| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Alcoholism in America: From Reconstruction to Prohibition. By Sarah W. Tracy. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xxvi, 357 pp. $48.00, ISBN 0-8018-8119-6.)

When Johns Hopkins University Press published Drunkard's Progress (1999), my anthology of Washingtonian temperance narratives from the 1840s, scholars were mainly dependent on Harry Gene Levine's pioneering work (Demon of the Middle Class, 1978) for basic understanding of nineteenth-century notions of excessive drinking. Alcoholism in America exemplifies the exponential advances recently achieved by young historians, such as Sarah W. Tracy, entering the now-burgeoning, interdisciplinary field of alcohol and addiction studies. Tracy sets a new standard of sophistication in this lucid exposition of alcohol as "a complicated cultural signifier" (p. xv), the chronic consumption of which has "'overdetermined' or multiple origins" that demand "an integrated approach emphasizing the biological, the psychological, and the social" (p. xvi). It may be, indeed, that our forebears, with their holistic model of disease, had a subtler grasp than we do of the multifarious nature of what we call alcoholism.

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