Sociologist Selden D. Bacon is best known at Rutgers for being the CAS Director who brought the Center of Alcohol Studies to Rutgers from Yale in 1962, no small feat after Yale had decided to no longer support the program of the Center.
How exactly was he able to pull it off? How did Brinkley Smithers end up sponsoring a new building for the Center? What was his role as director to create a thriving research center, accompanied by successful programs in treatment, education, and publishing? Why did his administrative career end abruptly in 1975?
But first and foremost, Selden D. Bacon is also “generally acknowledged as the initiator of American sociological studies of alcohol-related phenomena in the post-Prohibition era,” as Paul Roman describes him in his introduction to an edited volume on Bacon’s scholarship entitled Alcohol: The development of sociological perspectives on use and abuse.
- Visit the Selden D. Bacon page in the Digital Alcohol Studies Archives
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Dr. Bacon was also a prolific writer, authoring scholarly publications and informational articles as well, as his updated bibliography reveals. It was compiled by our small team processing the resources we made accessible in the Digital Alcohol Studies Archives and, to tell the truth, quite a few more items worthy of further consideration to be digitized.
Published as A Sociologist and the Problems of Alcohol Studies: The Life and Legacy of Selden D. Bacon in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, both the introductory essay and the supplementary bibliography relied heavily on the unique resources in the Digital Alcohol Studies Archives.
The third in the series of updating the bibliographies of notable people in alcohol studies, this was the first in which the free online texts gave the coauthors peace of mind: it was incredibly easy to collect, organize, and share these articles. The RUcore record supports citation management software applications, such as EndNote and RefWorks, or allows downloading the citation in RIS format, standardized to use by other citation managers.
From the Digital Alcohol Studies Archives
- Read Bacon’s two seminal publications in the Memoirs series complementing QJSA articles
- Three of his lectures were published in the volume entitled Alcohol, science and society. Twenty-nine lectures with discussions as given at the Yale Summer School of Alcohol Studies.
- Download Selden Bacon’s full bibliography.
- Browse documents related to Selden D. Bacon in RUcore, the Rutgers University Community Repository
- Browse all available documents related to notable people in RUcore, the Rutgers University Community Repository