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Prohibition



  • Ken Burns Got "Prohibition" Wrong

    by Mark Lawrence Schrad

    Burns largely accepts an individualistic and libertarian narrative of prohibition as a misbegotten campaign of moral scolds, missing the reformist, egalitarian, and humane demands of the movement and the exploitative nature of the "liquor traffic" it sought to disrupt. 



  • The History of Saloons Helps Understand the Social Harm of the Pandemic

    "In the century and a half after the founding, saloons continued to be a key social institution, places of business, leisure, and community for many men—until Prohibition wiped them out, destroying in one fell stroke the cultural and economic infrastructure they had long provided."



  • The Truth About Prohibition

    by Mark Lawrence Schrad

    American historians have often identified Prohibition with a coalition of social reformers, nativists and religious fundamentalists. Looking at the international temperance and prohibition movement tells a different story of a fight against exploitation of workers and minority groups through addiction.



  • Manhood, Madness, and Moonshine

    by Dillon Carroll

    Today's concern for "deaths of despair" among white Americans isn't unprecedented; a wave of alcoholism and temperance advocacy after the Civil War highlighted the relationship between social unsettlement, substance abuse and social reformism.


  • Under Columbus, Georgia: What Folklore Erases

    by Bryan Banks

    Subterranean tunnels under Columbus, Georgia have been repurposed as part of dramatic stories of crime, emancipation, and war, tales which obscure the more prosaic and violent aspects of the town's history. 



  • Let Us Drink in Public

    Many modern open container laws derive from previous “public drunkenness” and “vagrancy” ordinances that criminalized not just alcoholism, but also poverty and homelessness.