Description: Challenging the prevailing view that taverns tended to break down class and gender differences, Salinger persuasively argues they did not signal social change so much as buttress custom and encourage exclusion.
Brief description: Sharon V. Salinger is chair of the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside.
Review Quotes: The most comprehensive survey to date of this curiously underinvestigated aspect of early American social life . . . [Contains] a wealth of illustrative and amusing anecdotes . . . Well researched and informative.
--Simon Middleton, William and Mary Quarterly