My excellent panelists that they should be recruiting their time it. I was working on a book about a celebrity or writer of the very earliest 19th century, who among other cultural qualities, suffered from addiction to opium. Sidebar, he blamed it all on his many years of School Teaching in virginia, which i think we can all appreciate that. He wrote that there is a disheartening and monotonous drudgery in teaching that silently but fatally saps his constitution, big numbs his faculties, and converts the fuel of enthusiasm into melancholy. Opium was the solution, and who can disagree . In writing about his laudanum habit i found it necessary to rethink my own ideas about addiction. He and his contemporaries spoke of opium as his demon, acknowledging its addictive qualities, they also tended to say that his real problem was melancholy itself. Since the publication of the alcohol at republic in 1979, scholars have explored the extent to which 19th century americans wrestled with addictiv
Welcome, and thank you for coming to the roundtable, with the unwieldy and yet highly evocative title drugs, alcohol, and the gendered and racial experience of addiction in the early republic. I am carolyn eastman, and im pleased to inform you that the subject of this roundtable proved evocative enough that cspan is filming us right now. A fact that gives me an additional opportunity to remind my excellent panelists that they should be recruiting their time it. I was working on a book about a celebrity or writer of the very century, who among other cultural qualities, suffered from addiction to opium. He blamed it all on his many years of School Teaching in virginia, which i think we can all appreciate that. He wrote that there is a disheartening and monotonous drudgery in teaching that silently but fatally saps his constitution, big numbs his faculties, and converts the fuel of enthusiasm into melancholy. Opium was the solution, and who can disagree . In writing about his laudanum hab