Download or read book The Saloon written by Perry Duis and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This colorful and perceptive study presents persuasive evidence that the saloon, far from being a magnet for vice and crime, played an important role in working-class community life. Focusing on public drinking in "wide open" Chicago and tightly controlled Boston, Duis offers a provocative discussion of the saloon as a social institution and a locus of the struggle between middle-class notions of privacy and working-class uses of public space.