Carry A. NationRetelling the Life Fran Grace The story of one of America's most notorious and misunderstood women. Carry Nation was 54 when she "smashed" her first saloon, but her life before she started her infamous hatchet crusade has been little known until now. In this first scholarly biography of Nation, Fran Grace unfolds a story that often contrasts with the image of Nation as "Crazy Carry," a bellicose, blue-nosed, man-hating killjoy. Using newly available archival materials and placing Nation in her various historical and cultural contexts, Grace "retells" the crusader's tumultuous life. Brought up in antebellum Kentucky, Nation lived through the devastation of the Civil War and endured a failed marriage to an alcoholic physician. In her early 20s, a single mother and a destitute widow, she experienced a spiritual crisis. Her second marriage, to a much-older David Nation, grew strained under the failure of their Texas farm, her exploration into Holiness religion, and her attempts to work outside the home. When the couple moved to Kansas, Nation's disappointments translated into an agenda for social reform. Frustrated by the rampant violations of the state's prohibition law and empowered by a sense of divine mission, Nation responded with rocks, crowbars, and hatchets. Though much of her last two decades was spent on stage or in jail and in battles with other family members over the future of her unstable adult daughter, she edited two newspapers and founded several homes for abused and needy women. This complexly woven and delightfully written biography adds depth to the popular image of Carry Nation, situating her at the center of major cultural currents in her time. Fran Grace is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Redlands. Religion in North AmericaCatherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors May 2001400 pages, 57 b&w photos, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, bibl., index, append.cloth 0-253-33846-8 $35.00 s / £26.50

This volume examines the life of Carry A. Nation, whose destruction of saloons and other businesses that sold liquor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century won her both praise and criticism from fellow temperance advocates. Although she was arrested, beaten, and often criticized, she impressed many people with her sincerity and courage. She carried the temperance crusade from the level of education to that of action, and helped bring on national prohibition.

This is the history of temperance and prohibition as you've never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that affected virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. 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. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. Placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, forces us to fundamentally rethink its role in opposing colonial exploitation throughout American history as well. Prohibitionism united Native American chiefs like Little Turtle and Black Hawk; African-American leaders Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, and Booker T. Washington; suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Frances Willard; progressives from William Lloyd Garrison to William Jennings Bryan; writers F.E.W. Harper and Upton Sinclair, and even American presidents from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Progressives rather than puritans, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to the beerhalls of Central Europe to the Native American reservations of the United States. 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 American readers have been led to believe.

"In the long and painful annals of good works," Robert Lewis Taylor begins this dual portrait of a woman and an age, "no name leaps out with more concussive impact than that of Carry Nation." The Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist and biographer tells Nation's whole remarkable story--as well as the story of her turbulent era, raucous with hymn singing and gunfighting, rampant with high ideals and low politics. Carry Nation and her hatchet have long passed into legend, but at the turn of the century, this extraordinary phenomenon was the most discussed woman in the world. She was a force to be reckoned with, fought against, fled from, or fervently admired. Kansas tenaciously survived the Daltons, the James brothers, and Belle Starr, but its marshals, its judges, its rough-and-ready populace had never been called upon to deal with anyone quite like "stand up and fight" Carry Nation. America's most uninhibited crusader was born into a family of oddities. One of her aunts made repeated attempts to convert herself into a weathervane. Carry's mother firmly believed herself to be Queen Victoria. As a child, Carry had "visions"; as an adult, she was sane, if rigorously single-minded, in her determination to reform. She carried her free-swinging campaign against drink, tobacco, sex, the Masonic Lodge, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and many more, far and wide. Carry Nation swung her hatchet from the brawling Wichita of Wyatt Earp to the Tenderloin of New York, to the halls of Yale and Harvard, to the far corners of America, and overseas to a bemused Old World. Thanks to a masculine bias of the period against shooting women, she not only survived, she thrived to demolish saloons, insult judges, defy sheriffs, and terrorize bartenders. She invaded the most sacred of male preserves--and she inspired women everywhere to revolt. Even today, for readers accustomed to all the varieties of public protest, her exploits can only produce a kind of awed wonder. In magnificently capturing Carry Nation and her world, Robert Lewis Taylor has created a work no lover of true Americana can afford to miss. Marvelously detailed, delightfully witty, this is an altogether spellbinding biography by a major American author.--Adapted from jacket.

Now with a new afterword, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatic account of the civil rights era’s climactic battle in Birmingham as the movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down the institutions of segregation. "The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America’s long civil rights struggle. Child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches against segregation. Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young black girls. Diane McWhorter, daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI records, archival documents, interviews with black activists and Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative of the personalities and events that brought about America’s second emancipation. In a new afterword—reporting last encounters with hero Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and describing the current drastic anti-immigration laws in Alabama—the author demonstrates that Alabama remains a civil rights crucible.