Susan Cheever chronicles drinking in America

The rum

Sure, there was the Boston Tea Party, but rum ruled the colonies:

"The British were trying to tax alcohol, so no taxation without representation wasn't great on tea but it really wasn't good on rum. In some ways, the American Revolution was about rum. It's as if they fought the American Revolution not for the right to vote, but for the right to drink," Cheever says.

Rum was definitely the drink of the colonies, and "no one stood for rum consumption the way Ethan Allen did."

Stories abound, the most famous of which has the leader of the Green Mountain Boys so soaked with rum that he was unaware a snake had bitten him multiple times after he fell asleep in a glen.

When he awoke, he complained of the mosquitoes.