This is in reply to Dan Mallek's inquiry re courses and texts for a general
course on alcohol.

I will be teaching a course on the social history of alcohol at Carleton
University (Ottawa) this year. It's a one-semester (12-week) course for
upper-year students that will be given January-April 2000.

Enrolments for the course have been very good. We set a ceiling
of 70 students per course at this level, and few courses come close to
that and have 20-40 students on average.  But the 70 had already been
reached for the alcohol course when I returned from France in mid-August.
We found a larger lecture theatre and the enrolments are now close to the
maximum: 120.   If this interest is general, it's very promising for the
future of our field.

I have yet to write up the syllabus but I'll be covering alcohol from the
ancient world to the present with the bulk of the course dealing with the
Middle Ages to the present.  I'll cover the themes you would expect:
production, trade, consumption, regulation, attitudes, and the
relationship of alcohol to class, gender, health, religion, and so
on.  Although I'll deal with the spectrum of alcohols, my focus will be on
wine.

It is a problem to find a text, and what we clearly need is a decent
general history of alcohol. (Is anyone writing one?)  For wine there's Tim
Unwin's _Wine and the Vine_, and as problematic as it is I might use it
this year.  I've just completed a short history of wine that will be
published by Penguin next year.  It covers, for wine, the themes I'll deal
with in my course.  I've had mixed experiences using my own books as texts,
but unless something else appears, I will probably use my book the next
time I teach the course.

None of this might help Dan Mallek and his prospective course, but it's very
encouraging to see more courses being set up.  I hope we will see the
exchange of practical information on teaching on the list.  When I
posted a request about courses earlier this year a number of
colleagues kindly send me their course outlines, and I'll be happy to send
mine to anyone interested once it's done.

Rod Phillips

Roderick Phillips
Editor, Journal of Family History/
Professor, Department of History
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Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 5B6
Tel: (613) 520-2600 ext 2824; fax: (613) 520-2819
Email address: [log in to unmask]
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