Thomas Pegram's account of the fight to regulate alcohol traces the moral and political campaigns of the temperance advocates.

Social classes collide over morality and social propriety in a brand-new state Well before the Volstead (or National Prohibition) Act of 1919, Oklahoma was dry. Oklahomans banned liquor at their state’s inception in 1907 and maintained the ban even after the repeal of national prohibition. In this book, James E. Klein examines the social and cultural conflicts that led Oklahomans to outlaw liquor and discusses the economic and political consequences of the ban. Grappling with Demon Rum identifies who favored and who opposed prohibition, showing that its proponents were largely middle-class citizens who disdained public drinking establishments and who sought respectability for a young state still considered a frontier society. Klein tells how the Oklahoma Anti-Saloon League orchestrated a dry campaign to raise moral standards, reduce crime, and improve the quality of life, twice convincing voters to support prohibition. Going beyond the usual evangelical-versus-ritualist, rural-versus-urban, and ethnocultural oppositions used by other historians to explain prohibition, Klein shows that Oklahoma’s immigrant and Catholic populations were too small to account for those voting against the measure—or for the large customer base that supported bootleggers. He points instead to the large number of working-class Oklahomans who patronized saloons, whether legal or not, and focuses on class conflict in early efforts to control alcohol. He also describes the trials of enforcement officers who worked to plug leaks in statewide and later national prohibition. A cultural and social history of liquor in early Oklahoma, Grappling with Demon Rum provides a fresh look at crusaders against vice at the regional level. In portraying this conflict between middle- and working-class definitions of social propriety, Klein provides new insight into forces at work throughout America during the Progressive Era.

In popular memory the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Lisa Jacobson reveals, alcohol’s respectability and mass market success were neither sudden nor assured. It took a world war and a battalion of public relations experts and tastemakers to transform wine, beer, and whiskey into emblems of the American good life. Alcohol producers and their allies—a group that included scientists, trade associations, restaurateurs, home economists, cookbook authors, and New Deal planners—powered a publicity machine that linked alcohol to wartime food crusades and new ideas about the place of pleasure in modern American life. In this deeply researched and engagingly written book, Jacobson shows how the yearnings of ordinary consumers and military personnel shaped alcohol’s cultural reinvention and put intoxicating pleasures at the center of broader debates about the rights and obligations of citizens.

"Reflecting America's complicated and often confused cultural identity, laws have long regulated who can and cannot make, sell, distribute, purchase, and drink wine. Richard Mendelson's compelling legal history is detailed but never dry because it reveals as much about Americans' attitudes towards themselves as about their understanding of wine."—Paul Lukacs, author of American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine and The Great Wines of America "This concise yet well-documented history of how the wine industry has fared, and ultimately triumphed, through temperance, Prohibition, and convoluted control systems makes an enjoyable read for any serious oenophile."—Philip J. Cook, author of Paying the Tab: The Costs and Benefits of Alcohol Control

Brewing Battles is the comprehensive story of the American brewing industry and its leading figures, from its colonial beginnings to the present. Although today s beer companies have their roots in pre-Prohibition business, historical developments since Repeal have affected industry at large, brewers, and the tastes and habits of beer-drinking consumers as well. Brewing Battles explores the struggle of German immigrant brewers to establish themselves in America, within the context of federal taxation and a growing temperance movement, their losing battle against Prohibition, their rebirth and transformation into a corporate oligarchy, and the determination of home and micro brewers to reassert craft as the raison d etre of brewing. Brewing Battles looks at beer s cultural meaning from the vantage point of the brewers and their goals for market domination. Beer consumption changed over time, beginning with an alcoholic high in the early 19th century and ending with a neo-temperance low in the early 21st. The public places where people drank also changed from colonial ordinaries in peoples homes to the saloon and back to home via the disposable six pack. The book explores this story as brewers fought to create and control these changing patterns of consumption. Drinking alcohol has remained a favored activity in American society and while beer is ubiquitous, our country harbors a persistent ambivalence about drinking. An examination of how the industry prevailed in a sometimes unreceptive environment exemplifies how business helps shape public opinion. Brewing Battles reveals the complicated changes in the economic clout of the industry. Prior to the institution of the income tax in 1913 the liquor industry contributed over 50% of the federal government s internal revenue; 19th century temperance advocates portrayed the liquor industry as King Alcohol. Today their tax contribution is only 1% yet brewing actually has a much more pervasive influence, touching on almost every aspect of modern American life and contributing greatly to the GNP. Brewing Battles is this story.

Staged Readings studies the social consequences of 19th-century America’s two most prevalent leisure forms: theater and popular literature. In the midst of watershed historical developments—including numerous waves of immigration, two financial Panics, increasing wealth disparities, and the Civil War—American theater and literature were developing at unprecedented rates. Playhouses became crowded with new spectators, best-selling novels flew off the shelves, and, all the while, distinct social classes began to emerge. While the middle and upper classes were espousing conservative literary tastes and attending family matinees and operas, laborers were reading dime novels and watching downtown spectacle melodramas like Nymphs of the Red Sea and The Pirate’s Signal or, The Bridge of Death!!! As audiences traveled from the reading parlor to the playhouse (and back again), they accumulated a vital sense of social place in the new nation. In other words, culture made class in 19th-century America. Based in the historical archive, Staged Readings presents a panoramic display of mid-century leisure and entertainment. It examines best-selling novels, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and George Lippard’s The Quaker City. But it also analyzes a series of sensational melodramas, parlor theatricals, doomsday speeches, tableaux vivant displays, curiosity museum exhibits, and fake volcano explosions. These oft-overlooked spectacles capitalized on consumers’ previous cultural encounters and directed their social identifications. The book will be particularly appealing to those interested in histories of popular theater, literature and reading, social class, and mass culture.

Discusses the prohibition era of early twentieth-century America, including temperance movements, the prohibition amendment, alcoholic beverage profiteers, and the repeal of prohibition.

The word “prohibition” tends to conjure up images of smoky basement speakeasies, dancing flappers, and hardened gangsters bootlegging whiskey. Such stereotypes, a prominent historian recently noted in the Washington Post, confirm that Americans’ “common understanding of the prohibition era is based more on folklore than fact.” Popular culture has given us a very strong, and very wrong, picture of what the period was like. Prohibition’s Greatest Myths: The Distilled Truth about America’s Anti-Alcohol Crusade aims to correct common misperceptions with ten essays by scholars who have spent their careers studying different aspects of the era. Each contributor unravels one myth, revealing the historical evidence that supports, complicates, or refutes our long-held beliefs about the Eighteenth Amendment. H. Paul Thompson Jr., Joe L. Coker, Lisa M. F. Andersen, and Ann Marie E. Szymanski examine the political and religious factors in early twentieth-century America that led to the push for prohibition, including the temperance movement, the influences of religious conservatism and liberalism, the legislation of individual behavior, and the lingering effects of World War I. From there, several contributors analyze how the laws of prohibition were enforced. Michael Lewis discredits the idea that alcohol consumption increased during the era, while Richard F. Hamm clarifies the connections between prohibition and organized crime, and Thomas R. Pegram demonstrates that issues other than the failure of prohibition contributed to the amendment’s repeal. Finally, contributors turn to prohibition’s legacy. Mark Lawrence Schrad, Garrett Peck, and Bob L. Beach discuss the reach of prohibition beyond the United States, the influence of anti-alcohol legislation on Americans’ longterm drinking habits, and efforts to link prohibition with today’s debates over the legalization of marijuana. Together, these essays debunk many of the myths surrounding “the Noble Experiment,” not only providing a more in-depth analysis of prohibition but also allowing readers to engage more meaningfully in contemporary debates about alcohol and drug policy.

Ferry examines a wide selection of voluntary societies - mechanics' institutes, mutual benefit organizations, agricultural associations, temperance societies, and literary and scientific associations. He reinterprets the history of these organizations in terms of their own internal tensions over liberal doctrines and the effect of social, cultural, and economic change and compares the effects of liberalism on rural and urban associations and on societies in both English and French Canada.

Showcases the major amendments to the Constitution since its ratification in 1792, summarizing how the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were created and discussing how each amendment affects our lives today.