Virtual Lecture: “Inn Civility” – Colonial Taverns and 18th Century America

Registration: http://tinyurl.com/4n6wzv29

From exclusive “city taverns” to seedy “disorderly houses,” urban taverns were wholly engrained in the diverse web of British American life. Dr. Scribner explains how, by the mid-eighteenth century, urban taverns emerged as the most popular, numerous, and accessible public spaces in British America. He also investigates how these once-imperially-connected spaces transformed into hotbeds of revolution, loyalism, and violent clashes over civil society and republicanism.

Dr. Vaughn Scribner is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Arkansas, who researches the eighteenth-century British Empire, especially in the Americas. His first book, Inn Civility, investigated colonial American taverns as spaces of societal contest, while his second book, Merpeople: A Human History, utilized humanity’s long-held fascination with mermaids to better understand the human condition. He is currently writing an environmental history of the American Revolution from the perspective of British and Hessian soldiers.