We are excited that another one of our faculty has been selected to be featured in Mind’s Eye. The research of Dr. David Gutzke will be in the 2019 issue (to come out in print this fall).
His story hit the research page and Mind’s Eye blog today.
As a professor of British history, an international scholar on the topic of alcohol use and a historian looking at social change, he has published more than 20 books and articles on these subjects. The Mind’s Eye article primarily focuses on the evolution of the pub in the interwar era.
Here’s a passage from the story:
“The brewers were trying to change the type of people you expected to see in pubs. They wanted middle-class people as customers. Brewers wanted respectability,” he says, “both for themselves and public houses.”
This aligned with the Progressive movement’s values. Progressives wanted to right social ills. They desired efficiency, discipline and order. And they sought government intervention to improve society.
One brewer Gutzke studied, Sydney Neville, wrote in his memoir he felt personally responsible to the general public to discourage drunkenness.
“The slogan of the whole movement was, ‘We do not want people to drink more beer. We want more people to drink beer.’ I thought it was very clever,” Gutzke said.
Congratulations, Dr. Gutzke.