Taverns, Entrepreneurial Networking, Self-Improvement, and Urban Tendencies in the Early Republican Northeast

This is a hybrid event. The in-person reception will begin at 4:30 PM. Please visit here to register.

In addition to providing inexpensive intoxication and occasionally lousy accommodations, northeastern village taverns were urbanizing institutions. Village taverns helped New Yorkers and New Englanders conceive and pursue wide-ranging economic and social ambitions. As nodes in regional transportation networks, taverns connected villages to each other and to larger cities. Through taverns’ print and oral communication networks, entrepreneurs reached wide audiences while leveraging taverns’ links to desirable novelty and urbane improvements. If, as historian Richard D. Brown argues, “urban society is a crossroads phenomenon, bound directly to exchange and communication,” then taverns fostered urbanizing tendencies in the region.