Americana Ebrietatis: The Favorite Tipple of Our Forefathers and the Laws and Customs Relating Thereto

In 1917, Hewson L. Peeke assembled a revelatory portrait of colonial and early American life, one in which alcohol was not a vice but a cornerstone of daily existence. Drawing on court records, newspaper accounts, and personal diaries, Americana Ebrietatis documents an America where beer, cider, and wine replaced water at every table, where the first Governor of Massachusetts brewed his own ale, and where a man could be fined, stocked, and forced to wear a sign reading "Drunkard" through the streets for overindulging. Peeke traces the journey from these open-drinking decades through the growing moral panic, showing how immigrant traditions (Germans with their beer, Italians with their wine) blended with Yankee hard cider to create a republic that was, by any measure, perpetually tipsy. The book illuminates a forgotten America where alcohol fueled shipyard labor, lubricated political deals, and marked every significant occasion from christenings to funerals. What makes this work endure is not merely its catalog of vintage drunkenness but its clear-eyed documentation of how a culture that once accepted drinking as naturally as breathing gradually turned toward prohibition, and what that transformation reveals about American ideals, anxieties, and hypocrisy.