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The War on Alcohol

Prohibition and the Rise of the American State

Lisa McGirr (Harvard University)

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Paperback

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English
Norton
04 January 2017
Prohibition has long been portrayed as a "noble experiment" that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers, and speakeasies. Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history.

Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar today: the war on alcohol was waged disproportionately in African American, immigrant, and poor white communities. Alongside Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws, Prohibition brought coercion into everyday life and even into private homes. Its targets coalesced into an electoral base of urban, working-class voters that propelled FDR to the White House.

This outstanding history also reveals a new genome for the activist American state, one that shows the DNA of the right as well as the left. It was Herbert Hoover who built the extensive penal apparatus used by the federal government to combat the crime spawned by Prohibition. The subsequent federal wars on crime, on drugs, and on terror all display the inheritances of the war on alcohol. McGirr shows the powerful American state to be a bipartisan creation, a legacy not only of the New Deal and the Great Society but also of Prohibition and its progeny.

The War on Alcohol is history at its best-original, authoritative, and illuminating of our past and its continuing presence today.

By:  
Imprint:   Norton
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 211mm,  Width: 140mm,  Spine: 23mm
Weight:   295g
ISBN:   9780393353525
ISBN 10:   0393353524
Pages:   352
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Lisa McGirr is professor of history at Harvard University. She is the author of The War on Alcohol and an award-winning history of the new right, Suburban Warriors. She and her family live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews for The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State

A focused and thought-provoking book. -- The Economist


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