Malevolent Spirits Along the Hudson Valley

Although the seeds of alcohol use and abuse were sown during the colonial period in the Northeast, they remain a problem in Indian Country to this day. Malevolent Spirits Along the Hudson Valley follows the trajectory of this European introduction among the seventeenth-century Indigenous peoples of the Hudson Valley--the Munsee, Mahicans, and Mohawks--centering on the question of how alcohol became entangled in their material and cultural lifeways. Susan Alette Dublin explores alcohol's place in early contact Hudson Valley material culture and contexts, its availability and growing importance as a trade good, the Indigenous-European colonial discourse as it related to alcohol use, and the development of Indigenous drinking patterns. In an effort to address the introduction of alcohol from an Indigenous standpoint, Dublin uses sources from traditional history, ethnohistory, and archaeology alongside primary and historical commentary. Dublin's interdisciplinary study attempts to find common ground as well as disjunctures among the various sources to illuminate the history of the seventeenth-century alcohol trade in early America.