HIST 280 - History of Alcohol and Drugs

Credit Hours: 3
Lecture Hours: 3
Lab Hours: 0

This course is a survey of the history of alcohol and drugs from 1500 to the present. This class will take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the evolving role of alcohol and drugs in the history of the human experience over the past 500 years. By focusing upon economic, political, intellectual, and religious relationships to alcohol and drugs, the class will reveal the changing ethics of western society from the early modern period and the age of discovery through the recent War on Drugs and the medicalization of addition. The course begins with the introduction of new stimulants like coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, and an array of distilled liquors (like rum, whiskey, brandy, and gin). In the eighteenth century, the beginning of modern regulation of alcohol is initiated by the British, followed by the development of a temperance movement in North America and western Europe.

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Academic Catalog

HIST 280 - History of Alcohol and Drugs