Though our country’s 250th birthday is now fast approaching, plenty of Americans aren’t feeling particularly celebratory. But as a historian of the American Revolution, I know that the founding generation would want us to party—and party hard. Not simply to celebrate them, but because few occasions in the late eighteenth century didn’t call for a drink.

Those who lived through the Revolutionary Era consumed far more alcohol—whether cider, beer, wine, rum, or any number of cocktail concoctions—than we do today. They tippled at the end of a workday, or in the middle during harvest season; after birthing a baby, ordaining a new minister, training with the militia, or feting a friend’s arrival to town.

One of the colonists’ favorite reasons to drink, however, was to honor the anniversaries of successful protests against the British........

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