During Denver's wild ride from frontier mining town to twentieth-century metropolis, the city's saloons, like those of many other western frontier towns, played a vital role in the development of the city. Now with a new preface, Tom Noel's classic study, The City and the Saloon, is a liquid history of how Denver's bars both shaped and reflected the Mile High City's birth and adolescence.

Thomas J. Noel, also known as "Dr. Colorado", teaches history at the University of Colorado at Denver where he is the director of Public History, Preservation & Colorado Studies, and is a columnist for the Denver Post. He has served as a Denver Landmark Commissioner and chair during the 1970s and 1980s and is a National Register Reviewer for Colorado. He is the author or coauthor of forty-one books on Colorado.