The following articles are selected from the papers presented at the International
Congress on the Social History of Alcohol in 1993. In their focus either on drinking
practices or on social responses to drinking, they exemplify the primary concerns
of alcohol history. Approaches are often interdisciplinary, exploiting new types of
sources such as material culture and oral history as well as exploring new uses of
traditional documentary sources. These studies invite comparison among the
experiences with alcohol of various societies and suggest the utility for social
historians of examining international discourses over the use and governance of a
set of substances persistently intertwined in human affairs.
