A History Of The World In Six Glasses Analysis

Slaughter divides The Whiskey Rebellion into three principal sections entitled Context, Chronology, and Consequence. The first section begins with a comprehensive assessment of the anti-excise tradition which follows late seventeenth-century British philosophy and traces its progression from Walpole's excise battle in 1733, through the Stamp Act crisis of 1764 and on through the Anti-Federalist account of the tax provisions of the Constitution of 1787. In the second section, Slaughter details the debate over the excise, its implementation and the outbreak of both peaceful and violent opposition to it; opposition that occurred not only in Pennsylvania but along the entire frontier. In his final section, and with a trace of personal bias, Slaughter describes the outbreak of violence in the summer of 1794 for which he holds John Neville largely accountable. Slaughter continues in the final section with Hamilton and Washington deciding to make an example of western Pennsylvania despite the fact that the excise had gone uncollected all along the frontier, and the Watermelon Army fiasco which the Federalists

Spirits helped build America in many ways. Rum in particular had always been favored drink by Americans, however in the late seventeenth century, New Englanders began importing raw molasses so they could distill their own rum at a lesser cost. This became an extremely profitable business and arguably helped America come one step closer to independence as they deviated away from British rule and became self-sufficient. In addition, when the British passed the Molasses Act in 1773, American colonists defied the law and continued smuggling in molasses in order to maintain their economy. This led to their resistance against more acts passed by their English counterparts and eventually to their freedom at

Rum distillers, sensing the opportunity to make a profit, imported molasses from the West Indies and made rum themselves, instead of relying on expensive middlemen. Britain tried to get in on the profit, imposing a tax in the Molasses Act of 1733, which would have cut New England’s economic output significantly. However, the act backfired; distillers smuggled molasses to avoid the tax, laying the foundation for a boycott of British goods during the American Revolution. The British, perhaps ignoring lessons learned from the Molasses Act, passed the Sugar Act in 1764, at the end of the French and Indian War. Reasoning that America should foot the bill for most of its war costs, the British “decided to strengthen and enforce the Molasses Act” (Standage 119). Americans were unhappy, and organized the Sons of Liberty to protest the tax, decrying “taxation without representation”. The British added more and more taxes, only adding flames to the fire. Americans broke under the onslaught of taxes and decided to revolt, starting the American Revolution, which had profound effects on world history. While the tax on tea was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, and, thusly, is “associated with the start of the revolution” (Standage 120), the simmering flames of a revolution that would create one of the most powerful countries in world history started when the British imposed a tax on sugar, used to make

2) Why was it so important to Europe’s development that many people’s beverage of choice switched from alcohol to coffee?

The author wants to show that beverages had a great impact on history. He wants to tell his

When the Americas were just beginning to form, spirits accelerated their colonialism. At first, sugarcane production was introduced to the Western Indies or Caribbean Islands by Christopher Columbus. The West Indies land was not suitable to grow wine vines or grains for beer, instead Columbus introduced sugar canes to the Indies, creating a major sugar plantation in the West

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage is a non-fiction historical novel, whose main purpose is to show the surprisingly pervasive influence of certain drinks on the course of history. Then it takes the reader on a journey through time to show the history of mankind through the lens of beverages.

2. The author uses sources that date back to the Stone Age, to gather his information on the use of beer. He outlines how society changed from being hunter-gatherers, and relying on the environment for nutrition, to farmers who were independent of scavenging the environment for nutrition.

1. From which advanced civilization/culture did Europeans get the “science” of how to make spirits?

As the Revolutionary War ended, the United States faced a completely new set of challenges. Now the United States had to shift focus from gaining independence from England to gaining their own financial security. The newly formed country had to figure out a way to pay for the war debt incurred by the colonies. In order to do this, the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, convinced congress and the president that a tax on whiskey would be able to provide the revenue needed to repay the debts. However, the tax on whiskey was met with heavy resistance. To Hamilton, the tax was only “a few dollars a year for the average small distillery” but for the Frontiersmen it was an attack on their way of life. The resistance to the tax, the

In 1791, under the advisement of Alexander Hamilton, congress passed the whiskey tax. This tax, put a twenty-five percent tax on whiskey. Hamilton created this tax in hopes of the federal government gaining more money to help pay of the nation’s debt. However, in doing so, this angered many people, especially farmers in western Pennsylvania, because they distilled the extra grain they had to make whiskey and sell it to make extra income. These small operations in western Pennsylvania rebelled by erecting liberty poles and taring and feathering tax collectors. George Washington, who was president during this time, saw the outburst and decided to take action against the angered farmers. Washington gathered about 13,000 men from the militia to put an end to this rebellion. In doing so, Washington showed that the government help the power over the citizens. In The Whiskey Rebellion, by Thomas Slaughter, he describes different consequences that arise from the whiskey tax. Slaughter presents three main points, which include conflicts between the east and west, two political systems that begin to develop, and the actual rebellion.

By the 1750s, the American colonies had come a long way from their original struggles and failures. They had grown in both population and economic stability. Even so, relations between the colonies and Great Britain were strained. The colonists became more and more discontented with England’s control of their political and economic affairs. The colonies were dissatisfied with the rules of British Mercantilism, or the idea that the colonies were a mere source of raw materials and market for the British mainland. This animosity for the motherland had then been seeded by the lack of economic freedom and the harsh taxes that had been set on everyday luxuries and necessities;

Professor Thomas Slaughter has provided a most thorough overview of the Whiskey Rebellion, which he asserts had by the time this book was conceived nearly two centuries after the episode transpired, had become a largely forgotten chapter of our nation's history since the time of the Civil War. He cites as direct evidence of this fact the almost complete absence of any mention of the event in many contemporary textbooks of the conservative era of the 1980's, which this reviewer can attest to as well, having been a high school student in the late 1970's, who never heard of the Whiskey Rebellion until years later. Building off of his own dissertation on the topic, the author convincingly shows that the Whiskey Rebellion was in fact an event

The Whiskey Excise Tax hit rural farmers especially hard, and they started crying foul almost immediately after passage. It was criticized for being an “unreasonable economic hardship and as an ominous intrusion by central authorities into local affairs” (Gould, 1996, 405). These “westerners” felt as if they were being unjustly victimized by this tax. Most farmers during this period in American history worked extremely hard just to make ends meet, so operating a whiskey distillery offered them a source of extra income. In the minds of these western farmers this tax left them at a competitive disadvantage with eastern farmers. Western small-time farmers generally had small whiskey distillers. These frontier distillers could not run as efficiently as the larger distillers in the east, so their tax burden was much greater. For this reason many of the western farmers felt that Secretary Hamilton had set up a system that was giving tax-breaks to the larger eastern-based distillers. This sentiment is often echoed in today’s world- that the federal government promotes “big business” (Holt, 2004, 30). The cause of much of this rile and frustration, however, stems from the age-old

Because of what was going on in the colonies, the British parliament decided a reform of the Sugar and Molasses act was in need. The Sugar Act reduced the tax on molasses from six pence to three pence per gallon. Also included in the new act were more foreign goods to have a tax placed on such as sugar, wine, and coffee. It also placed strict regulations on the export of lumber and iron. This strict enforcement of the new act caused an almost immediate decline in the rum industry. The ultimate goal of the new act was to reduce the markets that the colonist could sell.