Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society
Brian Cowan
Abstract
The title of Inn Civility is more than a pun. It also identifies the two main subjects of Vaughn Scribner's monograph: the inns, taverns, and coffeehouses of colonial British North America as well as the culture of civility that many colonists wished to promote within those commercialized spaces for consumption and sociability. These spaces were central to concepts of sociability and even national identity throughout the eighteenth-century British world on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In the early eighteenth century, the Englishman Thomas Walduck opined, upon all the new settlements the Spaniards make, the first thing they do is build a church, the first thing ye Dutch do upon a new colony is to build them a fort, but the first thing ye English do, be it in the most remote part of ye world, or amongst the most barbarous Indians, is to set up a tavern or drinking...