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Title details for Smashing the Liquor Machine by Mark Lawrence Schrad - Available

Smashing the Liquor Machine

A Global History of Prohibition

by Mark Lawrence Schrad
Tom Perkins
Audiobook
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1 of 1 copy available
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. 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, Thomás Masaryk, Kemal Atatürk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. 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.
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 8, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781705281550
      • File size: 843022 KB
      • Duration: 29:16:17

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from September 1, 2022

      Get ready to rethink and reassess everything you ever knew about Prohibition. Schrad (political science, Villanova Univ.; Vodka Politics) sets out to shed light on a side of Prohibition history that is hardly ever touched upon in history books. Schrad reframes the temperance movement as a global one that was tied up with progressivism, suffragism, antiracism, anti-imperialism, and colonialism. It is a stark departure from the common portrayal of temperance activists as conservative religious zealots and "killjoys" from rural America. On the contrary, the majority of Prohibitionists fought not just for liberation of the drunkard from the bottle, but also against oppression of the working class and other marginalized groups by the titular machine. Schrad calls attention to the contributions of Native American, Black, and urban female activists to the cause of Prohibition, often at great personal risk. VERDICT This is comparative history at its best. Narrator Tom Perkins does a brilliant job bringing the voices of historical figures, which are at times unbelievable and hilarious, to life.--Ammi Bui

      Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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