Join us for our first history talk of the 2025 season!

In 2025 the Bidwell House Museum has four summer history talks planned and we begin this week with a talk about the book Accommodating the Republic: Taverns in the Early United States.

As Americans surged westward and built their new republic in the early nineteenth century, entrepreneurial, improvement-minded men went to taverns to raise capital, promote innovative businesses, practice genteel sociability, and rally support for favored causes—often while drinking staggering amounts of alcohol. White men’s unrivaled freedom to use taverns in their pursuits of happiness helped flesh out the evolving meaning of citizenship in the young United States. Yet white men did not have taverns to themselves. Sharing tavern spaces with other Americans intensified white men’s struggles to define what, and for whom, taverns—and the nation–should be.

Kirsten E. Wood is a specialist in the social and political histories of the early United States. In addition to exploring taverns, she has written about Peggy Eaton and Andrew Jackson’s presidential sex scandal, enslaving widows’ social and economic power, the harmonic ideal in patriotic music, and the opportunities for joy and pleasure in the young nation’s public places. She is an associate professor of history at Florida International University and earned her PhD and MA from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Princeton University.

This lecture will be in-person at the Tyringham Union Church and also viewable via Zoom. In-person tickets can be purchased at the door, but Zoom attendees must register in advance in order to receive the Zoom link.