The happy warrior, and today hes here to discuss his new book, drunks an American History. Please join me in welcoming chris finan. [applause] thank you. Its a real pleasure to be here in california. I just happened to be visiting, and i didnt really know what to how to dress when i was coming out here from new york. So im wearing tweed [laughter] so im going to take it off. I just wanted you to see that i do, in fact, have a jacket. [laughter] i, i love history, and i have for a long time. I studied history in school, in graduate school. And what had always appealed to me as a historian was strong stories. And so my first book was a biography of alfred e. Smith, the first catholic to run for president , a poor boy who became the great reforming governor of new york and then would have been a great president , but he got wiped out by herbert hoover. And i love that story. I spent 20 years writing it, and i decided when it was done, id better hurry up on the next book or id be dead. The
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