Background
Jessica Warner was born in 1956 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States. She is the daughter of John Finney.
Jessica Warner. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann.
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, United States
Princeton University where Jessica Warner received her Bachelor of Arts degree.
Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, United States
Yale University where Jessica Warner received her Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy degrees.
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, United States
Princeton University where Jessica Warner received her Bachelor of Arts degree.
Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, United States
Yale University where Jessica Warner received her Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy degrees.
(In 1720, a new drink emerged as the overwhelming drug of ...)
In 1720, a new drink emerged as the overwhelming drug of choice among London's working poor; it was both affordable and many times stronger than traditional spirits. The beverage was gin, and the craze it initiated would become the 18th-century equivalent of the crack cocaine epidemic. The Craze is the first popular illustrated history to focus exclusively on the gin craze. Warner looks at the impact of "mother gin" from personal, political, and sexual perspectives. She draws on hundreds of primary sources, from Defoe to Dr. Johnson, guiding through squalid back rooms, streets thronged with hawkers, raging mobs, and the halls of Parliament. The result is a timely, irreverent, utterly engrossing look at a city and a drug - and a drug scare - that helped shape contemporary views of pleasure, consumption, and public morality.
https://www.amazon.com/Craze-Gin-Debauchery-Age-Reason/dp/1568582315
2002
(His real name was James Aitken, though he was better know...)
His real name was James Aitken, though he was better known as "John the Painter," and during the early months of the American Revolution, he wreaked havoc in England by performing acts of terror on behalf of America. In this first full-length chronicle of the man who attempted to burn down royal navy yards across England, Jessica Warner paints a tart and entertaining portrait of the world's first modern terrorist.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1560257334/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i3
2004
(A completely original exploration of abstinence movements...)
A completely original exploration of abstinence movements in America - from alcohol to sex to meat. Over the last two hundred years, Americans have sworn off alcohol, masturbation, spicy foods, fatty foods, pickles, coffee, tea, drugs, sex, meat, and more. Even now, America is a country of abstainers: eighty percent don't smoke, forty percent don't drink, three percent don't eat meat, and one-third of all public-school students are taught abstinence-only sex education. In this remarkable new book, critically acclaimed author Jessica Warner examines why Americans abstain - and why they want you to abstain. With her trademark wit and stunning prose, Warner shows how abstinence and evangelical Protestantism both burst onto the American scene in the early nineteenth century.
https://www.amazon.com/Day-George-Bush-Stopped-Drinking/dp/0771088531
2008
(A completely original exploration of the abstinence movem...)
A completely original exploration of the abstinence movement in America - from alcohol to sex to meat. America's long love affair with abstinence goes back to the early nineteenth century when thousands of men and women suddenly stopped drinking hard liquor. Consistency then demanded that they give up all their other vices - beer and cider, tobacco, coffee, meat, pickles, pies, masturbation, and more. Two centuries later, the ideal of abstinence has lost none of its power to influence how Americans live - and how they want you to live. With her trademark wit and irony, acclaimed author Jessica Warner tells the story of one of America's most enduring and powerful ideals.
https://www.amazon.com/All-Nothing-History-Abstinence-America/dp/077108854X
2010
educator historian scientist author
Jessica Warner was born in 1956 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States. She is the daughter of John Finney.
Jessica Warner began her studies at Princeton University where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in History magna cum laude in 1978. Then she went to Yale University and obtained a Master of Philosophy degree in 1981 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Medieval Studies in 1991.
In 1991, Jessica Warner, after receiving her doctor's degree, became a postdoctoral fellow of Alcohol Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, serving there till 1993. Later in 1995, she joined the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto where she worked till 2010. In 2004 she also began her teaching career as an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. From 2009 till 2015 she was a member of Graduate Faculty at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science at this university. In 2010-2011 she was an instructor of the writing program at the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto.
Her first book is Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason (2002). Written in an accessible and rollicking style, it describes how the potent potable became a key form of escape among the English lower classes in 18th-century London, at a time of social upheaval and brutal poverty. Warner wrote the book in a lighter style but found the facts to be dark, especially those that show that addiction, then as now, affects the same set of people, and is addressed by politicians with the same sorts of pat answers and solutions to the problem. What Warner shows is that from 1720 to 1751, cheap gin was the urban drug of choice. The working poor turned to it to numb them from the cold and their misery, and the more well-off looked down on the gin drinkers. But they also recognized that drunkenness tended to immobilize the masses, rendering them more docile and more likely to do the bidding of the government and their employers.
Individuals in Warner's cast of characters play a role in commenting on the drink. Some of the most well-known figures include Samuel Johnson, Lord Chesterfield, Sir Robert Walpole, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and William Hogarth.
The next book, The Incendiary: The Misadventures of John the Painter, First Modern Terrorist, tells the story of an obscure young British tradesman and petty criminal who became briefly infamous for trying to burn down all of England's dockyards, believing that this would make him a hero of the American War of Independence. Her other known books are The Day George Bush Stopped Drinking: Why Abstinence Matters to the Religious Right and All or Nothing: A Short History of Abstinence in America. She also contributed to journals, including Albion, Journal of Family History, Addiction, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, Journal of Social History, Globe and Mail, Social Science History, Contemporary Drug Problems, and American Journal of Public Health.
Jessica Warner is known as an outstanding educator and a brilliant author. She is particularly known for her work as a research scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. For her work, she received some honors, including fellowships from Yale University and grants from the United States Department of Health and Human Services and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her grants and awards include Recommender Grant from the Ontario Arts Council (2011, 2019), Toronto Arts Council (2014) and the Canada Council for the Arts (2012). In 2005 she was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for The Incendiary: The Misadventures of John the Painter. Her book Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason garnered excellent reviews, in both North America and Britain, and was adopted by several universities as a text used in first-year Western Civilization courses.
(His real name was James Aitken, though he was better know...)
2004(In 1720, a new drink emerged as the overwhelming drug of ...)
2002(A completely original exploration of the abstinence movem...)
2010(A completely original exploration of abstinence movements...)
2008
Quotations:
"I'm not sure if I am a writer. The label has come to be too precious, too Romantic with a capital R."
"I despise contemporary academic writing. There's no excuse for it. This is not mathematics, this is not physics. Anything in the humanities should be accessible to reasonably intelligent readers. There is no reason why it has to have a lot of jargon or needs words like gender or deconstruction. You don't need to cite Foucault to make a point."
Jessica Warner married Reese Warner in 1991.
