Points Interviews – Page 22 – Points: short & insightful writing about the long & complex history of drugs & alcohol

The Points Interview: Gene Heyman

May 11, 2011 by Joe Spillane

The eighth installment of the Points Interview is a timely one, in light of guest blogger Eoin Cannon’s recent post discussing a classroom visit by Gene Heyman. Today, we are pleased to have Gene discussing his recent book, Addiction: A Disorder of Choice (Harvard University Press, 2009). Since it first appeared, the book’s provocative reconsideration of the nature of addiction and the disease paradigm has generated considerable interest (readers wanting to get a flavor of the varied responses are invited to examine this essay in The New Republic and this interesting exchange in Times Higher Education) in both academic and policy circles.

Describe your book in terms your mother (or the average mother-in-the-street) could understand.

While writing the book, I had several goals in mind as well as several audiences, including mothers. What I hoped the reader would come away with was an understanding of the nature of addiction–and an understanding of what addiction told us about ourselves, particularly how we make choices. I included key research findings so that readers could see for themselves how addicts behave and the nature of the support for the book’s conclusions. For example, although psychiatric texts, clinicians, researchers and the National Institute on Drug Abuse bulletins routinely refer to addiction as a “chronic relapsing disease,” the epidemiological chapter reveals that addiction is the psychiatric disorder with the highest remission rate. Most individuals who meet the official criteria for addiction are ex-addicts by age thirty. Every major, scientific epidemiological survey has obtained this result, yet it has gone unmentioned, even by experts. Thus, the book reveals “new” but well established research that is fundamental to the understanding addiction.

The Points Interview: Bruce Stewart

April 6, 2011 by Joe Spillane

It is a pleasure to present the lucky seventh installment of the Points Interview, with Bruce Stewart joining us to discuss his new book, Moonshiners and Prohibitionists. The book has just been released by the University Press of Kentucky, as part of its excellent New Directions in Southern History series, and offers a fresh take on moonshining and its relation to the politics of prohibition. Prof. Stewart is assistant professor of history at Appalachian State University.

Describe your book in terms your mother (or the average mother-in-the-street) could understand.

This book explains how prohibition sentiment, which was originally championed by middle-class townspeople, ultimately became embraced by rural Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. To demonstrate how and why this change occurred, the book chronicles western North Carolinians’ changing perceptions of local alcohol distillers (many of whom would become moonshiners after the enactment of federal liquor taxation in 1862) throughout the nineteenth century. Before the 1880s, licit distillers were viewed as entrepreneurs who provided local communities with a product (alcohol) the promoted social cohesion. Mountain residents also supported illicit distillers (or moonshiners), believing that the federal liquor tax threatened local autonomy. After the 1880s, the image of alcohol manufacturers (legal and illegal) took a turn for the worse. Portrayed as social deviants who converted “the staff of life” into “poison,” distillers on both sides of law came under attack from rural residents who – like their urban counterparts – began to advocate for statewide prohibition. Why did this change in attitude occur?

The Points Interview: Sarah Meacham

March 25, 2011 by Joe Spillane

We’re delighted to present the sixth installment of the Points Interview, in which we make our first foray into the colonial period in North America. Points talks with Prof. Sarah Hand Meacham, author of Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Prof. Meacham is currently an assistant professor in the Department of History at Virginia Commonwealth University. Every Home a Distillery employs some skillful historical detective work to examine women’s role in the manufacturing of alcoholic beverages, and the manner in which men ultimately asserted their own primacy in that field of endeavor.

Describe your book in terms your mother (or the average mother-in-the-street) could understand.

In Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), I analyze the interesting question of how technology and science came to be defined as men’s domain. No one had realized that from the late seventeenth century until the late eighteenth century it was typically women in the Chesapeake (that is the eastern areas of Virginia and Maryland) who made alcohol. Our contemporary assumptions and the historic documents themselves have hidden women’s labor. For instance, tavern licenses were almost always given to men. When I began wondering what kind of credentials a man gave the court in order to be considered for a license, I discovered that all the men who received licenses were married to women with tavern-keeping experience. These were women who had grown up helping their mothers run taverns. The men received the licenses because that was how the law worked, but it was the wives who were doing much of the day-to-day labor of managing the tavern. This makes sense when you consider that the men needed to be away managing farms or other businesses. But if you looked at the legal documents alone, and not the genealogies of the businesses, it would appear as if women had nothing to do with the taverns. That’s one example of how the historic documents can sometimes lead us astray.

The Points Interview: Barbara W. Grossman

March 21, 2011March 21, 2011 by Joe Spillane

The fifth installment of the Points Interview takes us on our first venture into biography as a dimension of drugs history. Here, we talk with Barbara Wallace Grossman, author of A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009). The work tells the story of the actress Clara Morris, whose morphine addiction is just one dimension of a remarkable, turbulent, and compelling life.

Describe your book in terms your mother (or the average mother-in-the-street) could understand.

A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009) is the story of a remarkable person and grew out of my ongoing interest in documenting the lives of women who shaped American theater history. Having written a book about Fanny Brice – someone who worked hard, played hard, and left very little primary source material behind – I wanted to find a woman in theater who had kept a diary. A former student doing research at Schlesinger Library in Cambridge (Massachusetts) told me about an actress whose 54-volume diary was housed there. After spending several weeks reading the first few volumes, I knew I had the subject of my next book – a project that took almost 14 years to complete! It chronicles the turbulent life and career of actress, author and feminist Clara Morris (1847-1925)

Largely forgotten today, Clara Morris (1847-1925) was one of the most renowned stars of her time, known as “America’s Greatest Actress,” the “Queen of the American Stage” and the “Empress of Emotional Acting.” Her mesmerizing performances riveted audiences as much as her tabloid-worthy antics intrigued them. Using Morris’s diary, memoirs, novels and short stories, as well as countless newspaper articles and secondary sources, I worked hard to present her story in an objective, yet compelling way.

The Points Interview: Carol Benedict

March 14, 2011 by Joe Spillane

The fourth installment of the Points Interview series is ready, and I’m happy to say that it takes us into the fascinating world of tobacco history. Carol Benedict is author of Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010, set to be released next month by the University of California Press (you can read an excerpt here). She is currently on the faculty of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of History at Georgetown University.

Describe your book in terms your mother (or the average mother-in-the-street) could understand.

One third of the world’s smokers, over 320 million, now live in China. Active smoking
causes nearly one million deaths in China per year and another 100,000 Chinese die as a consequence of exposure to second-hand smoke. This book examines the deep historical roots of China’s contemporary “cigarette culture” and its burgeoning epidemic of smoking-related illness. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century when New World tobacco was first introduced into Chinese borderlands, the book describes the spread of commercialized tobacco cultivation throughout much of China in the seventeenth century, changing fashions of tobacco use in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the emergence of the Chinese cigarette industry in the twentieth century. It explains why smoking, previously enjoyed by men and women alike, gradually became almost exclusively a male habit after 1900. The book also examines traditional Chinese medical ideas about tobacco, finding that Chinese physicians believed tobacco could be beneficial under certain circumstances even though they fully understood tobacco’s dangers. The perception that smoking could be good for health together with the important role it played in building and maintaining social relationships go a long way towards explaining its pervasiveness in Chinese society down to the present.

The Points Interview: Erika Dyck

February 14, 2011 by Joe Spillane

For our third installment of the Points Interview, we move from alcohol to LSD, and a conversation with Erika Dyck, author of Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD From Clinic to Campus. Erika is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. Readers interested in more compelling work in the history of medicine and health may wish to check out a new edited volume by Erika Dyck and Christopher Fletcher, Locating Health: Historical and Anthropological Investigations of Place and Health.

Describe your book in terms your mother (or the average mother-in-the-street) could understand.

The Sixties are often remembered for the day-Glow images, groovy terms, tie-dyed fashions, trippy music and, for some people, perhaps even as a period of social and moral degeneration. LSD has been blamed (or credited) for helping to create this imagery, but the drug has a longer history. It was first developed in 1938 and was legally used in thousands of research studies throughout the 1950s before it became known as a more popular recreational drug. My book looks at one of these sets of studies; a set of experiments that took place off the beaten path but that had a significant influence on the way that LSD was studied, understood, and later abused. In the small town of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, with support from Tommy Douglas’ provincial government, the same government that introduced Medicare to Canadians, researchers coined the term ‘psychedelic’ and left their mark on a generation. This book is about those prairie-based psychedelic pioneers.

What do you think a bunch of drug and alcohol historians might find particularly interesting about your book?

Drug and alcohol historians may already be familiar with the mythology surrounding LSD and the psychedelic ethos, but they may be less familiar with the way in which LSD was used as a treatment for alcoholism.

The Points Interview: Mark Schrad

January 31, 2011January 31, 2011 by Joe Spillane

The second installment in our continuing series of author interviews features Mark Lawrence Schrad, author of The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave (Oxford University Press, 2010). Mark Schrad is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. After checking out the interview, readers may also wish to learn more about his current book project, Vodka Politics.

Describe your book in terms your mother (or the average mother-in-the-street) could understand.

Most people think of temperance and prohibition as a uniquely American phenomena, but as I demonstrate in The Political Power of Bad Ideas, temperance was one of the very first transnational social movements, and was truly global in scope. Moreover, nationwide alcohol prohibition was adopted in ten other countries and countless colonial possessions in addition to (and in most cases even before) the United States, all with similar disastrous consequences, and in every case followed by repeal.

On the one hand, my book places the American experience with temperance and prohibition in its proper international context. On the other, I use this seemingly bizarre global event—the rapid international diffusion of a “bad” policy idea in the form of prohibition—to say something about how ideas travel, and how they are filtered within different domestic policymaking structures.

With these dual objectives in mind—one historical, and one theoretical—the book doesn’t read like a standard historical monograph.

The Points Interview: Daniel Okrent

January 24, 2011January 23, 2011 by ttravis

Author interviews will be a recurring special feature on Points, and our first foray into the genre is with Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition (Simon & Schuster, 2010).

Describe your book in terms your mother (or the average mother-in-the-street) could understand.

okrent cover — But what about the Bronfmans?

LAST CALL tells the difficult-to-believe story of Prohibition— how a surprisingly diverse coalition of organizations united to achieve the unlikely goal of amending the Constitution in a way that limited personal freedom; how the 14-year reign of Prohibition altered American politics, economy, jurisprudence, and social life; and how a combination of failed implementation policies, official corruption, and the devastating economic effects of the Depression brought about Repeal. In short, my book seeks to answer three simple questions: How did it happen? What exactly was it? And how did it end?

What do you think a bunch of alcohol & drug historians might find particularly interesting about your book?

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