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The Sobriety Test:
Temperance and the Melodramas of Modern Citizenship
by
Thomas Augst
(University of Minnesota)
Monday, March 21, 2005, at 4:30 p.m.
Wilbur Cross North Reading Room
Wilbur Cross Building
University of Connecticut
Storrs, Connecticut
PRÉCIS:
Temperance reform changed the meaning and conduct of freedom in
nineteenth-century America by making the private lives of ordinary men a
new sort of public spectacle. In fraternal organizations such as the
Washingtonians, in the lecture hall, in the pages of a novels, and on the
melodramatic stage, the figure of the reformed drunk taught Americans to
govern themselves and others in new ways, forging modes of leisure and
sociability that would shape the development of municipal regulation,
public culture, and the emerging social sciences in the later
nineteenth-century. This paper analyzes the roles that new institutions
and practices of a mass culture played in temperance reform, exploring
aesthetic conventions and class politics that continue to define contests
for moral authority in our own time.
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Please consult the 2004-2005 schedule
for a
complete list of this year's seminars.
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