She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Accommodating the Republic: Taverns in the Early United States, and reported the following:
Page 99 falls in the middle of chapter 3, where I delve into tavern accounts to reconstruct the economic and social tapestry of tavern-keeping and tavern-going in the early United States. Here, we meet Martin Browne, the proprietor of a tavern in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Browne’s alcohol transactions primarily involved moderate quantities for the era, such as half-pints of whiskey. While our imaginations might boggle at the idea of an eight-ounce pour, some tavern goers brought “pocket bottles” suitable for carrying at least some of their liquor away with them, and many customers bought by the quart or gallon because whiskey represented a basic staple in numerous early American households. Even so, patrons varied greatly in their alcohol purchases: some drank much more whiskey than average, some much less, and some bought low-alcohol beverages or none at all. Indeed, Browne’s and other tavern ledgers show that many patrons visited taverns for reasons beyond alcohol. Over 40 percent of Browne’s patrons also bought other household essentials such as vinegar and potatoes. A substantial fraction found themselves indebted to Browne for textiles or clothing, like William Dalloway’s red waistcoat and footed stockings, probably the work of Martin’s wife Molly, a weaver, or another woman in the household. For their pleasures and necessities, Browne and his neighbors rarely paid cash in full. Consider, for instance, Browne’s dealings with Betsy Duty, a servant in his household. Browne paid her wages in money, shoes, snuff, stockings, and two Linsey petticoats, assigning each a monetary value in his ledger. Like Browne himself, most tavern customers at the turn of the nineteenth century bought on credit and paid in goods and labor as well as money, weaving webs of debt that bound keepers and customers together, sometimes for years.Learn more about Accommodating the Republic at The University of North Carolina Press website.
A reader who turned to page 99 could deduce my specific arguments about the economic ties between keepers and patrons and the longer arc of historical continuity, for many economic patterns in the infant nation’s village taverns had colonial origins. But this hypothetical reader would, I think, be hard-pressed to predict the simultaneous, contrary evidence for economic, social, and political change, which makes taverns in this period so complex and so rewarding to study. Page 99 also provides no hint of the diverse sources and historical actors found elsewhere in the book. Whether page 99 is a good proxy for the book depends partly on whether you like your history with or without spoilers.
While the patterns of exchange that linked Browne and his neighbors had pre-revolutionary corollaries, many small town and village taverns in the early republic took on new roles, encouraging infrastructural development, westward expansion, the proliferation of republican institutions, and the fervor for improving oneself, one’s property, and society. Taverns also became hubs for commercial and political innovation. For some Americans, tavern-going represented adult white men’s right to govern themselves, their families, and their republic as they chose. Yet hard-drinking adult white men did not have taverns to themselves. Temperate white men, middle-class white women, and free people of color all staked claims upon tavern spaces in the early republic, whether in the name of public good or personal satisfaction. Those striving for temperate or genteel taverns never overawed the advocates of rowdy masculinity. Nevertheless, they made more headway than many historians have realized, ensuring that age-old and novel tavern interactions posed enduring questions about who belonged in the republic and for what purposes.
--Marshal Zeringue
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