In addition to providing inexpensive intoxication and occasionally lousy accommodations, village taverns in the Northeast were urbanizing institutions. They helped New Yorkers and New Englanders conceive and pursue wide-ranging economic and social ambitions.
As nodes in regional transportation networks, taverns connected villages to each other and to larger cities. Through taverns’ print and oral communication networks, entrepreneurs reached wide audiences while leveraging taverns’ links to desirable novelty and urbane improvements.
If, as historian Richard D. Brown argues, “urban society is a crossroads phenomenon, bound directly to exchange and communication,” then taverns fostered urbanizing tendencies in the region.
The next Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar, on May 7th at 5 pm, will host Kirsten E. Wood of the Florida International University for “Taverns, Entrepreneurial Networking, Self-Improvement & Urban Tendencies in the Early Republican Northeast.” Richard D. Brown of the University of Connecticut will also provide comments.
Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. You can learn more here.
This is a hybrid event. The in-person reception at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston starts at 4:30 pm and the program will begin at 5 pm. The virtual program begins at 5 pm and will be hosted on the video conference platform Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
Purchasing the $25 seminar subscription gives you advance access to the seminar papers of all seven seminar series for the current academic year. Subscribe at www.masshist.org/research/seminars. Subscribers for the current year may login to view currently available essays.
Register to attend the event online.
Photo: The 1747 Nellis Tavern on Route 5, just east of St. Johnsville, NY, in 2013 (provided by Palatine Settlement Society).
