Faces along the Bar
Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon, 1870-1920 (Historical Studies of Urban America)
Madelon Powers recreates the daily life of the barroom, exploring what it was like to be a "regular" in the old-time saloon of pre-prohibition industrial America. Powers concentrates on the turbulent years from 1870 to 1920 when the industrial revolution wrenched and reshaped American society and its working-class institutions. Powers examines the lives of saloongoers across America, including those in major cities such as New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco as well as smaller cities such as Sioux City, Shoshone, and Oakland. Powers concludes that an underlying code of reciprocity and peer group honor in saloon life unified the regulars and transformed them into a voluntary association. Thus, amid the fumes of beer and cigars, the regulars were able to cultivate the dual benefits of communal companionship and marketplace clout, making the old time saloon one of the most versatile, ubiquitous, and controversial institutions in American history.
Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.
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What the reading experience may hold
A fuller profile for choosing with more confidence—not just another copy of the preview.
Nonfiction
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Balanced tone · Measured pace
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
A good fit if…
Readers who want a thoughtful experience and enjoy noticing the connections beneath a book’s surface story.
This book's DNA
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Spoiler-Free Emotional Arc
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A quick reading snapshot
Edition facts and catalog signals to help you decide whether this book fits what you want to read next.
- ISBN-13
- 978-0-2266-7769-9
- Language
- English
- Edition record
- OL9544667M
A more thoughtful way into this book
This guide uses the edition details and category signals above to help you choose deliberately. It does not replace the author's work or a full review.
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
Begin with its place in Nonfiction, then notice where the book resists that label.
Read for connection, not completion.
Mark one passage that sharpens the book's central concern and one that complicates it. That tension often reveals more than a quick summary.
Three questions to carry with you
- Whose perspective organizes the story, and whose perspective remains outside it?
- Which sources or lived experiences carry the author’s central argument?
- How does the book change the way you understand its larger subject?
Editorial framework by Wesley Bryan, BookenDeX Founder and Editor.
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