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Prohibition and the Rise of the American State
by Lisa McGirr
A groundbreaking history of Prohibition and a new creation story for the powerful American state.
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.
8 pages of illustrations
"Starred Review, An important book that warrants a place at the forefront of Prohibition histories. General readers will love it, and scholars will find much to ponder." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. McGirr's new perspective on Prohibition is recommended for all readers interested in American history." - Library Journal
"Both sobering and enlightening, McGirr's work gives Prohibition and its consequences a much-needed reexamination that provides insights relevant to today's War on Drugs. Photos." - Publishers Weekly
This information about The War on Alcohol was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lisa McGirr is professor of history at Harvard University and the author of the award-winning history of the new right, Suburban Warriors. She and her family live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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