Description
When most people think of the prohibition era they think of speakeasies rum runners and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink In other words in the popular imagination it is a peculiarly American history
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 Schrads pathbreaking history of prohibition looks at the antialcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of protemperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin Leo Tolstoy Thoms Masaryk Kemal Atatrk Mahatma Gandhi and anticolonial activists across Europe Asia Africa and the Middle East Schrad argues that temperance wasnt American exceptionalism at all but rather one of the most broadbased and successful transnational social movements of the modern era
Unlike many traditional dry histories Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than Americans have been led to believe
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