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xiv Introduction possess, and laws related to intoxicants vary across the United States and the world. In recent years, marijuana has become more acceptable, both socially and legally. In fact, some have worried that legal marijuana could become a drag on alcohol sales, which would be a blow to tavern keepers. It is too soon to tell if this is the case, but one thing is certain: Americans still consume very large quantities of alcoholic beverages, and many of them are still consumed in taverns, an industry that currently commands nearly $20 billion a year in sales in the United States (Statista 2017). As long as there has been society, there have been intoxicants, and as long as there have been businesses and customers, there have been taverns that have sold alcoholic beverages. The tavern has been around as long as any other societal institution. It has always been, and it surely will always remain. Shortly after the landing of the first English settlers at Jamestown in 1608 and Plymouth Rock in 1620, the American tavern quickly took root. Along with the building of churches came the building of taverns, both seemingly springing organi- cally from the soil as fast as English settlements multiplied. Nearly every early community had taverns, and they provided many important func- tions, serving for instance as inns and places of shelter for wayward travel- ers as well as meeting houses and places of revelry for locals. Into the next century, Americans were still drinking, and they were doing so heavily. Ben Franklin observed this fact when in 1737 he noted multiple terms for drunkenness in a publication he titled The Drinkers Dictionary. Franklin was no teetotaler, and he also liked to imbibe, and in verse he sang the praises of alcohol, but he was concerned about the incredible amount of drunkenness he witnessed around him, and he witnessed much of this in taverns (Szasz 1993, 83 Larson 1937). He must have spent a great deal of time around drinkers because he compiled a list of 228 terms that were used to describe intoxication. Phrases such as “has swallow’d a Tavern Token” and “He makes a Virginia Fence” are charming reminders that as long as alcohol has inhabited a central part of society, we have been com- ing up with euphemisms to describe drinking and drinkers. Fast-forward a couple more generations and Americans were drinking as much as ever. The historian W. J. Rorabaugh describes the early republic as containing a “nation of drunkards,” in which profound changes in society created a period that Rorabaugh asserts witnessed the highest levels of alcohol con- sumption of any time before or since (Rorabaugh 1979). In this environ- ment, taverns thrived and evolved. In the latter half of the 19th century and into the first two decades of the 20th century, the golden age of the tavern emerged: the saloon period. Saloons became ubiquitous features in the many downtowns of the United