that men were drinking most of this, were drinking more than the infants. and were probably drinking much more than the women were. so, we can assume that men's consumption was probably on the order of 16 gallons per year of the equivalent of the 90 proof alcohol. now, that is higher than it was previously during the colonial era, and yet it will go up. you see, by 1830, it's up to 4 gallons per capita in u.s. so, this is a period of peak consumption of alcohol in american history. now, you're wondering how you measure up. well, the last statistics that i have is for the year 2007 and it shows that alcohol consumption in this country is half of what it used to be. and yet there's plenty of evidence that alcohol can be for

much of the american population still a problem. okay. so, we've talked about the extent of drinking. we need to talk about what it was that early americans were drinking. so here are the options. you have to think about what were gentlemen drinking and what were common people drinking. of these options up here, what did gentlemen of the early republic prefer? gentlemen like john marshall? >> madiro, which is that strong, imported wine. it's pretty expensive, has a punch but not nearly as powerful as what common people preferred. of the options there, what did common people prefer? you're thinking beer because you're thinking in your own

time. what do you think of those choices would be the most popular for common men in america of 1830? >> whiskey. >> whiskey, far and away. remember we talked about the whiskey rebellion, how people were upset about the federal government putting a tax on whiskey because that really hit home. that was a preferred item of consumption. now, that's a good question, why did they drink so much whiskey and very little beer? well, lot of it has to do with technology. go ahead [ inaudible question ] >> it has a warming effect, more so than beer. that's important because lots of people working out doors. [ inaudible question ] >> it doesn't spoil as easily. now, there is no refrigeration in the early republic. you can't go to your refrigerator and get a nice, cold beer. you're going to drink a beer, it

has to be freshly made and you have to drink it prettily quickly before it goes bad. now, people are moving around a lot, so they like something that's portable, something they can put in a flask and stick in their pocket. and whiskey is perfect for that. and it will keep for a very long time. so people drank a lot of whiskey and very little beer. and wine they mostly drank these very strong wines like madeira but wine drinking was a femme none of gentlemen rather than of common people. so, foreigners comments on the very great extent of drinking in thedidididów early republic. one english visitor said that americans were, quote, certainly not as sober as the french or germans but perhaps about on the level with the irish. and americans recognize their

own heavy drinking. john adams found it, quote, mortifying that we americans should exceed all over people in the world in this degrading, beastly vice of intemperance, end quote. intemperance meant drunkenness in the language of the time. george washington thought that alcohol was, quote, the reign of half the workmen in this country, end quote. but it's not just workmen. it's also gentlemen. for example, in 1790, the governor of new york gave a public dinner attended by fellow gentlemen. there was 120 gentlemen attending and they consumed 135 bottles of madeira. 36 bottles of port. 60 bottles of beer. these would be bottles the same size as a wine bottle.

so the rung total for those of you keeping score, 135 bottles of madeira, 36 of port, 60 bottles of rum and this was at one public dinner. partly the drinking is so heavy at these political banquets because they're offering toasts to almost everything. there would be a toast to the united states. a toast to the constitution. a toast to the heroes of the revolution. a toast to the president. a toast to the vice president. a toast to the american fair, by which they meant the women who were not attending the banquet. there would also be a toast often for every single state in the union. now, that's quite a challenge when you're just at 13 states, but they keep adding stating to the union. indeed, i think this is one of their prime incentives for adding states to the union. let's let in kentucky. that will be another toast at

the next banquet. and people are drinking everywhere and on all occasions. they drank at home and they drank at work. they drank at taverns. they drank at play. they drank for pleasure. and they drank to numb pain. they drank from the crack of dawn to the crack of dawn. it was standard for many men to begin the day with what was called an eye opener, which was a shot of whiskey. and then to continue through the rest of the day. a traveler declared, quote, americans can do nothing without a drink. if you make acquaintance, you drink. if you close a bargain, you drink. they kwaurl in their drink and they make it up with a drink. they drink because it is hot. they drink because it is cold. if successful in elections, they drink and rejoice. if not, they drink and swear.

end quote. so, now we've got a pattern. so we've got something that we need to explain. we have to address the why question. why is it that americans are drinking so much in this period of american history? what explanations would you want to put on the table for this? yes. >> maybe the water quality wasn't so good. >> water quality, poor water quality and that's certainly true. there was almost nothing in the way of public purified water. which we take for granted today. how did you get your water in the early republic? you went to the well and got it. even in the cities. and in the cities you can imagine just how filthy the well water would get or if you're drawing water out of a river or out of a stream because they

also double as se we ares. so drinking the water was not a popular option. what else would you put for an explanation? yes. >> is it because the cost of alcohol during that time is not very expensive? >> to say the least it's very cheap. it's the cheapest in all the world. now, why do you suppose alcohol would be so cheap in the united states? yes. >> production methods or importing is a lot cheaper. >> okay. you think they're mostly importing their alcohol or consuming domestically produced alcohol? mostly. madeira is imported but what about whiskey. what is whiskey made from? grain. and what do americans grow a ton of, grain. they're the number one grain producing country in the world. it's an agricultural country. they have a lot of surplus grain. and often the grain growers are at a distance from market.

say they're in western pennsylvania and they have got to get their produce over the mountains to market in philadelphia. you want something that's more portable and higher value per volume. and so distilling your corn crop into whiskey makes it much more marketable in the east. so, there is more whiskey being produced in the united states than in any other country in the world. when you've got a big supply, it means the price is going to be low. another factor is that governments didn't tax whiskey. you remember what happened when the federal government tried to tax whiskey. it didn't go well. now, if any of you want to rush out and buy a bottle of whiskey right after this lecture, you're going to find it's pretty expensive. and you're going to find that most of the cost of that whiskey

comes in the form of federal and state taxes. so, in the 20th century, governments got in the habit of levying taxes on whiskey and got away with it. but that wasn't the case in the early 19th century. so you had a very common product with virtually no taxation on it and that meant it was cheap and it was cheaper to get drunk in america than in any other country in the world. and many americans thought that was their primary liberty. so, we have bad water, what about drinking other things? what about drinking soda? or drinking juices, were those options? >> sell zer did not exist. >> rare. >> fruit juices again, you have the refrigeration problem. so people might drink some juice right away during harvest season, but there's no way to store it except to turn it into

alcohol. so you would turn apple juice into a hard cider or you would turn pear juice into a pear brandy. but there's very little to drink in america that's not alcoholic other than water and the water was bad. when they asked one new yorker what he thought about the local water, he said, quote, it's very good for navigation. in other words, you can sail on it but you don't want to drink it. okay. so we have the bad water. we have the fact that whiskey is quite cheap. any other explanations that you can think of for why people drink so much in this period of time? yes. >> being drunk makes you feel better about whatever is happening in your life. >> certainly it does. okay. in the short term. so, there are stresses in this society. it's a very competitive society

in terms of people seeking to make money and not everybody is going to succeed. there will be a fair share of failures. and so just the stress of this more competitive society is going to lead a lot of people to drink to console themselves or to drink to celebrate that they're successful. any other things that you can think of? yes. >> going back to the domestic production, the cost of transportation between out west and the cities of the east was a lot cheaper. >> okay. transportations costs are going down and transportations is being improved, particularly in this period of time with the steamboat. but also early canals, such as the eerie canal which was completed in 1825. so that's helping to lower the cost of whiskey in the east when that whiskey is being brought

from the west. now, let me also suggest to you that the high geographic mobility of americans contributes to this. that americans are moving around in pursuit of economic opportunity, not always finding it. and when they do move around, they're trying to form new social bonds with people. and they often found it easier to share a drink with some new acquaintance, to try to get to know them. and so almost every social occasion featured drinking. every corn husking, barn raising, funeral, marriage, birth called for alcohol. one farmer remembered a country funeral in maine. quote, the minister could not stand to preach without holding on by the side of the door. the bearers could not walk

straight or the mourners keep in line of procession. yet it was not noticed in those times, end quote. now, the same man recalled the local wedding. quote, we all took so freely of the good cheer that the minister forgot his verses. so after trying several kinds of poetry and ditties, he gave it up and said to the couple, you may consider yourselves married and i will come out some other day and finish the ceremony. now, these were stories that were told during the 1830s looking back on this earlier time, of very heavy drinking. now, another factor is what americans ate. what do you suppose the diet was very heavy on in this period of time? lot of health food? no. what do you suppose people ate

massive quantities of? meat. now, we come to the refrigeration issue. could you go to the refrigerator and pull out a steak? no. were there any grocery stores to go to? no. so, how did you preserve meat at that time? you salt it or you smoke it. in either case, if you eat a lot of that, you're going to be very thirsty. and then you're going to face the choice, water or whiskey and most americans will choose the whiskey. there was a belief that after you've had a heavy meal, heavy and salted or smoked meat that you need alcohol to settle your stomach. now, americans were notorious for eating massive quantities of food. and eating it as quickly as possible. european visitors were just astonished. they would bring stopwatches to time american meals and they

would just marvel to see these huge quantities of hams and beefsteak and bacon being bolted down in five minutes and then of course they have to settle their stomachs and it's with whiskey. one visitor noted, quote, as soon as food is set on the table, they fall upon it like wolves in an unguarded heard. yes. >> do they get a lot of alcohol poisoning? >> we're going to come to problems. i promise that. we're going to come down to those because none of this is going to be without problems. and we're going to talk about social consequences. but in terms of causes, i also want to talk about the nature of work. there was the belief that alcohol helped people work outdoors. it helped them deal with

extremes of temperature, either very hot or very cold. helped them cope with it raining or snowing. now, did most americans work outdoors or indoors at that time? >> outdoors. >> outdoors because what sorts of jobs did they have? they're farmers overwhelmingly. that's the number one occupation in america. 80%. then other common -- relatively few americans worked indoors at desk jobs. and so if you believe that this helps you cope with the weather outside, you're going to be drinking on the job. and even people who worked in shops, let's say as black smiths or shoe makers, they also drank during the job. and the belief was that it

helped people do their daily work. and so it was a common practice, it was almost universal that employers would provide alcohol. if you were a farmer and you hired farm laborers, those la r laborers expected that in addition to the pay you were going to give them that you were going to feed them a meal and provide them with alcohol so they could keep working. if you went into a shoe maker's shop, it would be the same story. the master would provide alcohol. it would be a bond between the master and the journeyman or the apprentice and it would keep the work going on. question? t -6 slaves? >> no. the slaves are the exception to this. with the exception during harvest season. so it's a special bonus to get slaves to work harder during say the cotton harvest or the tobacco harvest by providing them alcohol at that season. but otherwise, masters are

trying to deny alcohol to their slaves. but slaves can see the free people all around them drinking very heavily. so it becomes a goal to try to steal alcohol and share it with your friends in the slave quarters as an act of defiance. as a way to say, we're just as good as free people and we ought to be able to drink, too. now, in the military, the army and the navy had to provide alcohol. george washington's army often ran out of food for long stretches of time. his army never ran out of alcohol. and washington understood, as did all other commanders, that if you wanted to keep men in the ranks, the number one thing you could do, even better than paying them, was to provide alcohol everyday. same thing in the navy. now we're going to see that this is going to start to change during the 1830s and it's going to produce a great deal of

strain in social relationships between employers and the employees when employers try to cut off the providing of alcohol. alcohol. elections promoted alcoholic consumption. we might like to think that people would be sober when they are making their very important political decisions but in the early republic, most voters were not sober when this happened. indeed, the friends of different candidates would be at the polling places and they would have flasks of whiskey with them and they would be up slapping people on the back and offering free whiskey and encouraging them to cast their vote for the candidate that was providing them with the alcohol. it was -- so for example, a traveler reported quote, an election in kentucky lasts three days. during that period whiskey and apple toddy flow through our

cities and villages like the uphradiies through ancient babylon. a number of runner were busily employed driving voters. now today there are laws if you're promoting a candidate you have to be a certain distance from the polling place and you're not allowed to be pressing alcohol on potential voters but there were no such laws in the early republic. george washington was one of the most successful politicians of his time in virginia because he understood a practice known as treating which is that a candidate should host a barbecue in the run up to the election, invite all of the voters of the county to come to his barbecue and provide them with free food, these heaping slabs of smokes and salted meat and all the

alcohol they could drink. now, the belief at the time was that a candidate that is so generous is proving that he's accessible to common people. he's not some sort of stuck up, distant arift oe krat. washington was a very dignified man who would not show up at his own barbecue but he would have friends who would host this and washington pays the bill. he's not alone in doing this. almost everyone who runs for office in the early republic, particularly in the south would do this. one of his more successful campaigns, washington served 144 gallons of alcohol to 307 voters. what about the politician who develops principals and decides he's not going to serve alcohol

in a campaign? well, there was a rare example of this. his name was james madison. as a young politician in virginia, he refused to treat the virginia voters. he deemed the practice quote inconsistent with the purity of moral and republic principals, end quote. how do you suppose james madison did in his campaign. he went down in defeat. the next time he ran for office, he resumed treating the voters and he won. okay. so we've explored the reasons behind this very heavy drinking in america of this time. we have to consider what do you suppose the social consequences were of this level of alcohol consumption, particularly by men? what would be some of the problems you would find? >> much more domestic violence,

particularly of men hitting wives, hitting children. that's a problem. yes. >> more violence in general. >> more violence in general out there in the taverns, you're surrounded by fellow drunks. you start arguing about politics. you start arguing about the weather. you start arguing about the color of people's eyes and a brawl breaks out so there is that. >> bad decisions made. >> bad decisions made in terms of -- >> political. >> political decisions. we can sometime wonder about some of the zipdecisions being e by voters given the state that they were in when they go to the polling place. that's why we now have laws saying it's not a good idea to get people drunk just before they go to vote. other consequences you might think of, yes. >> health problems. >> health problems. this is a level of alcohol consumption that can invite health problems.

we're not talking about people taking an occasional drink at a meal, we're talking about people drinking all day long, hard stuff. now not all americans are doing that but among american men, a majority of them were doing that in this period of time. that's going to take a toll on people after a while. for some people the toll will start pretty quickly because some people really don't have the capacity for this but they feel pressured to do it because that's what everybody around them is doing. any other problems you can think of, yes. >> bad decisions in the work place. >> in the work place. this is going to become much more of a problem let's say when you add machines to the work place. it's one thing if you're making a shoe by hand but what if you're making a shoe with the help of machinery and you've had too much to drink? you can start to lose fingers

and hands and arms pretty quickly. employers didn't like that because it messes up the machines. they spent good money for those machines. what were you going to say. >> i'm guessing that production also goes down if you're more drunk you're not as coordinated. >> you're not as coordinated so once you got machines then the level of production is more noticeable to the employer because the job of the employee is to keep pace with the machine of the. so setting a brisker pace than a lot of people were used to working. now if you're drinking you can't keep up with the machine than the shoes will come out all screwy because you didn't as the worker do your part in the work process. this is going to be particularly of concern to the people who are organizing new work places, particularly factories. yes. >> also the economic slow down because the people who are drunk

don't work so hard. >> that's right. employers in general want to get more work out of people because they are engaged in a competitive marketplace. so if your competitor manages to reduce the drinking by his workers and you don't, who is it that's going to be more successful in selling the product for producing more product? it will be your competitor and not you and you may go out of business. yes. >> military consequences because the navy and the military are drinking so much they might lose battles because of that. >> it might be but the good thing for the american military is the other militaries were also drinking. right? so the military is going to be the last element of american society to change. they are going to be continuing to provide alcohol to the soldiers through the civil war. other questions or comments. yes. >> is there a drinking age?

>> no drinking age at that time. so you could come in as a 6-year-old and if you had the money they would sell you a drink. okay. well this is good. you've covered the essential elements. if you can think about it, it's heavy level of drinking that's going up. it's leading some americans to question it because of these different social problems. women in particular. they are not drinking as much as the men but they are bearing many of the negative consequences. when they give consequences, poverty. if your husband is drinking up his wages, then there's not going to be enough food or decent clothing for the children and for the wife at home. so women are becoming very concerned that a heavy level of

alcohol consumption is leading to high levels of domestic abuse and it is impoverishing many families. we talked about this concept of republican motherhood where women feel they have an obligation to teach virtue to their children. it's pretty hard to teet virtue in a household where the primary male example is drunk a lot of the time. so women would say, our responsibilities as rooepublica mothers means we ought to be heard in the political sphere on issues that affect our household. the number one negative issue affecting our households is a high level of alcohol consumption. really the two strands of

culture which are coming together, we could say really three strands. one this idea of republican motherhood. another strand is evangelical religion. the united states is primarily a protistant country at that time. the most dominate form is ev evangelical churches are increasingly coming to the belief that drinking any alcohol is a sin. it leads people to other sins. so if you are to perfect your moral behavior than the convert to your faith must stop drinking. now earlier in the colonial period, churches had tried to reduce drinking a little bit but they hadn't really pushed on it. now you get churches pushing very hard especially in the

period after 1830. so you've got republican motherhood is one strand of influence. you've got e57ing evangelical as another strand. employers were in a more competitive marketplace. they didn't want to be spending their own money buying drinks for their workers when that is just complicating and reducing prouk productivity. >> would you say that this heavy alcohol consumption deepened the divide between domestic sphere and public sphere or connected it. >> it's deepened it that the women are feeling that the public sphere particularly all of this public drinking at elections is causing a problem for them in their households. so they say if we're going to protect our sphere, this domestic sphere we need to have

a whole lot less drinking in the public sphere. so if they succeed in this temperance movement and the public sphere becomes one that's much more temperant than the argument is the domestic sphere and public sphere will be in more harm ony when you have thi high level of drinking both public and private. >> wouldn't increasing the amount of alcohol go against the idea of increasing productivity because that would promote things like protests among the workers? >> well, it might but workers like to have their jobs. this is a time in which the union movement was very weak. so not all employers can get away with this but most employers can get away with it because even where people are unionized there are other issues that are more important to them

such as having better pay. so sometimes employers are improving pay a little bit at the same time that they are taking away the provision of this alcohol in the work place. now, i say sometimes. often the employer is just taking away the alcohol provision and not improving the pay but workers have to take it because they are not unionized. this is a time in the country when the government, state, and national do not recognize unions. that's a development of the 20th century. okay. so the work place is changing. now, again i want to remind you most americans stay farmers. providing alcohol so it's not so much that the work place is changing for farmers, it's that a lot of farmers are becoming evangelical christians and they want to reduce alcohol consumption because it's in their conviction, the moral thing to do.

some employers are not only eliminating the alcohol they provide in the work place, they are also telling their workers, don't you bring your own flask in here. no more drinking on the job. some employers go even farther where they can gaet away with i. they say if you really want to keep your job here i'd like you to go to the local e57ivangelic church and take a pledge of temperance and preferably one of abstinence now this means of alcohol. now, a lot of workers would say no way but workers concerned about keeping their job would say okay, i'll see you on church on sunday. so this is developing attention. not all workers want to go along with what their employers want them to do in terms of changing their behavior not simply in the

work place but also in their leisurely time. some workers go along with it. some don't. it also becomes a class divide. now which social class do you think is going to be pushing hardest for temperance? >> upper. >> well, yeah. the people who will be owning these workshops or owning farms. so what class who we call that. middle class and wealth we are people. the people who would be most desid deresistant would be the people who feel that they most need alcohol to cope with their hard lives. that would be working people. i'm talking about a general pattern. you will find plenty of working men who joined temperance groups because they wanted to get better control of their lives. i don't want you to go away from

this thinking all workers wanted to get drunk. that's not true. there were many workers who cared about temperance but the people who cared most deeply about temperance were middle class people. any questions so far? so i talked about -- there's something of a gender divide. women care very deeply about temperance. most of the resistance to it would be male. it's a class divide. much stronger among middle class people than working place people. there's also an ethnic divide. people who are already born in the united states were more prone to embrace the temperance movement than immigrants. immigrants often felt this was a form of cultural warfare. there's also a religion divide. many of the immigrants to america were catholics.

they didn't quite see the same problem with alcohol that proddist ants were identifying. they felt that attempts to reduce their alcohol consumption was a way of attacking their ethnicity and faith. if you wanted to find the setting where you would find probably the greatest commitment to preserving traditional customs of drinking it would be in neighborhoods that would have a large number of immigrants, relatively poor, often catholic. they would just say it's none of your business what we do on our own time. leave us alone. there becomes a political divide. by the 1830s and 40s, we've got a new pair of political parties. the old federalist gone. the old jeffersonian republicans have evolved. what are the names of the

parties we find in the 1830s and 1840s. the democrats and the wigs. now, the wigs drew very heavily upon those social groups that favored temperance. so the wig party made a commitment to pushing temperance because the wig party was strong in the northeast. strong among business owners. strong among evangelical christians. although women couldn't vote. if they could vote, they would have voted overwhelmingly in the north east for the wigs. the democratic party on the other hand draws support from those groups that tend to be most skeptical about temperance. immigrants, working class americans, more rural americans. so there's something of a cultural divide that's emerging in the country that has political consequences.

now the temperance movement does start to have an impact during the 1830s and 1840s. initially, it's in the form of what we call moral swasion. that's like persuasion. now for example, if you're watching television, you will see ads were there are warnings against the consequences of drunk driving. now there's certain law against drunk driving but there's also a publicity campaign that's mounted by social groups and by the government to try to persuade people to change their behavior. similar efforts to try to persuade people today to stop smoking cigarettes. that's what we call moral swasion. an attempt to persuade people to make the choice themselves to change their behavior.

temperance initially focused on moral swation and achieved some gains. it essentially became disrespectable to be a middle class person and to be a heavy drinker. middle class people start to police themself. they don't like to associate with people who are heavy drinkers. it starts to dissipate in the middle class particularly in the northeast and midwest. it persists in the working class where working class people are reinforcing more traditional behavior. temperance groups are finding that there's kind of a cap to how far they can go in achieving the reduction of drinking if they just rely on moral swasion. so the alternative is so get localities and states to pass laws that would forbid the sale,

the consumption, the production of alcohol. now, you're thinking about the famous prohibition law that congress passed in the 1920s. we're talking about an earlier period when it is not a federal issue. it's a state issue. there are a number of states now that take up this question of should they ban the production, the sale, and the consumption of alcohol? the first state to do this is the state of maine in 1851. so this first attempt at prohibition in the country was done at the state level. the very first state to try it was maine. now maine is a north eastern state. had a lot of evangelicals. had a lot of middle class entrepreneurs. it was very strong for the wig party. so it's an ideal place to try

this for the first time. during the next four years, another 12 states will adopt their own version of the maine law. all of the states were in the north. all of the new england states adopted such laws. new york adopted it and about half of the states in the midwest adopted it. did any southern state s adopt such a law? no. so we're seeing that the country is dividing over the issue of temperance and particularly over the attempt to use political prohibition to force people to change their behavior. >> i have a question. why does the southern part of the united states not go -- not pass prohibition laws? >> this is a very good question. can anybody think of reasons why

the south might be particularly reluctant to jump on board with this northern phenomena. yes. >> with the examples of a factory there's not as many in the south. >> there's not as many factories. we talked about industrial capitalism being one of the three sources. that force is particularly weak in the south. >> people in the south work outside. >> they are working outside. it's a very rural part of the country. yes. >> the town hall meetings -- >> okay. it's harder to organize social groups in the south because the population is so disbursed yes. >> you don't give alcohol to the slaves. >> so it's all for themselves. so they think of it as an important right of being a free person is to drink all you want. do they want outsiders telling them not to? no. there's also a developing

suspicion about the north and any kind of social movement that develops there. it's perceived to be some sort of dangerous fad and that northerners shouldn't be telling southerners what to do so part of it is just trying to defend traditions in the south because they don't want to do anything that's new and comes from the north. traditions of drinking suits their way of living just fine. now that's not to say there weren't southerners who favored temperance. there were. but there weren't enough of them to pass any laws. in general, southerners do not like an activist government. they don't like governments passing laws making people change their behavior. they just don't like it. they don't like it when their own states do it. they especially don't like it if any outside government tries to do it. now, why do you suppose southerners are so sensitive

about an activist government? what kind of activist by a government, that would be especially concerning to them. yes. >> the emans ipation of slaves. >> they don't want white governments to get it into their head that they can do things like mess with people's property. now, messing with tavern keeper's property or distillers property is not as bad as messing with slavery because so much was invested in that. it's a slippery slope. if a government thinks it has the right to shut down distilleries or shut down taverns, what's to stop them from shutting down slavery? so just to be on the safe side, southerners, meaning white

southerners likes to say the government that governs best is the government that governs least. so they didn't like what they were seeing in the north. these northerners using state governments to try to change people's behavior. question. >> weren't they also still mad over the protective tariffs and how they had to -- >> they are. who is it that's pushing the protective tariffs. the wigs. the same people pushing temperance. so they just don't the messengers who are the wigs. >> american history tv in prime time continues tuesday night with a look at jewish history. a hallow cost survivors personal account followed by a look at what passengers aboard the transatlantic ship the st. louis faced when leaving germany for havana cuba in an attempt to seek refuge from the nazis. the lives of american jews during progressive era. all of that tuesday night beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern here on cspan 3.

>> here some of the highlights for this weekend. friday at 8:00 p.m. eerastern. a look at the civil war. 6:00 p.m. eastern a technology fair. sunday, political commentator, author and former presidential candidate pat bacannon. 8:00 eastern books on hillary clinton, barack obama and edward snowden. 10:00 p.m. eastern on afterwards, the weekly standards daniel halbur and sunday morning at 10:30 we tour can as per wyoming. saturday at 6:00 p.m. the civil war. the depiction of slavery in movies and sunday on real america at 4:00 p.m., an

interview with president heurbet hoover. join the cspan conversation. look us on facebook, follow us on twitter. alcohol con sumgts in colonial america. giving and receiving advice was so highly valued by the founding fathers that they emphasized the concept numerous times. he talked about advice from the founding fathers at the francis tavern museum for about an hour. it's a delight to be with you again. i love this place even know we're not technically i.:xj tavern, i love the sense of history that is so much apart of where we are so many incredible things happened if you know the story of the american revolution. you realize that this is where general washington said goodbye to some of his principle senior officers. you realize this is the place

exactly a week before colonel bur and general hamilton faced one another in a duel. and they sat next to one another. can you imagine with all of this impending. burr was somewhat sullen that night. hamilton was animated. he was induced to sing his favorite song here. an old martial song called the drum which is a fascinating song. i love the way it ends. it's with hamilton really singing about this country and the fact this this country would live forever. the tat earvern, an incredible . it's fun for me to be among a group of people that know a lot about american history. that doesn't happen very often. you all know the same problem. when people find out you're

interested in history they sort of look at you like what's wrong with you? why can't you get a life and do something useful but i like you have always enjoyed reading history. i've enjoyed american history and quite by accident, i became a scholar performer of john a adams and later alexander hamilton. yes, i wear a wig and tights. an unusual thing to do but it's a great, great medium. you know you can get people who hate history, really involved in whatever you might sacrifice in terms of accuracy you more than make up for in terms of audience participation and involvement. i've been to prisons and schools that feel like prisons. it's just amazing how excited people get when they actually have a chance to talk to a founding member of this country. but that's not why i'm here tonight. you