This is the History of temperance and Prohibition as you\'ve never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that affected virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries.
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Progressives rather than puritans, the Global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory Liquor machine that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to the beerhalls of Central Europe to the Native American reservations of the United States.
Harper and Upton Sinclair, and even American presidents from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
Anthony, and Frances Willard; progressives from William Lloyd Garrison to William Jennings Bryan; writers F.
E.
W.
Washington; suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B.
Prohibitionism united Native American chiefs like Little Turtle and Black Hawk
African-American leaders Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, and Booker T.
Placing the temperance movement in a deep Global context, forces us to fundamentally rethink its role in opposing colonial exploitation throughout American History as well.
In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women\'s rights, and indigenous rights.
Schrad argues that temperance wasn\'t American exceptionalism at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era.
Schrad\'s pathbreaking History of Prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Thom�s Masaryk, Kemal Atat�rk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on Prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American Prohibition was just one piece of a Global phenomenon.
In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American history.
When most people think of the Prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink.
This is the History of temperance and Prohibition as you\'ve never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that affected virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries
