How important was alcohol to the American Revolution?

In this episode of the Friends of Mount Vernon Book Club, we discuss Brooke Barbier’s Cocked and Boozy: An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution and the role drinking played in the politics, economics, social relationships, and everyday life of Revolutionary America.

The conversation explores taverns and drinking culture, alcohol as both a social equalizer and a marker of class, and what the drinking habits of figures such as George Washington and John Hancock can tell us about the people behind the familiar stories of the founding era.

We also discuss Barbier’s use of food, drink, humor, and social history to make eighteenth-century Americans feel less distant—and what alcohol reveals about power, sociability, politics, and the society that produced the American Revolution.

Book discussed: Cocked and Boozy: An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution by Brooke Barbier.

The Friends of Mount Vernon Book Club welcomes historian Frank Cogliano for a wide-ranging conversation about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the American Revolution, and the difficult questions the founding generation left behind.

Cogliano joins the group to explore the relationship between Washington and Jefferson, the ideals that united them, the political differences that eventually pulled them apart, and what those disagreements reveal about the creation of the early American republic. The conversation also considers independence, political leadership, slavery and the contradictions of the founding era, and the ways Washington, Jefferson, and the Revolution continue to be interpreted and debated 250 years later.

It is a lively discussion about friendship and rivalry, historical memory, and what it means to reconsider the founding generation on the 250th anniversary of American independence.

We discuss the latest George Washington biography.