Alcohol and Drugs History Society

CASQ: Culture, Alcohol and Society Quarterly

CASQ: Culture, Alcohol and Society Quarterly: Newsletter of Kirk/CAAS Collection at Brown [University], vol. 4, no. 2 (Jan., Feb., March 2009) has been published.  It includes a preview of a session at the May 20-23, 2010 inaugural meeting of the Conference of 19th cent. Americanists, "Washingtonian Transformation in Antebellum Literature, the Arts, and Culture: Imagination, Rhetoric and Semiotics." Papers will be presented by Richard Bell, Ric Caric, Peter Molin, W.R. Sutton, and Graham Wander. It also includes (pp. 7-19) an article about problems in writing the history in or of Alcoholics Anonymous (by CASQ editor Jared Lobdell).  There is much else in this issue (such as a sketch of Irish-Americans and drink and drugs).

Tea and the tea-table in 18th-cent England (book)

Markham Ellis and others, eds., Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England (Pickering and Ellis, forthcoming 2010).

Cultural history of the recovery movement (book)

Trysh Travis, The Language of the Heart: a Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2009).

Product Description
In The Language of the Heart Trysh Travis explores the rich cultural history of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and its offshoots and the larger "recovery movement" that has grown out of them. Moving from AA's beginnings in the mid-1930s as a men's fellowship that met in church basements to the thoroughly commercialized addiction treatment centers of today, Travis chronicles the development of recovery and examines its relationship to the broad American tradition of self-help, highlighting the roles that gender, mysticism, and print culture have played in that development.

Travis draws on hitherto unexamined materials from AA's archives as well as a variety of popular recovery literatures. Her analysis traces AA's embrace of the concept of addiction as disease, the rise of feminist sobriety discourse and the codependence theories of the 1970s and 80s, and Oprah Winfrey's turn-of-the-millennium popularization of metaphysical healing. What unites these varied cultures of recovery, Travis argues, is their desire to offer spiritual solutions to problems of gender and power. 

Treating self-help seekers as individuals whose intellectual and aesthetic traditions are worth excavating, The Language of the Heart is the first book to attend to the evolution and variation found within the recovery movement and to treat recovery with the attention to detail that its complexity requires. 

Book review in the Indianapolis Star

The story of Indiana prohibitionist and power broker Rev. Edward Shumaker (not AA proponent Rev. Sam Shoemaker) is the topic of Jason Lantzer's PhD thesis, now released as a book (mentioned here last month) "Prohibition is Here to Stay", Notre Dame Press, 2009. The book review by Russ Pulliam can be accessed here. The link to the publisher's webpage for the book is here.

New issue of CASQ

CASQ, 3/8 (July/August/September 2008) was recently published.  It's edited by Jared Lobdell.  The initials stand for Culture Alcohol & Society Quarterly: Newsletter of the Kirk/CAAS Collections at Brown.

CASQ vol. 3, no. 6 published

Culture, Alcohol & Society Quarterly: Newsletter of Kirk/CAAS Collections at Brown [University), vol. 3, no. 6, January/February/March 2008 has been published as a PDF file. Jared Lobdell is editor.

AA's Dr. Bob honored

About 2000 people, some on motorcycles, came to an Akron, Ohio, cemetary on Founder's Day to honor Dr. Robert Smith, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. For details, see here.

Bill Pittman (1947-2007) and AA

The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 22/1, Fall 2007, includes an appreciation of Bill Pittman collected and edited by Katherine Nelson. Contributors include Katherine Nelson, Ernest Kurtz, and Charlie Bishop. Pittman was an AA archivist, historian, and publisher as well as a collector of Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve Step recovery literature. He died November 9, 2007 at his home in Center City, Minnesota. As a historian he may be best known for his University of Minnesota thesis (1983) published in 1988 and reissued in 1999 as The Roots of Alcoholics Anonymous. He arranged for several years for Hazelden to print and distribute without charge the Social History of Alcohol Review, the predecessor of SHAD. See also here.

Before and much before AA

Volume 3, no. 5 (Oct//Nov./Dec. 2007) of CASQ: Culture, Alcohol and Society Quarterly Newsletter of the Kirk/CAAS Collection of Brown [University] was published in March 2008. Its principal focus is on the immediate predecessors of Alcoholics Anonymous, but there also is a brief installment in the continuing CASQ series on the Washingtonians, remote ancestors of AA. By the way, CAAS are the initials for Brown University's Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies. Brown's resources for the study of alcoholic drink, particularly anti-drink movements, were strengthened by the gift in the mid-1990s of the Chester H. Kirk Collection on Alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous. For more, see here.

AA in San Antonio, Texas (manuscript book)

Bob R., AA in SA: a history of Alcoholics Anonymous in San Antonio (San Antonio, Texas: Central Service Office, Alcoholics Anonymous, 2007 and c. 2006). Over 200 pages.