only seventeen convictions.” — Susan Cheever
“The interesting truth, untaught in most schools and unacknowledged in most written history … is that a glass of beer, a bottle of rum, a keg of hard cider, a flask of whiskey … was often the silent, powerful third party to many decisions that shaped the American story from the 17th century to the present.” — Susan Cheever
4. Key Figures / Case Studies
- Pilgrims and early colonists:
- Beer shortages and provisioning shape when and where ships make landfall.
- Taverns knit together scattered settlements and carry news, credit, and politics.
- 18th and early 19th century farmers and workers:
- Rum, cider, and later whiskey as part-payment for labour; drinking embedded in wage systems and harvest rituals.
- Saloons and grog-shops as working-class institutions where employers, political machines, and workers all compete for loyalty.
- Temperance activists:
- Middle-class and religious reformers, often women, targeting saloons as sites of family ruin and political corruption.
- Mass organizations, pledge-taking rituals, and moral suasion as tools to reshape everyday habits.
- Urban political machines:
- Parties and ward-heelers using free drinks to mobilize voters, with saloons doubling as political HQs.
- Elections and patronage tied to the liquor trade, making Prohibition a direct threat to machine power.
- Bootleggers, speakeasies, and federal agents under Prohibition:
- Organized crime and informal distribution networks filling the gap left by legal closure.
- Courts and juries reluctant to convict ordinary drinkers, undermining enforcement.
- Postwar middle-class America:
- Martini hours, business lunches, and advertising-driven brand identities for beer and spirits.
- Quiet normalization of daily drinking alongside rising concern about alcoholics and “problem drinkers.”
- Contemporary public-health institutions:
- Drunk-driving campaigns, workplace testing, treatment programs, and changing norms about visible intoxication.
- Alcohol recast as a regulated risk rather than solely a moral failing.
5. Central Metaphors & Symbols
- The tavern as America’s first civic center:
- A place where news, mail, credit, and political talk circulate in the same air as alcohol.
- Symbol for how drinking is fused with communication and collective decision-making.
- Alcohol as a “silent third party”:
- Present at negotiations, elections, land deals, and domestic conflicts without being named as an actor.
- A way to remember that many historical choices were made under the influence.
- The pledge and the saloon door:
- Temperance pledges, smashed bar fixtures, and “dry” towns as images of struggle over who controls public space.
- The saloon door as a boundary between respectable and disreputable behaviour, constantly renegotiated.
- Prohibition as a pressure cooker:
- Liquor goes underground but doesn’t disappear; pressure leaks through speakeasies, bootlegging, and official corruption.
- The image helps explain why repeal was almost inevitable once enforcement legitimacy collapsed.
- The suburban cocktail glass:
- From saloon to living room, alcohol remains central, just rebranded as sophistication, hospitality, or masculinity/femininity.
- A reminder that “respectable” settings do not necessarily reduce risk; they just change who is visible as a problem drinker.
6. Author’s Purpose / Intellectual Context
- To restore alcohol to the center of U.S. social history:
- Standard narratives minimize the role of drunkenness, taverns, and liquor economies.
- By foregrounding them, Cheever reframes events from settlement decisions to party politics.
- To connect macro-history with intimate, ordinary behaviour:
- Decisions about where to land, how to vote, when to work, and how to celebrate are all filtered through a culture of drinking.
- The course tracks how those patterns shift as industrialization, urbanization, and new technologies arrive.
- To trace the moral and political oscillation around alcohol:
- From early acceptance through evangelically infused temperance to Prohibition and then to regulatory compromise.
- Shows how alcohol debates encode anxieties about class, gender, immigration, and modernity.
- To situate the U.S. in a broader drinking world:
- Implicit comparison with European societies that maintained “wet” cultures without a full Prohibition.
- Suggests that American tendencies toward absolutism and moral crusades made the U.S. trajectory unusually volatile.
7. Challenges / Gaps / Counterarguments
- Episodic, anecdotal structure:
- The narrative moves through vivid episodes more than through systematic data.
- Excellent for memory of stories but weaker as a comprehensive statistical account of consumption trends.
- Limited quantitative and economic analysis:
- The role of the alcohol industry, taxation, and fiscal dependence on liquor revenues could be pushed further.
- Readers seeking deep engagement with price, supply chains, or comparative per-capita consumption may find these underdeveloped.
- Underexplored groups and perspectives:
- Women appear strongly as temperance activists but less often as drinkers with their own cultures and spaces.
- Indigenous and immigrant drinking histories are touched on but not fully unpacked in their own right.
- U.S.-centric lens:
- Comparisons to other nations’ alcohol regimes are suggestive but brief.
- A more systematic cross-national view would sharpen whether U.S. trajectories are truly unique or just more extreme in degree.
- Interpretive risk:
- Emphasizing alcohol as an often-unseen factor can tempt over-ascription of causal weight.
- The strongest use of the course is as a reframing lens: to remember that alcohol was there, not to treat it as the sole driver of events.
November 5, 2025
To be read again, and where is the Book 2 with detailed data Of what has happened to MADD, happened to families, Happened to cemeteries, Happened to Job, Happened to Freedom,
Happening now
If I take away your birthright to relieve your pain and only allow one legal course no matter what Prohibition you claim are you not creating what to claim against.
One small book example. “Donald Trumps brother died of alcoholism” and yet he has driven more to alcohol than anyone besides Nixon in recorded history.
Say Sam Miguel
Good reading well structured book because again Great Courses are Great!
Happening now
If I take away your birthright to relieve your pain and only allow one legal course no matter what Prohibition you claim are you not creating what to claim against.
One small book example. “Donald Trumps brother died of alcoholism” and yet he has driven more to alcohol than anyone besides Nixon in recorded history.
Say Sam Miguel
Good reading well structured book because again Great Courses are Great!
December 20, 2025
This was interesting, but it really should be titled 400 Years of Alcoholism in America, because that is definitely the author's focus. Don't get me wrong - it was still informative and I learned a lot. I was just expecting more about what types of alcohol/drinks were popular at different times and why, how, when, and why certain alcohols were made in specific parts of the US, etc. There was a little of that, but not much. I found the historical sections dealing with the Founding Fathers' relationship to alcohol to be the most educational/entertaining. Worth a listen, but largely focused on the impacts of binge drinking and alcoholism throughout US history.
December 26, 2025
Love history and this was a quirky look at how drinking impacted a lot of historical events from the Pilgrims on the Mayflower and the establishment of colonies in America through prohibitions failure to the killing of JFK and even our midterm presidentspresidents drinking history. Of course Trump doesn’t drink but most others have and there are causal impacts that come from a nation that drinks more than it should. But the book actually neither glorifies nor pointsa finger at the negative effects, it mainly tells stories.
December 11, 2025
Less of an audiobook than a lecture, an interesting if cursory exploration of alcohol and alcohol culture in American history. I'd love to hear a longer version of this with some of the ideas expanded and explored more.
maybe it's because the author's dad was a famous author, but there is a bit of an outsized concentration on alcoholism and writing which seems a little bit out of step with the historical nature of the rest of it. still it's very interesting and a breeze.
maybe it's because the author's dad was a famous author, but there is a bit of an outsized concentration on alcoholism and writing which seems a little bit out of step with the historical nature of the rest of it. still it's very interesting and a breeze.
October 21, 2025
Fun quick read from Audible. Bunch of interesting factoids about booze in American history (yes, apparently everyone was drunk). The only thing is that the author is in recovery and the final chapter’s litany on the dangers of drinking and the history of prohibition feels less balanced than it should. More of a call to action than a historical or anthropological review.
January 15, 2026
One of the items I found most striking was Susan Cheever's discussion and research on the alcohol's prevalence amongst the "esteemed" founding fathers and military leaders, such as Ulysses S. Grant. With the exception of teetotalers George W. Bush and the current reprobate occupying the Oval Office, one could opine that were it not for alcoholic consumption, our nation may look quite different.
Read
December 6, 2025Kind of clickbait title, just some historical anecdotes (that are interesting and shed light on certain American events). Mainly a very strong anti-alcohol message with a weird focus on her father toward the end.
October 23, 2025
I enjoyed these lectures, especially the parts about writers that made drinking part of their persona, like Hemingway and Susan's father, John.
November 2, 2025
3.5 out of 5 Stars
November 3, 2025
really well done! I like how it was broken up into bite sized pieces as well.
November 4, 2025
First 3 lectures were good the next 3 could have been skipped
November 8, 2025
very good set of lectures turned into an audio book. well worth the time.
Read
November 18, 2025“Drink is in itself a good creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness, but the abuse of drink is from Satan, the wine is from God, but the Drunkard is from the Devil". -Benjamin Franklin
November 18, 2025
Wasn’t expecting a history lesson on how our forefathers were alcoholics.
November 26, 2025
Nice short read on the history of alcohol and America going back 400 years
January 6, 2026
the jfk part was crazy
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews