"Twelve-step" recovery programmes for a variety of addictive behaviours have become popular. According to John W. Crowley, the origin of these movements - including Alcoholics Anonymous - lies in the Washingtonian Temperance Society, founded in Baltimore in the 1840s. In lectures, pamphlets and books (most notably John B. Gough's "Autobiography", published in 1845), recovering "drunkards" described their enslavement to and liberation from alcohol. Though widely circulated in their time, these influential temperance narratives seem to have been largely forgotten. This is a presentation of a collection of revealing excerpts from temperance texts, along with Crowley's own introductions. The tales, including "The Experience Meeting" from T.S. Arthur's "Six Nights with the Washingtonians" (1842) and the autobiographical "Narrative of Charles Woodman, A Reformed Inebriate" (1843), still speak with surprising force to the miseries of drunkenness and the joys of deliverance.
- ISBN10 0801860083
- ISBN13 9780801860089
- Publish Date 20 January 1999
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 30 July 2003
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 232
- Language English