Hello all.  This is too good to be true, I must say, a temperance history
group.  I look forward to reading the archive.  I am a Ph.D. student, soon
to be ABD (comps in 10 days), writing a literary/cultural history of
drinking in American literature from roughly 1819 to 1926.  I am reading
the temperance novel as central (but not representative) to the literary
history of the sentimental years, and hence to the literary tradition
inaugurated in this era.  For me this is a tradition of narrating life by
narrating morality (with certain frameworks), and I see at least strands
of it still going today.  After the war I find other things, most of them
alcoholic (e.g., literary naturalism), and styles of narration which focus
on attributes of character other than decision-making, such as range.  My
favorite "temperance" author is of course the immortal T. S. Arthur,
although I am also fond of the early 1850s "battle manuals" for temperance
such as \Uncle Sam's Farm Fence\.  I am also looking at Hawthorne,
Melville, Emerson, Locke ("Petroleum Nasby"), Fern, Longfellow, Mitchell,
Willis, Sigourney, Barnum, Adams, Dickens, Douglass, Irving, Kirkland,
Lincoln, Poe, Whitman (Walt and Walter) and the list goes on and on
doesn't it right on up to that most famous group of the 1920s.  In
addition to the 19th and early 20th century stuff in America, I am also
curious about the history of temperance movements around the world, and to
the present day.  The history of treatment for alcoholism also comes with
the territory.  Hopefully the volume here is quite high.  I'll probably
lurk for at least the next ten days, seeing as I have to study comps --
one of my areas is an interdisciplinary "Drinking in American Culture"
and not surprisingly I recognize many names on the list of subscribers.
 
Jon Stephen Miller
Department of English
University of Iowa
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"Life is sweet as nitrous oxide" -- Ralph Waldo Emerson