January 2018 – Points: short & insightful writing about the long & complex history of drugs & alcohol

The Color and Character of AA

January 25, 2018January 25, 2018 by ttravis

Editor’s Note: Today’s tribute to the work of AA Historian Glenn C. comes from leading recovery historian William L. (“Bill”) White, Emeritus Senior Research Consultant at Chestnut Health Systems. Readers of Points will recognize Bill as the author of the definitive history of recovery in the U.S., Slaying the Dragon, and the more recent Recovery …

Rich Dubiel Meets Glenn C.

January 21, 2018January 18, 2018 by ttravis

Editor’s Note: Today we present the second installation in our roundtable series celebrating the work of AA Historian Glenn C. Richard Dubiel, formerly Professor of Communications at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, was an early beneficiary of Glenn’s work with Hindsfoot Press, which published his insightful “Sober Sleuths: Lawrence Block and James Lee Burke” in 1999. …

AA History as Opposed to AA Myth

January 11, 2018 by ttravis

The first in our series of testimonials to the work of AA Historian Glenn C. comes from Art. S., who came into AA in the mid-1980s. A voracious reader of AA literature from his earliest days in the fellowship, he became an AA historian in 2001, when he took up the position of Archivist for …

Happy (AA Historical) New Year: Roundtable on the Work of Glenn C.

January 9, 2018January 6, 2018 by ttravis

With a nod to everyone who’s decided to abstain from alcohol in the new year, Points is kicking off 2018 with a tribute to one of Alcoholics Anonymous’s most talented historians, Glenn C., founder of the Hindsfoot Press (1993) and long-time moderator of the AA History Lovers listserv (fd. 2002). I first “met” Glenn through …

Connect with ADHS at AHA 2018 in Washington, D.C.!

January 4, 2018 by kylebridge

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Today, historians begin descending upon wintry Washington, D.C., for the 2018 meeting of the American Historical Association. AHA is the largest annual gathering for such professionals and their affiliated societies. Among those represented again this year is the Alcohol and Drugs History Society, with two panels of original research and one roundtable discussion. The date, times, and location of those sessions are listed below. Points readers (and their interested friends!) are invited to meet historians active in the field and learn about their most recent projects. We hope to see you there!

Session 1: Transgressive Marijuana: Cultivating, Performing, and Regulating the Cannabis Culture in the 20th Century

Friday, January 5, 2018: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Roosevelt Room 2 (Marriott Wardman Park, Exhibition Level)

Travel as Research: A Historian’s Recent Trip to Huautla de Jiménez, Mexico

January 2, 2018 by kylebridge

Editor’s Note: Today’s post was contributed by David Korostyshevsky, a PhD candidate in the University of Minnesota’s History of Science, Technology, and Medicine program. His research focuses on post-Enlightment discourses of intoxication and addiction in the Atlantic world. Contact him at koros003@umn.edu.

26238728_10215576634993350_1767057118_o — Oaxaca City (all photos courtesy of the author)

As historians, we are used to traveling to attend academic conferences, visit libraries, and study in archives. But sometimes, we ought to travel just to see the places about which we are writing. I learned firsthand about how fruitful the unexpected results of such a trip can be earlier this year, when I traveled to Mexico City, Oaxaca City, and Huautla de Jiménez. Such travel yields sources and context otherwise inaccessible to the historian.

In 1957, Robert Gordon Wasson, a vice-president at JP Morgan, published an article in Life Magazine in which he described his discovery of and experience with hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mexico. He found these mushrooms in Huautla de Jiménez, a small village in the northern mountains of Oaxaca inhabited by indigenous Mazatec people. After several trips in the early 1950s, he was finally invited to participate in a ceremony led by a curandera María Sabina. His Mexican mushroom trip made a profound impression on him. Publishing extraordinary descriptions of it in Life, Wasson became an unwitting, and later, reluctant, stimulus for a nascent psychedelic counterculture in the twentieth century.